company journey map

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.

Download Now

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.

Don't forget to share this post!

Related articles.

How AI Image Misuse Made a World of Miscommunication [Willy's Chocolate Experience]

7 Ways to Delight Your Customers This Holiday Season

14 Customer Experience Fails that Companies Can Learn From

How Customer Experience Has Evolved Over the Last Decade [+ 2024 Trends]

Memorable Examples of AR in Customer Experience [+Tips for Implementing the Technology]

Digital Customer Experience: The Ultimate Guide for 2023

How to Implement a Hybrid Customer Service Strategy That Works [Expert Tips]

User Flows: 8 Tips For Creating A Super Smooth User Experience

11 Best Practices for B2B Customer Experience

Customer Experience vs. User Experience: What’s the Difference? [+ Examples]

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

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

What is a customer journey map?

Table of Contents

Definition of customer journey mapping.

A customer journey map (or CJM) is a visual representation of the process your customers go through when interacting with your company. This diagram takes you through the exact steps that lead to a customer choosing your specific product and buying it from your business. Creating a customer journey map will provide you with a visual storyline of how a buyer or a customer persona engages with your business at every touchpoint. From seeing your brand on social media to going into the store to buy the product — the customer journey will document the entire story. Customer journey maps are especially useful when they chart the experience of a single persona. By taking one specific customer persona, such as a small business owner or a single mother, the journey map can be detailed and specific — providing you with data and information about how to target specific customers. If you include too many personas on one customer journey map, you risk your diagram becoming too generic, and you may overlook new opportunities. You’ll likely need multiple customer journey maps to accurately depict the many personas of your target audience. But of course, you’ll need to define those personas first. Miro has a user persona template that can help you represent your target audience and better understand how to satisfy their needs with your product.

Why is customer journey mapping important?

Ever wondered what makes a customer buy a specific product from a certain company? The answer often lies in the journey the customer takes above all else. Here’s why mapping the customer journey is so important for every business, no matter how big or small.

Makes complex customer journeys easy to understand

Like other diagrams and concept maps, turning a complex process like a customer journey into a visual representation brings clarity and shared understanding. Instead of trying to describe a customer journey model exclusively with words, the diagram gives everyone on your team a visual overview of the entire customer experience.

Most customer journey touchpoints are mapped on a timeline, which creates a chronological understanding of the needs and wants of the customer at each stage of the process. Having a tool that makes it easier for your team to understand these complex journeys is crucial, as often, a customer journey doesn’t align with one specific department. For example, marketing, sales, customer service, and technical support may all need to be involved in creating an ideal user experience.

Everyone from each of these departments needs to be clear on how the journey works, where the handoffs are, and how to maximize the experience. By having one diagram act as a point of reference, different departments can ensure they are on the same page and can make informed, collaborative decisions.

Puts you in the customer’s shoes

An effective customer journey map helps you learn not only customer behavior but also how customers interact with your product. It also helps you understand your customers on an emotional level, acknowledging what causes them frustration, happiness, and excitement. By putting yourself in a customer’s shoes, you can follow their entire journey from brand awareness to advocacy. This allows you to gain deeper insights into the customer’s pain points and what compelled them to choose your company’s product. Based on this analysis, you can tailor your business processes to attract similar personas and increase conversions.

Creates a clearer understanding of your customer’s expectations

Customer journey mapping is a strategic approach that allows your company to understand customer expectations as well as what attracts certain personas to buy your product. By taking the time to understand the customer’s journey, you can understand what they expect from their experience with your business and product. This deeper understanding of what they need from your business allows you to proactively support them. It may also identify opportunities for upselling and cross-selling.

Contributes to long-term customer retention

Striving to understand what the customer needs and following their journey will allow you to optimize their experience with your company. This will make your customer feel heard and appreciated, and, as a result, brand loyalty among your customer base will increase. In turn, this will lead to high customer retention and, hopefully, an increase in purchase frequency, which will benefit your company greatly in the long term.

The benefits of customer journey mapping

Many great tools can help you understand the customer journey. Why should you care about this one? Here are a few reasons why CJMs should be an essential part of your business toolkit.

Build better experiences

Customer journey mapping gives you a big-picture experience of your customer’s interaction with your brand. Think of a CJM as a map of a physical location like a city or a town. Once you have a map spread out in front of you, it’s easier to understand where you might run into roadblocks. It helps you plan ahead, and make adjustments to help customers overcome those obstacles.

Once you can visualize all phases of your customer’s journey, you can see where you’re not meeting their expectations. Armed with that knowledge, you can build a customer experience that’s seamless and satisfying. That translates into improved products and processes, more sales, faster sales cycles, and greater customer retention.

Enable customer success

For your business to succeed, your customer must also succeed. Customer journey mapping helps you see what is and isn’t working for your customer so you can set them up for success. Even a stylized picture of your customer’s journey can empower you to create, monitor, adjust, and enhance touch points.

Work better as a team

Even if your objectives are different, everyone in your organization is working toward the same goal: satisfying your customers. But it’s easy to lose focus. Engineering teams are busy coding, marketing teams are writing ad copy, sales teams are trying to sell to their prospects.… How do you all stay aligned?

Customer journey mapping is powerful because it keeps everyone focused on the customer. By creating a CJM, you can gain deep insight into what your customers want and need. For the marketing team, that means building better campaigns. For the sales team, that means deeper engagement with customers and prospects. For engineering, that means a holistic understanding of what programs are meant to achieve. Customer journey mapping makes it easy to equip every team member with a sophisticated understanding of your customers.

Set yourself apart from the competition

A  recent report  shows that 90% of the organizations that use customer journey mapping saw a decrease in churn and customer complaints. Customers and prospects respond positively when they feel like a brand understands their desires and pain points. The data is clear: customer journey mapping can set you apart from your competition.

5 customer journey stages

The customer journey map can be split into five important stages, as seen in this customer journey mapping template pack . Each customer will go through these stages as they interact with your company during their journey.

1. Awareness

Awareness is the moment when a buyer first becomes aware of your company, product, or brand. This can happen through a variety of mediums, from social media advertising to a word-of-mouth referral from another customer. Your brand can increase awareness and attract more customers through marketing practices and brand advertising. Paying attention to how your target audience grows their awareness of your brand enables you to optimize your marketing approach, budget, and channel prioritization.

2. Consideration

After your customer has become aware of your brand, they move into the consideration stage. This is a stage of ideation in which the customer considers whether they need the product or service your business is offering. They may also consider other companies that offer the same product. This stage proves the importance of good advertising at the awareness stage. If your company markets itself well, the customer will likely consider your product even more closely at this stage.

3. Purchase/Decision

After the customer has considered all of their options, it’s time to decide on the product or service they are going to purchase — or whether they’re going to make a purchase at all. Should they decide against buying, that will be the end of their personal customer journey. If that is the case, your company should focus on improving the awareness and consideration stages by working on its customer service or trying out new advertising or personalized promotional techniques.

4. Retention

Remember: the customer journey doesn’t end once they’ve made a purchase. Every company wants a loyal base of customers who return time and time again, which is why your team should analyze what needs to be done to stop customers from leaving. Fostering brand loyalty is a great way to improve your business’s general income. You can aim to retain customers by providing things like incentives, better customer support, and reminders about new products through digital marketing.

5. Advocacy

The last stage in the customer journey is advocacy — letting other people know about your brand or the service that you offer. Customers are more likely to advocate for your company if they are completely satisfied throughout each stage of the customer journey. This shows the interconnectedness of every step and how the journey is a circular pattern, even if it focuses on different personas.

What are customer journey touchpoints?

Throughout the five customer journey stages, there are different customer touchpoints . These are the moments in the customer journey when the customer interacts or engages with the business. Let’s take a closer look at the three types of touchpoints.

1. Pre-purchase touchpoints

A pre-purchase touchpoint includes any time when the customer interacts with your business before making a purchase decision. Pre-purchase touchpoints can occur in the awareness and consideration stages. They can also happen when another customer that has already gone through the entire customer journey refers your business. Pre-purchase touchpoints can happen if a buyer comes into contact with your business by visiting your website, seeing a post about you on social media, or hearing about your product from a friend. This point of the customer journey is all about persuasion and explanation. You need to make sure that when the customer discovers your business for the first time, you demonstrate that you can fulfill their buying needs.

2. Purchase touchpoints

Purchase touchpoints take place during the decision/purchasing stage of the buyer’s journey. This can happen in-store or online. You should optimize this stage to be as efficient and streamlined as possible so that the customer doesn’t change their mind during the purchase. For example, having a slow website that isn’t mobile optimized or forcing the customer to jump through hoops with a sales assistant to make a purchase will affect the buying process. Optimizing this touchpoint is essential to retaining customers, as a quick and easy purchase process could compel them to return in the future.

3. Post-purchase touchpoints

Post-purchase touchpoints include the journey’s advocacy and retention phases. The success of these touchpoints depends on how well-optimized the previous stages in the journey were. If the entire journey up until this point was enjoyable for the customer, they are more likely to refer your product or service to their friends and family. You should try to stay in regular contact with the customer to remind them about the journey and your company, as this will encourage them to return in the future.

What’s the difference between a customer journey map and a user story map?

Although customer journey maps and user story maps resemble each other, their functions are slightly different.

User stories are used to plan out features or functionalities, typically in an Agile model. In a user story, you describe a feature or functionality from user perspectives. That way, you can understand what the user wants to do and how that feature can help them accomplish it. Use a customer problem statement template to help you craft these perspectives.

Typically, a user story takes this form: “As a [type of user], I want to [goal], so that [benefit].” For example, “As a UX designer, I want to sketch on an online whiteboard, so I don’t have to be in the same location as my collaborators.”

You can then visualize that user story with a user story map. For example, if you wanted to visualize the user story above, you would start by detailing the various steps the user will take when using that functionality. In this case:

Sketch on the whiteboard

Share with teammates

See teammates sketch in real time

Then, you would document the features required to take each step. Once you’ve done that, you would write these features on sticky notes and rearrange them based on their corresponding functionalities.

In short, user story maps allow you to plan and implement changes to the customer journey. Customer journey maps allow you to discover and understand what those changes might look like.

How to create a customer journey map

Creating a great customer journey map can be challenging. You need to get into the mind of a specific customer persona and understand not only their needs but also the different ways in which they interact with your company. With Miro’s customer journey mapping tool , you can streamline the process of creating one of these maps for your specific needs. Or, if you'd rather not start from scratch, follow these steps when filling out Miro’s customer journey map template :

1. Set clear objectives for the map

Before diving into the creation of your customer journey map, ask yourself why you need to know this information. Are you looking to optimize certain touchpoints? Are you looking to see why customer retention is low? Do you want to determine why customers decide against your product? Figuring out why you’re building the map is essential to the success of the exercise.

2. Identify profiles and personas

As previously mentioned, you need to focus on a specific persona when examining the customer journey. It’s important to remember that the customer journey map should focus on one specific audience at a time. This will help you figure out exactly who your target customer base is and gain an in-depth understanding of the buyer’s needs that your company is attempting to fulfill.

3. List the customer journey touchpoints

Next, you need to understand what happens each time the customer comes into contact with your company. These points in the process will tell you which areas of the journey you need to streamline and optimize to improve the customer experience.

4. Take the customer journey yourself

For the customer journey map exercise to be productive, you need to put yourself in the shoes of the customer and be honest with the experience that you have. This is the best way to see if your customer journey mapping is accurate and identify areas for improvement in the customer journey.

Customer journey mapping example

Here are some customer journey mapping examples for you to draw inspiration from and better understand what goes into a customer journey model.

Alex Gilev’s Practical Customer Journey Map

Alex Gilev is a certified UX expert and product leader experienced in creating highly usable and intuitive web applications. His practical customer journey map example created in Miro is based on the idea that you want to create an irreplaceable product for your customers. This customer journey map is divided into four phases: Discovery, Onboarding, Scaffolding, and Endgame.

This take on a customer journey map allows you to figure out practical fixes that will increase your competitive advantage over other businesses in the same industry. It helps you identify the value metrics that make your product desirable to the specified persona so that they’ll want to use your product frequently and repeatedly.

Build a customer journey map suited to your needs 

As we’ve shown, creating a customer journey map with your team has many benefits. This exercise can help you create the ideal experience for anyone who may come into contact with your company. It could be invaluable to the future of your business and help you build a loyal customer base.

Are you ready to get started with customer journey mapping? Try the Customer Journey Map Template , the ideal foundation on which to begin. This template is tailored to help your company identify touchpoints so that you can meet your customers’ needs.

How to make a customer journey map?

Benefits of a customer journey map

Customer experience vs. customer journey map

Service blueprint vs. journey map

What is consumer decision-making process?

Buyer journey vs customer journey

The 7 steps of the customer journey

What is service blueprint?

Get on board in seconds

Join thousands of teams using Miro to do their best work yet.

Learn / Guides / Customer journey mapping (CJM) guide

Back to guides

How 5 businesses successfully mapped out the customer journey

Creating a customer journey map puts you in your customers’ shoes to help you understand the user experience—what your users think, feel, and do at each stage of their buying journey.

Last updated

Reading time.

We’ve put together a list of five brilliant customer journey mapping (CJM) examples to show you how it’s done, so you can learn how to improve the user experience (UX) for your customers. 

Want to know how customers really interact with your product?

Hotjar’s product experience insights tools let you see things through their eyes. 

5 great examples of customer journey mapping 

A good customer journey map identifies buyers’ actions, desires, and experiences at every key touchpoint—from when a customer lands on your webpage all the way to conversion, onboarding, and beyond.

Our list of customer journey examples breaks down the best B2B, B2C, ecommerce, and SaaS journey maps—and shows you how to understand your customers better to build your own.

1. Hotjar’s B2B customer journey map 

At Hotjar (👋), we make product experience (PX) insights tools to help businesses understand how their customers interact with their websites and digital products. And, of course, we’ve done some B2B customer journey mapping of our own to understand what our customers want, by tracking their interactions across key touchpoints. 

The result was the digital customer journey example shown above that maps our customers' experience when they use Hotjar tools for product testing. We visualized the key actions, questions, technical limitations, and opportunities of customers using our tools to get granular data to validate our product ideas and experiments. 

We started by identifying one specific customer journey, then used Google Analytics, Hotjar tools, and data from customer interactions with our brand to understand user actions, thoughts, and feelings. Then, we got UX, dev, engineering, and customer success teams to fill out empathy maps before mapping the journey. 

To increase empathy with our customers, we included two rows dedicated to pain points and happy moments—like the pain of finding patterns in complex customer data, and the ‘a-ha moment' when our users first realize value.  

We made our map flexible enough to be updated as customer needs change and new information becomes available, so we continually validate our assumptions against customers’ real-world experiences.

The benefits of customer journey mapping included helping us visualize customer motivations, drivers, and pain points, align cross-functional teams , eliminate silos, and clarify who owns each part of the buyer journey. 

How B2B companies selling self-serve digital products can create a similar map: 

1. Define the goal and scope of your customer journey map. We recommend starting with a narrow scope and only a few people involved. Focus on a specific problem you can break down into a few steps—like identifying where you’re losing users, and mapping out the pains, desires, and experiences of customers who exit your site.

Ask yourself: 

What do you want to achieve? 

Which customer journey touchpoints do you want to focus on? 

What KPIs do you want to measure? 

Where can you get the data you need? 

Which teams need to be involved?   

2. Use Google Analytics and Hotjar's Observe tools to collect user insights about online interactions:

Create Hotjar Heatmaps on key product pages to see where users are clicking and which parts of your page aren’t engaging users or working as intended. Then, improve UX and optimize the placement of on-page elements to boost conversions. 

Use Session Recordings to see how users scroll, click, and move around your site across an entire session. Focus on spotting bugs and blockers that cause them to bounce. 

3. Add qualitative user data from service chat logs, emails, or by asking customer support teams. 

4. Get key product and customer service teams to fill in an empathy map detailing what your buyers do, say, see, hear, think, and feel. Feel free to steal our free template below!

5. Map the journey with Post-its and pens before digitizing it and sharing it across the company. 

2. Rail Europe’s B2C journey map 

B2C ecommerce travel provider Rail Europe gives customers an easy way to book rail tickets online. Their on-site user interface (UI) is strong, but the company wanted to go deeper to understand the customer journey across all touchpoints. 

Mapping the customer journey produced a full spectrum customer experience map that illustrates the buyer's journey before, during, and after a purchase. It reminded their team that the buyer journey starts long before a customer lands on the website to book a ticket—and continues after the trip, through touchpoints like post-trip refunds, sharing recommendations, or publishing photos on social media. 

Rail Europe’s customer journey map also shows the transition between stages or channels to accurately visualize what is often a non-linear journey . For example, in the initial research, planning, and shopping phases, customers often move back and forth between comparison pages, checking timetables, and website chat and planning features.  

Mapping the journey like this helps Rail Europe understand different customers’ channel preferences, see which touchpoints aren’t working as they should, and which aspects of the user experience need more attention from design teams, marketing, and customer support. They visualized actions, thoughts, feelings, and experiences and rated the customer satisfaction of each stage, as well as the relevance and helpfulness of Rail Europe, to home in on areas for improvement.

The map doubles down on customer empathy by identifying travelers’ overall concerns and frustrations while on the trip, even those unrelated to their rail journey—the overall travel experience is still connected with the company brand in customers’ minds. 

This stand-alone map can be understood across teams without supporting materials, and there’s a focus on actionable insights—like the need to address customer frustrations over snail mail ticket delivery. 

Ecommerce website analysis like this is valuable for any company selling experiential products or services, like concert tickets, vacations, or tours. If that’s you, follow Rail Europe’s example and conduct customer journey map research by surveying current and potential customers to uncover exactly what they’re hoping for, thinking, and feeling as they engage with your brand.

Tips to map out the ecommerce customer journey:

1. Ask yourself: 

How can we access users who aren’t yet customers? 

What happens before the customer gets to our web page? How do they do research for a trip? What kinds of search keywords do they use online?  

Is the buyer journey non-linear? If not, how can we represent this? 

2. If your buyer journey has multiple touchpoints, group them into categories like 'research and planning', 'shopping', 'booking', etc. 

3. Match survey insights to touchpoints and map out the journey visually, adding qualitative insights about what the customer is thinking, feeling, and doing at each stage. 

💡 Pro tip: use Hotjar Surveys to collect real-time suggestions about your website or app from users to make data-driven decisions and validate assumptions that inform and elevate your customer journey map. 

Hotjar’s no-code UI makes it easy to create drag-and-drop surveys  

3. Rewind’s SaaS customer journey map 

Rewind makes backup & restoration software for SaaS platforms. Their team decided to map out the B2B SaaS customer journey when revenue fell short of expectations after the acquisition of a similar product. It also became clear that marketing efforts weren’t attracting the ideal customer.

Like many SaaS companies, Rewind relied on sales calls and customer relationship management (CRM) data to understand their users. But they were missing key insights about what happens before the customer lands on their website. 

To map the journey, the Rewind team defined their ideal customer profile (ICP) before conducting customer interviews to deeply understand buyer motivations and the decision-making process. They also used Google Analytics, Hubspot , and PX insights tools to understand users’ online behavior and how they were interacting with marketing materials. 

This showed them a short, high-intent, back-and-forth customer journey that happens almost exclusively online—since Rewind is installed in SaaS platforms, a lot of traffic is referred from their app marketplaces. 

The map showed event triggers and the customer’s thoughts and feelings as they moved through becoming aware of their problem (loss of important data), understanding the need for a solution, and doing online research—before arriving at Rewind.  

By mapping the full journey, the Rewind team discovered that customers often use professional forums or communities as part of solution research, and discovered a new buyer motivation and market segment: data compliance. 

According to Content Lift Founder Ryan Paul Gibson , who helped Rewind conduct customer interviews, the company also realized “potential buyers don’t want to speak with sales or ‘get a demo'. They want to research the product themselves and evaluate it. They also don’t want to enter a credit card to test it; they want to try it first and pay if it’s a good fit.” 

Rewind updated their go-to-market strategy, personas, product positioning , and marketing to complete these missing steps in the customer journey map.

The result? A two-fold increase in product installations, and better internal alignment on their ICP—which has improved their efficiency and helped them maximize resources. 

To create a great SaaS customer journey map: 

Set your research objectives

Create a list of topics that align with your ideal buyer journey. For example, in Rewind’s case, they were customers’ reasons for buying, details about their company and role, and what caused them to start searching for a solution. 

Create questions to ask customers during interviews, but leave flexibility for discussion.

Run in-depth customer interviews to capture the exact order of events in the buyer journey and make sure you understand every customer action and touchpoint—from users identifying a problem to making a purchase.

Bucket interview insights into user priorities, pains, and anxieties—what happened to trigger a search; which research channels the customer uses; how they evaluate solutions.

4. Spotify’s B2C customer journey map 

When music streaming app Spotify mapped the user journey, their team focused on tracking touchpoints for one specific feature: sharing playlists via third-party apps.  

Their map zeroes in on clearly defined user personas and identifies key areas of customer engagement with a focus on users’ emotions and thoughts at each stage.

The team’s journey mapping research revealed a key customer pain point—fear of being judged for their music taste—that can hold users back from sharing music. They also identified an awareness gap to address: some users didn’t know the feature existed. 

By mapping the user journey, Spotify improved their UI and in-app flows to streamline the customer experience and make every touchpoint relevant to how real customers use the product.  

Mapping user flows is key for digital B2C brands with a product that lives and dies by good usability—and a business model that relies on customer loyalty. 

To map the user journey before improving or launching a feature:  

Conduct market research based on direct and indirect competitors to understand how people use similar features, and what they expect from yours. 

In user interviews , focus on the specific feature or stage of the journey. Why aren’t customers using it as you’d like? What are the barriers to product adoption? Dig deep into what motivates users to complete a specific action—and what blocks them.  

Using interview data, create a buyer persona and include their key needs and motivations. What can you do to bring this feature to their attention and boost adoption? 

Create a customer journey map combining stages in the user’s interaction with the feature, and break down the actions they take and the thoughts and emotions they have at each stage. 

Use these insights to remove friction and improve user flows, validating your design with real users. 

Pro tip : use Hotjar's Observe tools to study Session Recordings and Heatmaps and get insights into the product experience of real or test users at every point in the customer journey.

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

5. Emirates Airline’s multi-channel customer journey map 

To reflect their customers’ multi-channel journey, flag carrier Emirates created a CJM that covers reservations, check-in, and onboarding experiences. 

As well as digital channels, the map includes call center interactions, which provide context for interactive voice response (IRV) technology and human service agents. It also sheds light on customer desires, broken down into categories like ‘comfort’, ‘safety’, ‘confidence’, and ‘freedom & control’, shown in the corners of the map.

With a global brand like Emirates, customers expect the same experience at all touchpoints, in all countries. This exercise helped the Emirates team understand customers’ main interactions and expectations to better coordinate service touchpoints and provide a consistent, high-quality experience across each one.  

For example, they set up a single, virtual contact center platform to increase efficiency and ensure consistent interactions across every channel. It’s not just the customer who benefits: the Emirates team now better understands exactly how to meet user needs across several channels and countries.

This map is ideal for businesses whose customer journey combines online and offline touchpoints, especially companies looking to differentiate themselves through the quality of their service. 

How to implement a multi-channel customer journey map: 

Define your key goals for producing the map.

Conduct thorough market research and customer interviews to reduce your assumptions and understand every single interaction and channel customers experience.

Interview customer experience and support staff members at all touchpoints and in all regions.

Use analytics tools and product experience insights software to understand how buyers interact with your digital marketing, website, and chat functions across channels and locations.  

Use AI to analyze customer call recordings for tone and sentiment.

Pro tip: use Hotjar Feedback widgets to get in-context insights about what users really think about your app or website. You can filter feedback by region or channel to better understand your global customer touchpoints.

Hotjar's non-invasive Feedback widgets allow customers to give their opinions of your website or product as they experience it.

You’ve reached your destination: a truly valuable customer journey map  

Customers interact with your brand over a variety of channels and touchpoints, and their journeys aren’t always linear. But understanding their journey is key to improving your product and boosting customer acquisition, adoption, and retention. 

Follow these customer journey mapping examples to experience key touchpoints from your users’ point of view and grasp their pains, needs, and frustrations so you can build a journey your customers will love.

Want to know how customers really interact with your brand?

Frequently asked questions about customer journey mapping, what are the stages of the customer's journey.

Buyer journeys can typically be broken down into three steps or stages: 

Awareness of a problem or pain

Consideration (researching and evaluating solutions)

Making a decision

What does a strong customer journey map look like?

A good customer journey map includes all the touchpoints where a customer interacts with your brand. It should include the various stages of the marketing and sales cycle, customer touchpoints across your product and website, and map out customers’ actions, thoughts, and feelings at each stage, as well as KPIs.

For example, Rail Europe’s customer journey map tracks all the stages of research, planning, and shopping, through to booking, travel, and post-travel. At each stage, it maps out customer questions, concerns, and feelings, as well as the helpfulness and relevance of Rail Europe.

What are the stages of customer journey mapping?

Customer journey map stages are: 

Collecting data and conducting customer interviews or surveys 

Mapping the customer journey in a workshop

Extracting insights and producing a report

CJM tools: features and how to choose

Previous chapter

CJM research

Next chapter

How to create a customer journey map

Lucid Content

Reading time: about 8 min

How to Make a Customer Journey Map

• Conduct persona research
• Define customer touchpoints
• Map current states
• Map future states

Steve Jobs, the genius behind Apple’s one-of-a-kind customer experience, said, “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.”

Nowadays, a clear vision and strategy for customer interactions is no longer an optional “nice-to-have”—it’s essential. As you refine your customer experience, a customer journey map is one of the most powerful ways to understand your current state and future state.

A customer journey map is a diagram that shows the process your customers go through in interacting with your business, such as an experience on the website, a brick and mortar experience, a service, a product, or a mix of those things.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s experience with your brand. These visuals tell a story about how a customer moves through each phase of interaction and experiences each phase. Your customer journey map should include touchpoints and moments of truth, but also potential customer feelings, such as frustration or confusion, and any actions you want the customer to take.

Customer journey maps are often based on a timeline of events, such as a customer’s first visit on your website and the way they progress towards their first in-product experience, then purchase, onboarding emails, cancellation, etc. 

Your customer journey maps may need to be tailored to your business or product, but the best way to identify and refine these phases is to actually talk to your customers. Research your target audiences to understand how they make decisions, decide to purchase, etc. Without an essential understanding of your customers and their needs, a customer map will not lead you to success. But, a well-constructed and researched customer journey map can give you the insights to drastically improve your business’s customer experience.

The benefits of customer journey mapping

Customer journey mapping is a powerful tool for uncovering insights into your customer experience, driving business goals, and building resilience in a changing market. In a 2022 report, Hanover Research found that 94% of businesses said their customer journey maps help them develop new products and services to match customer needs. Another 91% said their maps drove sales. 

But understanding a customer’s journey across your entire organization does so much more than increase your revenue. It enables you to discover how to be consistent when it comes to providing a positive customer experience and retaining customer loyalty. 

This was especially evident in recent years as top of improving marketing, customer journey maps emerged as a valuable way to understand evolving buyer behavior. In fact, 1 in 3 businesses used customer journey maps to help them navigate the changing landscape during the pandemic.

When done correctly, customer journey mapping helps to:

• Increase customer engagement through channel optimization.
• Identify and optimize moments of truth in the CX.
• Eliminate ineffective touchpoints.
• Shift from a company to a customer-focused perspective.
• Break down silos between departments and close interdepartmental gaps.
• Target specific customer personas with marketing campaigns relevant to their identity.
• Understand the circumstances that may have produced irregularities in existing quantitative data.
• Assign ownership of various customer touchpoints to increase employee accountability.
• Make it possible to assess the ROI of future UX/CX investments.

Following the process outlined above, customer mapping can put your organization on a new trajectory of success. Yet, according to Hanover Research, only 47% of companies currently have a process in place for mapping customer journeys. Making the investment to map your customer journey and solidify that process as part of your company’s DNA can result in significant advantages in your competitive landscape, making your solution the go-to option that customers love.

Customer journey maps can become complicated unless you keep them focused. Although you may target multiple personas, choose just one persona and one customer scenario to research and visualize at a time. If you aren’t sure what your personas or scenarios might be, gather some colleagues and try an  affinity diagram in Lucidchart to generate ideas.

1. Set goals

Without a goal, it will be difficult to determine whether your customer journey map will translate to a tangible impact on your customers and your business. You will likely need to identify existing—and future—buyers so you can set goals specifically for those audiences at each stage of their experience.

Consider gathering the key stakeholders within your company—many of whom likely touch different points of the customer experience. To set a logical and attainable goal, cross-functional teamwork is essential. Gather unique perspectives and insights about each part of the existing customer journey and where improvements are needed, and how those improvements will be measured.

Pro Tip : If you don’t already have them in place, create buyer personas to help you focus your customer journey map on the specific types of buyers you’re optimizing for.

2. Conduct persona research

Flesh out as much information as possible about the persona your customer journey map is based on. Depending on the maturity of your business, you may only have a handful of records, reports, or other pre-existing data about the target persona. You can compile your preliminary findings to draft what you think the customer journey may look like. However, the most insightful data you can collect is from real customers or prospective customers—those who have actually interacted with your brand. Gather meaningful customer data in any of the following ways:

• Conduct interviews.
• Talk to employees who regularly interact with customers.
• Email a survey to existing users.
• Scour customer support and complaint logs.
• Pull clips from recorded call center conversations.
• Monitor discussions about your company that occur on social media.
• Leverage web analytics.
• Gather Net Promoter Score (NPS) data.

Look for information that references:

• How customers initially found your brand
• When/if customers purchase or cancel
• How easy or difficult they found your website to use
• What problems your brand did or didn’t solve

Collecting both qualitative and quantitative information throughout your research process ensures your business makes data-driven decisions based on the voice of real customers. To assist when conducting persona research, use one of our user persona templates .

Discover more ways to understand the Voice of the Customer

3. Define customer touchpoints

Customer touchpoints make up the majority of your customer journey map. They are how and where customers interact with and experience your brand. As you research and plot your touchpoints, be sure to include information addressing elements of action, emotion, and potential challenges. 

The number and type of touchpoints on your customer journey map will depend on the type of business. For example, a customer’s journey with a SaaS company will be inherently different than that of a coffee shop experience. Simply choose the touchpoints which accurately reflect a customer’s journey with your brand.

After you define your touchpoints, you can then start arranging them on your customer journey map.

4. Map the current state

Create what you believe is your as-is state of the customer journey, the current customer experience. Use a visual workspace like Lucidchart, and start organizing your data and touchpoints. Prioritize the right content over aesthetics. Invite input from the stakeholders and build your customer journey map collaboratively to ensure accuracy. 

Again, there is no “correct” way to format your customer journey map, but for each phase along the journey timeline, include the touchpoints, actions, channels, and assigned ownership of a touchpoint (sales, customer service, marketing, etc.). Then, customize your diagram design with images, color, and shape variation to better visualize the different actions, emotions, transitions, etc. at a glance.

Mapping your current state will also help you start to identify gaps or red flags in the experience. Collaborators can comment directly on different parts of your diagram in Lucidchart, so it’s clear exactly where there’s room for improvement.

5. Map future states

Now that you’ve visualized the current state of the customer journey, your map will probably show some gaps in your CX, information overlap, poor transitions between stages, and significant pain points or obstacles for customers.

Use hotspots and layers in Lucidchart to easily map out potential solutions and quickly compare the current state of the customer journey with the ideal future state. Present your findings company-wide to bring everyone up to speed on the areas that need to be improved, with a clear roadmap for expected change and how their roles will play a part in improving the customer journey.

Customer journey map templates

You have all the right information for a customer journey map, but it can be difficult to know exactly how to start arranging the information in a digestible, visually appealing way. These customer journey mapping examples can help you get started and gain some inspiration about what—and how much—to include and where.

Don’t let the possibility of a bad customer journey keep you up at night. Know the current state of the customer journey with you business, and make the changes you need to attract and keep customers happy.

Customer journey mapping is easy with Lucidchart.

About Lucidchart

Lucidchart, a cloud-based intelligent diagramming application, is a core component of Lucid Software's Visual Collaboration Suite. This intuitive, cloud-based solution empowers teams to collaborate in real-time to build flowcharts, mockups, UML diagrams, customer journey maps, and more. Lucidchart propels teams forward to build the future faster. Lucid is proud to serve top businesses around the world, including customers such as Google, GE, and NBC Universal, and 99% of the Fortune 500. Lucid partners with industry leaders, including Google, Atlassian, and Microsoft. Since its founding, Lucid has received numerous awards for its products, business, and workplace culture. For more information, visit lucidchart.com.

Bring your bright ideas to life.

or continue with

By registering, you agree to our Terms of Service and you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Privacy Policy .

Generative AI

Artificial intelligence isn’t going anywhere.

Create once. Distribute forever.

Saas seo: why alternative pages are a great investment, how calm business is using content & seo to win in b2b, about us overview.

• Software Companies
• Manufacturing Companies
• “Boring” Industries
• Link Building
• Content Creation
• Content Distribution
• Content Repurposing
• Search Engine Optimization
• Content Marketing Strategies
• Technical Search Engine Optimization
• Conversion Rate Optimization Services
• Case Studies
• Training & Development
• Our Leadership

Subscribe For Exclusive Trends, Research & Data

Gain access to exclusive research, training, trends and support from the best marketers in the world.

Foundation Labs provides you with timely, meaningful, and relevant data that enables you to grow your company in a meaningful way. The world’s top SaaS companies subscribe to Foundation Labs to receive industry news and data driven insights to create a marketing culture that drives results.

We have two different plans:

→ Exclusive B2B SaaS growth, SEO & content case studies​ → Quarterly reports on data-backed B2B SaaS trends, correlations & more​ → Weekly Insiders-only email on trends, data & research​ → Insiders-only webinars on B2B SaaS content marketing​ → Two weekly newsletters with case studies & SaaS stories​

→ Exclusive B2B SaaS growth, SEO & content case studies​ → Quarterly reports on data-backed B2B SaaS trends, correlations & more​ → Weekly Insiders-only email on trends, data & research​ → Insiders-only webinars on B2B SaaS content marketing​ → Two weekly newsletters with case studies & SaaS stories​ → Invite-only fireside chats with marketing leaders at B2B SaaS giants → SaaS reports breaking down what’s working across industries today

Learn How The Best B2B SaaS Companies Do Marketing.

• Name * First Last
• Enter your email address

Last updated on June 22nd, 2023

How To Create A Customer Journey Map (To Help You Solve Their Problems)

Article's Content

All brands want to build better relationships with their customers—especially those in competitive industries.

Customers decide when to interact with your brand, and it’s up to them if they engage with the promotional material you share online about your solution. This means your content needs to show up in the right context at the right time throughout a customer’s journey.

You could guess based on gut feeling or a surface-level understanding of the industry, but that can get very expensive when you consistently need to optimize for performance.

Instead, customer journey maps allow your entire team to truly understand your customer’s journey to solving their problem and exactly what content you need to create to help them along the way.

Shifting Your Mindset to Customer Experience

Customer journey maps are not about selling products.

I repeat: Customer journey maps are not about selling products…

They don’t describe your brand or the benefits of your solution, and they definitely don’t describe any features of your product. A customer journey map is not about your business—it’s about your customer’s problems:

• How do they think about their problems?
• How do they feel throughout the process of solving their problems?
• What do they do at each step of the process?

As marketers, we need to put down our selling tools and pick up our listening and observing tools. This can be hard to do with revenue targets hanging over our head and competitors knocking at our door, but customer loyalty is a long-term game—and it is totally worth it. Why do we all want customer loyalty anyway?

Repeat business and referrals.

This Forbes article has a collection of key statistics about the value of the customer experience—including this powerful stat about customer loyalty :

“Loyal customers are five times more likely to purchase again and four times more likely to refer a friend.”

If that’s not enough to convince you, then remember that your customers have expectations for their experience with your brand—and those expectations are higher than ever.

Customers expect you to know them, to understand their problems, to demonstrate empathy, and to design a customer experience that meets their needs.

In fact, 73% of customers expect you to understand their needs and expectations … but only 51% of customers feel that companies actually do this. And customer journey mapping helps you understand customer needs and expectations.

Clearly, there’s a lot of room for improvement. In this post, I’ll share some tips for creating your own customer journey map because, after all…

Great customer journey = great customer experience ✅

The Secret Ingredient to a Great Customer Journey Map

To create a great customer journey map, you need to break customer pain points into micro-sized problems, then analyze each one to find out what information customers are using to make decisions and what might influence them along the way.

The secret ingredient is this:

The more detailed and specific you can be, the richer the experience will be for your customers. When you know exactly why and how your customers research solutions to their problems online, you can be there to support them and demonstrate through content that you understand their needs. This puts your brand in the best position to present a relevant solution.

By organizing these details visually—i.e., in a customer journey map—you can identify patterns and consistent topics of concern. This will help you see where you need to focus your content marketing investment.

Visualizing a customer journey map also makes it much easier to communicate with your own team for customer experience and content planning purposes.

Finding Detail Starts With Researching Your Customers 🤓

We recommend creating personas in order to understand your customers’ pain points, needs, perspectives and challenges before mapping their journeys.

This is because each persona you target may have a slightly different journey, and the more detailed you make your journey maps, the more opportunities you’ll have to create relevant content.

Once you have your persona, you need…

MORE DETAIL.

The best way to fill in the gaps is to conduct content marketing research .

Content marketing research typically includes three areas:

• Your customers
• Your competitors
• Your industry

This research will result in a mix of qualitative and quantitative data. There are many topics you can explore when conducting content marketing research; here are a few suggestions for each of the categories mentioned above:

• Pain points and problems
• Current and potential customer perceptions of your brand
• Preferences of current and potential customers
• The buying process
• Content consumed/available throughout the buying process
• Barriers throughout the buying process
• Customer behavior
• Customer reviews
• Keywords customers are searching for

Pro tip: If you’re looking to dive deeper into customer research, I recommend bookmarking our guide to creating a B2B customer persona —we break down the whole process for you.

Competitors

• Competitive positioning
• The need each competitor is serving
• Competitors’ websites and social communities
• The health of the industry
• Relevant trends
• Barriers or shifts that are having a negative impact

Your personas and your content marketing research should allow you to go through every stage of the buyer journey and identify what your customers are thinking, feeling and doing—and what kind of content you could create in response.

For example, if your target audience consists of field services business owners, chances are they’re looking to hire top talent. But you’re not taking chances. You’ve done your research, you know their pain points, and through this process you’ve uncovered their need to retain employees. Knowing this, you can produce content to solve that pain point, like this Plumber Salary Guide.

How To Create a Customer Journey Map

Now that you have tons of detail, you can jump into the mapping process.

At this stage, you’ll be exploring what customers are thinking, feeling and doing as they move through the decision-making process.

The typical decision-making process includes Awareness, Research, Evaluation, Decision, Validation, and Loyalty. This process can be customized depending on your industry, but it’s a great starting point.

What Your Customer Is Thinking

Use the research you’ve collected to complete all the sentences and answer all the questions below as if you were the customer.

Awareness: I have a problem.

• I need to improve…
• I need to prevent…
• I need to start…
• I need to stop…
• I need to optimize…
• I need to solve…
• I need to learn…

Research: I’m looking for information.

• What tools are available to solve my problem?
• What solutions exist to solve the problem I have?
• What products or services are available that might solve my problem?
• What brands are most qualified to solve my problem?

Evaluation: I have some information about solutions, and now I have more questions.

• What will address my problem most directly?
• Can I afford it?
• Am I confident in the solution?
• Who else should I collect information from?
• Have others tried this?
• Is there proof that it works?
• What is the benefit of this solution?

 Decision: Now I’m interested in a specific solution (yours), but I have a few more considerations before I close the deal.

• I need to confirm pricing.
• I need to confirm it will solve my problem.
• I need to confirm I can trust the company.
• What happens if something goes wrong?

 Validation: I am now a customer, and I want information that will help me use the product or service.

• What other aspects of this product or service are valuable?
• What do I do if I need help?

 Loyalty: I am now a loyal customer. I want to tell others about this solution.

• How can I share the success I’ve had?
• What can I do to help others in my network?
• What is the best aspect of the company and product to share?
• Can I have a stronger relationship with the company?

How Your Customer Is Feeling

You also need to consider how your customer is feeling at each stage of the decision-making process. These feelings play an important role because most (if not all) decision-making is connected to how a customer feels about their problem, how they feel about the solutions presented, and how others will perceive their decision.

Here are some thought starters:

• Are they anxious during the awareness stage of the decision-making process?
• Do they find the research and evaluation phase overwhelming?
• At what stage do they feel excited and confident?

When we appreciate our customers’ feelings we can craft content with the right tone and in the format they’ll find most useful.

What Your Customer Is Doing

During your research phase, you should have collected feedback from customers about how they discover solutions. You also should have accessed your website analytics and search tools like Ahrefs to understand how they’re searching for answers, both on search engines and on your website. Use this information to answer questions like these:

• Where are they researching online?
• What search terms are most relevant to them?
• What social channels and social groups are they using to gain perspective?
• What information on your own website is most important?
• Are they using live chat?
• Are they calling customer service?

Every action you identify is an opportunity to support your customers. Your brand can be in the right place at the right time with the information they’re looking for, demonstrating that you have what they need to solve their problem.

Wrapping up

A customer journey map is all about understanding the fine print behind your customers’ problems and their path to a solution. Stay focused on that, and you will have a wealth of knowledge to create content that is tailored to their needs at every step.

Keep in mind—a customer journey map is not meant to be a one-and-done thing. You’ll need to update it at least once a year, especially once your business realizes how valuable the customer journey map is to your bottom line.

Because guess what? By creating content and distributing it through the most relevant channels, you will improve your customers’ overall experience with your brand. Content marketing and the customer experience go hand-in-hand, and customers won’t hesitate to pay for a great customer experience. In fact, this report forecasts that customer experience will become more important than price in 2020—already, 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.

You can’t have a great customer experience without content! So what are you waiting for?

Download our free B2B customer journey map template , follow the process we covered in this guide, and don’t be afraid to go into DETAIL.

Did you enjoy this post?

Read this next.

Content Strategy

Content inspiration: a complete guide for b2b marketers, other reads on this topic, achieving market dominance: the role of backlinks in establishing industry leadership, airwallex rides international seo strategy to $5.5b valuation, content distribution strategy: what is it & why do you need one.

How to understand, use, and build customer journey maps

A customer journey map is key to building a solid marketing strategy. We cover everything you need to know about customer journey maps, their different types, examples, and the steps to making your own.

What is a customer journey map?

Why do you need a customer journey map, characteristics of customer journey maps.

• What are touchpoints?
• Different types of customer journey map

Journey map variations

• How to create a customer journey map

Customer journey map tools

• How to build an empathy-based, data-backed customer journey map
• How to use empathy to create stronger customer journey maps
• Customer journey tools: Top rated and best available

The customer journey is a long and often unpredictable road. Understanding it can be even more complicated. 

That’s why customer journey maps were invented: to understand the roadmap of a customer, from the very first touchpoint throughout the lasting life of their relationship with your business. 

Customer journey maps (or user journey maps) can be an invaluable resource for companies, from marketing to sales to UX, and are known to help businesses increase their ROI by 13–22% if done correctly. 

Below we cover journey maps from top to bottom, their importance, characteristics, and review examples, along with what you need to make your own. 

Key takeaways: 

Customer journey mapping is a strategic (and successful) approach to truly understanding your customers.

There are real and valuable business reasons to journey map.

There are six basic types of customer journey maps.

Customer touchpoints are every instance of interaction or engagement that happens along the journey. 

There are current- and future-state customer journey maps that can help predict future behavior .  

A customer journey map (sometimes called a user journey map, UX map, or CJM) is a visualization of the steps and experiences a customer has with a brand, from first contact to ongoing engagement, revealing both seen and unseen interactions.

User journey mapping lets you create personalized experiences across all touchpoints —for every individual—across all channels.

Companies can use this shared understanding to identify opportunities for innovation and improvement.

These maps can be simple or complex, depending on what you're looking to gain from them.

For any company, a customer journey map helps to enhance the customer experience and increase customer loyalty. 

A customer journey map can prove invaluable for optimizing across multiple departments—marketing, sales, product, and customer service—in many, many ways. Mapping your customer journey can help you:

Promote a customer-centric culture internally and externally 

Identify your ideal buyer and connect with customer needs

Glean customer journey insights into your audience that can drive revenue

Improve sales funnels & conversion rates authentically 

Amplify customer experience by understanding the customer’s perspective 

Reduce customer support tickets by locating customer pain-points 

Aid in marketing campaigns

Generate repeat business

Decrease customer churn and increase customer lifetime value

Together, these advantages translate into higher sales for your business.

A typical customer journey map includes: 

Actors—or potential profiles of customers—usually align with personas and their actions in the map are rooted in data . These actors will be the foundation of your map, and they will dictate the actions needed to create the desired outcome. 

Customer personas and buyer personas: What’s the difference?

A buyer persona is a profile that showcases your ideal customer based on existing customer data and market research. Buyer personas help humanize the ideal customer you are trying to attract, which helps you understand them better and pick the right marketing strategy to convert them.

A buyer persona is your ideal customer—they’re in research mode. You can have more than one buyer persona for your company, and understanding this buyer is the key to creating a successful customer experience. This buyer will turn into your customer.

Here’s what makes up your buyer persona: 

Demographics —including personal, professional, and specific (age, gender, location, education, income, marital status, skills, routines, etc.) 

Goals —including personal and professional, priorities, and challenges

Values —including personal and professional, and what they find to be important in products and companies

Preferences —including the content they consume, their communication choices, communities, groups, or associations, and how they spend their day, on and offline

All of these characteristics make up customer journey maps on the buying path. 

Journey phases

Journey phases are the different high-level stages in the customer roadmap. They provide organization for the rest of the information in the journey map (actions, thoughts, and emotions).

The stages will vary from scenario to scenario, and each organization will usually have data to help it determine what these phases are for a given scenario. Often you will see awareness, research, evaluation, and decision making in the customer phases. 

Customer expectations

Journey maps are best for scenarios that involve a sequence of events, describe a process, or might involve multiple channels.

Pain points are a specific problem that customers or prospective customers of your business are experiencing in the industry.

Scenarios can be real (for existing products and services) or anticipated—for products that are yet in the design stage. 

Actions, mindset, and sentiment

Every customer has a particular action that they take, because of a mindset that they have and will express it in their own sentiment. 

Actions: When a customer engages with your brand with a purpose. 

Mindset : Correspond to users' thoughts, questions, motivations , and information needs at different stages in the journey.

Emotions : How customers feel about your brand, whether positive, negative, or neutral. Plot these emotions in a single line across the journey phases, signaling the emotional highs and lows of the experience.

Opportunities

Opportunities of a customer journey map are desired outcomes. Maps should include key components, which can depend on the goal of the user journey mapping initiative.

Opportunities are also insights gained from mapping—they speak to how the user experience can be optimized.

To create a customer journey map, identify the personas, map the triggers that lead to desired outcomes, and discuss opportunities.

What are customer journey touchpoints?

Customer journey touchpoints are individual transactions through which the customer interacts with a business. 

Customer journey touchpoints for omnichannel brands are everywhere, here are a few examples:

Social media posts

Product demos

Advertisements

Brick and mortar visits

Website visits

You’ll also have the added returning customer touchpoints to consider—like how engaged they are with your product, if they are returning to your website or if they are attending your events for the second or third time. 

Examples of customer touchpoints 

Identifying each touchpoint is crucial for creating a customer journey map that will drive a better customer experience. Once you’ve identified the touchpoints, list out possible customer actions for each. 

Some actions that derive from customer touchpoints might be: 

Downloading an eBook

Clicking on your FAQ

Requesting a demo or call

Subscribing to your blog

Clicking a paid ad

It’s important to know which touchpoints to invest time and resources into. Your map maps out the areas you can improve, retain and scale. 

Types of customer journey maps

Each customer journey map has a different objective and business focus. There are six types to familiarize yourself with:

Current state —These illustrate what customers do , think, and feel as they interact with your business currently. 

Future state —These illustrate what customers will do, think, and feel as they interact with your business in the future. 

Day in the life —These examine everything that customers or prospects do, think, and feel (within a specific area), whether that involves your product or not. 

Service blueprint —This is a diagram that usually starts with a basic version of an existing or future state journey map. 

Circular —These are used for subscription-based models to visualize the customer journey as a circle or loop. This helps reinforce the importance of customer retention and lifetime value.

Empathy —These are used to create a shared understanding around the wants, needs, thoughts, and actions of a customer.  

Journey maps are meant to be used as a strategic planning tool. Use these definitions to guide you towards aspects of other methods that your team has not previously considered.

Journey map vs. Experience map

A journey map is specific to a product or service, while an experience map is more general and can be used outside of a business's scope.

Since experience maps are more generic in nature, they can also be used to find pain points in a product or service for a future journey map.

Journey map vs. Service blueprint

If journey maps are a product of experience maps, they will need a blueprint to direct them there. 

Service blueprints are a continuation of journey maps in the service industry. They lead the roadmap for service-based customer journeys. 

Journey map vs. User story map

User stories are used in Agile to plan features or functionalities, much like a future customer journey map.

In the user story map case, each feature is condensed down to a deliberately brief description from a user’s point of view. The typical format of a user story is a single sentence:

“As a [type of user], I want to [goal], so that [benefit].” 

How to create a customer journey map 

To create a customer journey map , it helps to have an idea of the steps involved. You can break the process of creating a customer journey map down into the following steps:

Define —Define your map goals with the customer’s journey in mind and your business goals at the finish line. 

Describe —Describe your customers and personas in detail from all aspects of their lives. 

Determine —Identify customer touchpoints from the beginning of the roadmap of engagement with your brand. 

Design —Lay out the customer journey every step of the way.

Designate —Mark customer milestones, motivations, frustrations, and turning points . 

Decide —Flag events that require action and make the necessary arrangements to fix any errors. 

Deploy —Adjust and optimize for a smoother customer experience.

Customer journey map templates 

Having a template is a great way to get started. There are a few different templates to choose from: 

Current state customer journey map 

The current state journey map visualizes the current experience with your product or service. It involves defining the scope of the customer experience with customer touchpoints.

This type of customer journey map is designed with the considerations, thoughts, feelings, and actions of your customers in mind. Current state mapping is a practical approach to identify existing pain points and create a shared awareness of the end-to-end customer experience. 

Day-in-the-life customer journey mapping 

A day-in-the-life journey map is another simple grid map based on time, created especially for the daily grind of the customer. Instead of different journey stages, it represents times in the day related to actions based on decisions in the path of purchasing. 

This template helps you visualize your customer’s daily routine even if these actions are outside your company. It typically is organized chronologically to systematically show the course of the habits of the day.

Day-in-the-life's are great for giving you insights into all the thoughts, needs, and pain points users experiences throughout their day. You can use this type of map to evaluate when your product or service will be most valuable in your customer’s day. 

Future-state customer journey map 

With a future-state journey map template, your goal is to learn how your customers feel about a new product launch or about how they will require your service in the future. 

Future-state journey mapping is a useful approach to explore possible customer expectations and to create new experiences. Mapping out a future customer journey helps to align your team around a common goal—the betterment of the customer experience.

Service blueprint customer journey map 

A service blueprint helps you design a roadmap of your service process—much like building a house. The goal is to be able to make projected changes to the service where needed and to be able to visualize each step in the eyes of the customer. 

Service blueprint maps reflect the perspective of the organization and its employees and visualize the things that need to happen behind the scenes in order for the customer journey to take place. 

Service blueprints are created when making procedural changes, or when trying to pinpoint solutions to roadblocks in the customer journey on a website.

Circular customer journey map 

A circular customer journey map is just that—circular instead of linear or graph-like to showcase a different type of business model. For instance, a SaaS company may find it more useful to visualize the customer journey as a loop or wheel. 

This subscription-based journey map does a nice job of portraying both the customer interactions and sentiments, as well as their journey from awareness to purchase. 

Empathy customer journey map 

The empathy journey map is a bit different because it aligns with the customer's feelings and emotions. Empathy is a big factor in the customer journey and this template is designed to help teams align their customer journey mapping exercise with these types of needs. 

With empathy, you can get into your customer’s shoes and truly feel what they feel as it pertains to your product or service. 

As with anything, you’ll need customer journey mapping tools to help you . The key is to find the right tool that works with your team and workflow. 

Here are a few tools to consider:

Custellence

PowerPoint or Google Slides

With the right map and the right tools, you can overcome roadblocks and open a path to scalability and success.

Enhance your journey mapping process with customer intelligence. Look at data points like heatmaps , scroll maps , and other insights you can glean from session replay . Combining these quantitative and qualitative insights will help you in your journey mapping process.

Using journey maps to drive organizational change

It may not be easy to get buy-in to support the changes in strategic planning that result from customer journey mapping. 

You can use what insights you’ve gleaned from the current state journey map in these beneficial ways:

Align your organization around the customer viewpoint. Engage with each department and set up a commitment to put the customer experience moments top of mind with an initiative for growth.

Enlist team members and partners to generate empathy for customers. Use your journey map to bring together relevant teams to train on customer experience best practices. 

Supplement a new strategy with internal communications that encourage better customer service. As new initiatives roll out, use internal channels to communicate how you’re improving the experience of the customer, and how team members can help.

Optimize your user journeys with Fullstory

Understanding your users' digital experience and optimizing your most important touchpoints can be make-or-break.

With Fullstory Journeys, you can easily see how users explore your site or app and see step-by-step page navigations and other key interactions along the way. This lets you identify if users are using your site how you intended; what the most common navigation paths are; and how users typically arrive at your most critical pages. 

It's no longer a guessing game—it's data-driven and actionable.

Fullstory's DXI platform combines the quantitative insights of customer journeys and product analytics with picture-perfect  session replay  for complete context that helps you uncover opportunities.

Sign up for a free 14-day trial  to see how Fullstory can help you combine your most invaluable quantitative and qualitative insights and eliminate blind spots.

Frequently asked questions about customer journey maps

Who uses customer journey maps.

For any brand or company that wants to learn their customer, from the point of motivation to the turning point of frustration, a customer journey map is the best tactic to do so. Journey maps are best for scenarios that describe a sequence of events. You might want to map multiple scenarios for one persona, depending on your project goals.

How often should I update a customer journey map?

If business goals change, so could your customer’s goals. If you roll out a new product or service, you may want to edit or update your customer journey map. Keeping your maps updated can help you reach your goals as a team. 

How many customer journey maps do I need?

The number of different customer journey maps needed all depends on your target audience. If you have multiple customer personas, it would be best to create different journey maps to suit each one. 

At the very least, be sure to create a customer journey map for the current and future state so you can aid in predicting future trends of the customer journey in alignment with your product and service.

Who should be involved in the mapping process?

Anyone that is involved in making your product or service successful should have a hand in the mapping process. Sales, marketing, customer success, and product teams all should be involved in customer journey mapping. Every team member will benefit from truly understanding their customers to make for a better customer experience. 

What is a user journey map in design thinking?

User journey maps for design thinking is an iterative process of studying the user so that they can engage with a system with more agility. It redefines customer problems in an attempt to identify alternative solutions that might not be obvious with the initial level of understanding.

Related resources and further reading

Map out how your customers navigate your website or app—and determine where you need to improve.

Jennifer Pyron from brand performance agency Mighty & True on building a customer journey map.

What is a customer journey map, how does it relate to product and marketing teams, and where can empathy help? Let's find out.

Fullstory helps you visualize customer interactions so you can understand and improve customer experience, one glowing review at a time.

A comprehensive guide to product analysis and analytics platforms, how important they are, and why they’re a valuable asset for your bottom line.

Journey mapping tools help marketers identify pain points, tailor interfaces, and cultivate efficient, enjoyable experiences for customers.

What is a Customer Journey Map? [Free Templates]

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

Table of Contents

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

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

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

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

What is a customer journey map?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The benefits of using customer journey maps

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

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

Improved customer support

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

Effective marketing tactics

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

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

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

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

Product advancements or service improvements

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

A more enjoyable and efficient user experience

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

A customer-focused mindset

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

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

How to create a customer journey map

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

Step 1. Set your focus

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

Step 2. Choose your buyer personas

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

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

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

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

Step 3. Perform user research

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

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

Get a free Heyday demo

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

Step 4. List customer touchpoints

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

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

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

Step 5. Build your customer journey map

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

Step 6. Analyze your customer journey map

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

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

Types of customer journey maps

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

Current state

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

Future state

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

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

Day-in-the-life

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

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

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

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

Empathy maps

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

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

Customer journey map templates

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

Customer journey map template for the current state:

The future state customer journey mapping template:

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

An empathy map template:

A customer journey map example

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

Buyer Persona:

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

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

What are their struggles?

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

What tasks do they have?

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

Opportunities:

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

Action Plan:

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

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

Turn customer conversations and inquiries into sales with Heyday, our dedicated conversational AI chatbot for social commerce retailers. Deliver 5-star customer experiences — at scale.

Turn customer service conversations into sales with Heyday . Improve response times and sell more products. See it in action.

Become a better social marketer.

Get expert social media advice delivered straight to your inbox.

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

Related Articles

FAQ Chatbot: The Best Way to Save Time on Customer Service

FAQ chatbots are bots designed to answer common questions people have about a product or service. They are used on websites or in customer service applications.

Customer Service Metrics: 2024 Guide + Free Template

Customers expect to get support wherever they look for and they expect it fast. To keep up, track the customer service metrics that matter.

Create a Customer Experience Strategy [FREE TEMPLATE]

This step-by-step template makes it easy to deliver a well-laid-out customer experience strategy that can give you planned, targeted growth.

Customer Experience Management Explained [11 Top Tips]

Turn that frown upside down! Keep your customers smiling with a strong customer experience management strategy.

• Get started Get started for free

Figma design

Design and prototype in one place

Collaborate with a digital whiteboard

Translate designs into code

Get the desktop, mobile, and font installer apps

See the latest features and releases

• Prototyping
• Design systems
• Wireframing
• Online whiteboard
• Team meetings
• Strategic planning
• Brainstorming
• Diagramming
• Product development
• Web development
• Design handoff
• Product managers

Organizations

Config 2024

Register to attend in person or online — June 26–27

Creator fund

Build and sell what you love

User groups

Join a local Friends of Figma group

Learn best practices at virtual events

Customer stories

Read about leading product teams

Stories about bringing new ideas to life

Get started

• Developer docs
• Best practices
• Reports & insights
• Resource library
• Help center

How to create an effective user journey map

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

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

Read on to find out:

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

What is a user journey map?

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

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

How to read a user journey map

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

Start your user journey map with FigJam

5 key user journey map phases.

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

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

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

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

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

Current-state user journey maps

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

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

Future-state user journey maps

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

How to make a user journey map in 5 steps

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

Step 1: Define user personas and goals.

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

Step 2: Identify customer touch points.

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

Step 3: Visualize journey phases.

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

Step 4: Capture user actions and responses.

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

Step 5: Validate and iterate.

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

Jumpstart your user journey map with FigJam

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

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

Ready to improve UX with user journey mapping?

• Woopra Logo
• Platform Customers Pricing Resources Company
• Log in Start For Free
• Automations
• Integrations
• Documentation

How to Create a Customer Journey Map: A Step-By-Step Breakdown

There are often a lot of twists and turns in the customer journey, with each individual experience being unique.

That said, there is a predictable sequence of touchpoints throughout the sales funnel.

Mapping each customer touchpoint out effectively helps enhance the user experience and increases the chances of customer success.

What Is a Customer Journey Map?

Simply put, a customer journey map is a visualization of the process someone undertakes as they move through the various touchpoints of the customer journey.

It typically starts with the initial interaction they have, like visiting your website for the first time when gaining brand awareness, and then moves through the subsequent stages of consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy.

Here’s an example of what a typical customer journey map may look like.

Notice how it concisely outlines the touchpoints customers take as they move throughout the customer journey.

It starts in the awareness stage with touchpoints like search results or paid content, moves on to the consideration stage with social media or email, then to the purchase stage, and so on.

There are four main purposes of customer journey mapping.

• Flesh out the step-by-step process someone takes from being a potential customer to a lead to an actual customer and ideally, a loyal advocate
• Understand the customer’s perspective
• Identify friction points that are causing issues with customer engagement
• Discover opportunities to reduce pain points and improve the overall customer experience

By doing so, you set the stage for better product design, more effective customer journey marketing, increased customer satisfaction, better customer retention, and ultimately, greater customer success.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map

1. define business goals.

Before doing anything else, you’ll want to pinpoint exactly what you’re looking to accomplish with customer journey mapping.

Some common examples include:

• Optimizing each touchpoint in the customer experience
• Identifying areas with higher than average dropoff
• Resolving issues that are leading to excessive dropoff
• Improving the overall customer experience both during the buyer journey and post-purchase

Clearly articulating what you’re trying to achieve is essential because it will direct the path you take for subsequent steps of customer journey mapping.

Note that a big part of effectively defining business goals is getting input from multiple key stakeholders in your company who are responsible for different aspects of the customer experience.

For instance, you may want to get input from your marketing leaders when developing the awareness and consideration stages of your customer journey map, input from your sales leaders when ironing out the purchase stage, and input from your customer service leaders when constructing the retention and advocacy stages.

It’s also smart to perform extensive user research and incorporate customer feedback to ensure you address the right pain points and tackle the issues that are most pressing for creating a positive user experience and long-term customer loyalty.

This should make for cohesive CX journey mapping where touch points flow smoothly from one to the next.

2. Identify Key Stages in the Customer Journey

Next, you’ll want to pinpoint the exact sales funnel stages involved with the customer journey.

The sales funnel stages can vary slightly from company to company, but as we mentioned earlier, some common ones include:

• Consideration

Fleshing the key stages out like this will show you the path users take as they go from being a prospect to a lead to a customer to an advocate.

By visualizing the key stages like this, you’ll see how each stage flows into the next — something that’s vital for making the customer journey as seamless as possible, meeting customer needs, and improving overall customer experience quality.

This is also what the next step in constructing customer journey maps is built on, which brings us to our next point.

3. Define Customer Touchpoints

You can think of the key stages in the customer journey on the macro level and the next step in the process — defining customer touchpoints — on the micro level.

These are the smaller interactions that customers take as they move from stage to stage in the user journey.

This can include digital touchpoints like becoming aware of your brand through an online ad, a search engine, paid content, and so on.

It can also include physical touchpoints like word-of-mouth.

Customer touchpoints will account for the majority of your customer journey map and help you visualize how people interact with your brand.

The exact number of touchpoints can vary considerably, so defining them is highly individualistic.

When identifying them, you’ll want to carefully consider the typical customer journey and write down every step involved. Then, arrange each touchpoint sequentially so you can see the big picture.

4. Design a Visual Representation of the Customer Journey

After defining business goals, identifying key stages in the customer journey, and defining customer touchpoints, it’s time to actually create your customer journey map.

Here, you’ll create a visual representation of what your business’s specific customer journey looks like for a bird’s-eye view.

To do this effectively, it’s helpful to use strong visual elements like different colors, symbols, bullets, and emojis so you can easily see everything at a glance.

Here’s an example of what an online shopping customer journey map could look like.

When it comes to customer journey mapping tools, there are several options available.

If you’re looking for something bare-bones and simple, you can use Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets.

If you want something a bit more advanced, you can use HubSpot’s Customer Journey Map Template , which includes seven free templates (more on this later).

Or, if you want software with extensive features that are specifically designed for creating customer journey maps, you can find a list of the top 10 products here .

Note that most companies have more than one customer persona. Therefore, you may need to create multiple customer journey maps while targeting each individual buyer persona.

Customer Journey Map Templates

When most people think of customer journey mapping, they think of the classic buyer’s journey.

And they wouldn’t be wrong.

Generally, that’s the most commonly used customer journey map and the type of mapping we used in the customer journey map examples above.

But it’s certainly not the only type of mapping you can use.

As we’ll learn in a moment, there are also customer journey maps that target specific segments of the buyer’s journey and customer journey maps that focus on what you want your ideal journey to be like.

For the rest of this post, we’ll cover four of the most popular customer journey map templates you can use for different situations.

That way you can cover all the angles and increase the chances of customer success every step of the way.

Buyer’s Journey

As we just mentioned, this is widely considered the most classic type of customer journey mapping.

When mapping the buyer’s journey, you follow the key stages in the customer journey (awareness, consideration, purchase, etc.) like we outlined above, along with customer touchpoints.

Here’s a simple template journey map example for the buyer’s journey from HubSpot, which you can find for free here .

The default starting point is extremely simple. It includes just three stages and a handful of questions to understand customer interaction.

However, you can easily add more stages, questions, and additional information to fully customize the buyer’s journey so that it’s specific to your business.

This template, admittedly, won’t provide the same depth as some of the more advanced tools for creating customer journey maps, but it should be adequate for many business owners.

If you don’t need anything fancy and are testing out customer journey maps for the first time, HubSpot should be more than sufficient.

Whatever template you use, buyer’s journey mapping tends to be a good starting point as it helps you visualize the entire process from someone entering your sales funnel to converting to becoming a loyal customer.

This is integral for optimizing every aspect of the customer experience end-to-end, and from a product standpoint, is essential for achieving UX mastery.

It’s also worth mentioning that if you’re looking to improve your UX design skills, The Interaction Design Foundation is an excellent resource for doing so. They offer a wide variety of courses from the beginner to expert level and only charge a flat monthly fee for access to all courses.

Now that we’ve tackled buyer journey mapping, let’s look at three other popular types of customer journey map template options that are also available.

Future State

In most cases, the buyer’s journey is the current journey customers are taking.

While there will likely be several areas you’re satisfied with, your existing customer journey probably won’t be ideal and likely isn’t meeting customer expectations 100%.

For example, there may be friction points along the way where customers are attempting to accomplish a goal. Or, there may be higher than acceptable dropoff in a particular area like using core features or becoming a paid customer after using a free product version.

By the way, if you want to holistically understand the customer journey and generate objective customer data, you can use a customer journey analytics platform like Woopra . This enables you to analyze essential customer journey metrics so you can see what it looks like end-to-end.

With future state customer journey mapping, you design a new map with new touchpoints and engagements based on your ideal vision.

That way, you’ll know what needs to be done to create the optimal customer journey.

If you’ve already experimented with creating customer journey maps and are looking to take the next step to refine the customer experience, you’ll likely be interested in future state mapping.

HubSpot offers a free future state template as well, which allows you to outline the series of steps that need to be taken to make the customer journey as perfect as possible. And it’s completely customizable.

You simply list the steps you want to take to create an amazing customer experience and ask key questions regarding customer behavior.

It’s nothing over the top, but it should get the job done for many business owners.

Lead Nurturing

Although technically part of the buyer’s journey, some marketers choose to create a lead nurturing customer journey map because of the extreme importance of lead nurturing.

After all, any major holes in the lead nurturing process can disrupt sales as a whole. And no matter how good your marketing team is at generating leads, the impact will be negated if you can’t successfully nurture them.

To optimize this area of sales, you can create a lead nurturing map using a template like this one.

Here, the default starts with someone being a stranger, then moves on to them being a subscriber/lead, then a marketing qualified lead (MQL), a sales opportunity/demo, then a deal closed/handoff.

Again, everything is customizable, so you can adjust the lead nurturing customer journey to your exact specifications. And, it too, is available for free from HubSpot .

Customer Service and Support

Once again, a truly rewarding user experience goes beyond the purchase and ensures a customer is satisfied well after they’ve bought a product.

Like lead nurturing, customer service and support are also technically part of the buyer’s customer journey map.

However, it dives deeper into this area of the sales funnel with the intention of increasing customer retention and advocacy.

And I think we can all agree that this is incredibly important given that “Happy and satisfied customers are 87% more likely to purchase upgrades and new services.”

Here’s yet another free customer journey map template you can get from HubSpot that focuses specifically on customer service and support.

With it, you can follow how a customer goes from engaging in the normal use of a product to noticing an issue/having a complaint to asking for help/contacting customer support to speaking with support to conflict resolution.

Having a clear overview of the touchpoints involved with this process should help you fully understand the flow so you can 1) see things from a customer’s point of view and 2) identify issues that may be detrimental to customer support.

For inspiration from real-life major brands like Spotify, TurboTax, and Amazon, here’s a list of customer journey map examples you can learn from.

Crafting an Exceptional User Experience with Customer Journey Maps

Customer journey mapping is a simple yet effective way to visualize each touchpoint in the user journey holistically for each buyer persona.

From the initial moment someone becomes aware of your brand to the time of purchase and beyond, customer journey maps allow you to see how users move throughout the entire lifecycle.

And as we’ve learned, this serves several important purposes, including seeing the buying process from a customer’s point of view, identifying customer pain points, and unearthing opportunities to improve the customer experience end-to-end.

It’s just a matter of following the correct customer journey mapping guidelines and using the appropriate template to outline the buying process.

Then, tracking key customer journey metrics like engagement, churn rate, and customer satisfaction with an analytics platform like Woopra or Google Analytics should help you refine your customer journey mapping to fully optimize the customer experience.

Full insight into the customer journey. No SQL required.

Get started with Woopra for free to see who your customers are, what they do and what keeps them coming back.

Related Articles

The beginner’s guide to behavioral targeting to increase conversions.

How to get Started with Analytics

From Emails to Customers — Woopra Campaign Tracking

5 actionable methods to engage mobile customers, explore topics.

© Woopra, Inc. 600 California St 11th Floor San Francisco, CA 94108

• Request a demo
• Product Analytics
• Customer Analytics
• Customer Journey Analytics
• Google Analytics F.A.Q.
• Privacy Policy
• Terms of service

• Reviews / Why join our community?
• For companies
• Frequently asked questions

Customer Journey Maps

What are customer journey maps.

Customer journey maps are visual representations of customer experiences with an organization. They provide a 360-degree view of how customers engage with a brand over time and across all channels. Product teams use these maps to uncover customer needs and their routes to reach a product or service. Using this information, you can identify pain points and opportunities to enhance customer experience and boost customer retention.

“ Data often fails to communicate the frustrations and experiences of customers. A story can do that, and one of the best storytelling tools in business is the customer journey map.” — Paul Boag, UX designer, service design consultant & digital transformation expert

In this video, Frank Spillers, CEO of Experience Dynamics, explains how you can include journey maps in your design process.

• Transcript loading…

Customer Journey Maps – Tell Customer Stories Over Time

Customer journey maps are research-based tools. They show common customer experiences over time To help brands learn more about their target audience. 

Maps are incredibly effective communication tools. See how maps simplify complex spaces and create shared understanding.

Unlike navigation maps, customer journey maps have an extra dimension—time. Design teams examine tasks and questions (e.g., what-ifs) regarding how a design meets or fails to meet customers’ needs over time when encountering a product or service. 

Customer journey maps should have comprehensive timelines that show the most essential sub-tasks and events. Over this timeline framework, you add insights into customers' thoughts and feelings when proceeding along the timeline. The map should include: 

A timescale - A defined journey period (e.g., one week). This timeframe should include the entire journey, from awareness to conversion to retention.

Scenarios - The context and sequence of events where a user/customer must achieve a goal. An example could be a user who wants to buy a ticket on the phone. Scenarios are events from the first actions (recognizing a problem) to the last activities (e.g., subscription renewal).

Channels – Where do they perform actions (e.g., Facebook)?

Touchpoints – How does the customer interact with the product or service? What actions do they perform?

Thoughts and feelings – The customer's thoughts and feelings at each touchpoint.

A customer journey map helps you understand how customer experience evolves over time. It allows you to identify possible problems and improve the design. This enables you to design products that are more likely to exceed customers’ expectations in the future state. 

How to Create a Customer Journey Map for Exceptional Experiences?

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0

Define Your Map’s Business Goal

Before creating a customer journey map, you must ask yourself why you're making one in the first place. Clarify who will use it and what user experience it will address.

Conduct Research

Use customer research to determine customer experiences at all touchpoints. Get analytical/statistical data and anecdotal evidence. Leverage customer interviews, surveys, social media listening, and competitive intelligence.

Watch user researcher Ditte Hvas Mortensen talk about how user research fits your design process and when you should do different studies. 

• Copyright holder: Unsplash. Copyright terms and license: CCO Public Domain. Link: https://pixabay.com/en/clay-hands-sculpting-art-69...
• Copyright holder: Unsplash. Copyright terms and license: CCO Public Domain. Link: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-in-black-shirt-an...
• Copyright holder: Indecent Proposer. Copyright terms and license: CC BY-NC 2.0 Link: https://www.flickr.com/photos/indecent_proposal/14...
• Copyright holder: Anna Langova. Copyright terms and license: CC0 1.0 Link: http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php...
• Copyright holder: Conmongt. Copyright terms and license: CC0 Public Domain Link: https://pixabay.com/en/hourglass-time-time-lapse-clock-1623517/

Review Touchpoints and Channels

List customer touchpoints (e.g., paying a bill) and channels (e.g., online). Look for more touchpoints or channels to include.

Make an Empathy Map

Pinpoint what the customer does, thinks, feels, says, hears, etc., in a given situation. Then, determine their needs and how they feel throughout the experience. Focus on barriers and sources of annoyance.

Sketch the Journey

Piece everything—touchpoints, timescale, empathy map output, new ideas, etc.). Show a customer’s course of motion through touchpoints and channels across the timescale, including their feelings at every touchpoint.

Iterate and Refine

Revise and transform your sketch into the best-looking version of the ideal customer journey.

Share with Stakeholders

Ensure all stakeholders understand your map and appreciate how its use will benefit customers and the organization.

Buyer Journey vs User Journey vs Customer Journey: What's the Difference?

You must know the differences between buyer, user, and customer journeys to optimize customer experiences. A customer journey map is often synonymous with a user flow diagram or buyer journey map. However, each journey gives unique insights and needs different plans.

Customer Journey

The customer journey, or lifecycle, outlines the stages a customer goes through with a business. This journey can vary across organizations but includes five key steps:

1. Awareness : This is the first stage of the customer journey, where the customers realize they have a problem. The customer becomes aware of your brand or product at this stage, usually due to marketing efforts.

2. Consideration : Once customers know about your product or service, they start their research and compare brands.

3. Purchase : This is the stage where the customer has chosen a solution and is ready to buy your product or service.

4. Retention : After the purchase, it's about retaining that customer and nurturing a relationship. This is where good customer service comes in.

5. Advocacy : Also called the loyalty stage, this is when the customer not only continues to buy your product but also recommends it to others.

The journey doesn't end when the customer buys and recommends your solution to others. Customer journey strategies are cyclical and repetitive. After the advocacy stage, ideally, you continue to attract and retain the customers, keeping them in the cycle. 

There is no standard format for a customer journey map. The key is to create one that works best for your team and product or service. Get started with customer journey mapping with our template:

This customer journey map template features three zones:

Top – persona and scenario. 

Middle – thoughts, actions, and feelings. 

Bottom – insights and progress barriers.

Buyer Journey

The buyer's journey involves the buyer's path towards purchasing. This includes some of the steps we saw in the customer journey but is specific to purchasing :

1. Awareness Stage : This is when a prospective buyer realizes they have a problem. However, they aren't yet fully aware of the solutions available to them.

2. Consideration Stage : After identifying their problem, the buyer researches and investigates different solutions with more intent. They compare different products, services, brands, or strategies here.

3. Decision Stage : The buyer then decides which solution will solve their problem at the right price. This is where the actual purchasing action takes place.  

4. Post-Purchase Evaluation : Although not always included, this stage is critical. It's where the buyer assesses their satisfaction with the purchase. It includes customer service interactions, quality assessment, and attitudinal loyalty to the brand.

All these stages can involve many touchpoints, including online research, social media interactions, and even direct, in-person interactions. Different buyers may move through these stages at different speeds and through various channels, depending on a wide range of factors.

User Journey

The user journey focuses on people's experience with digital platforms like websites or software. Key stages include:

1. Discovery : In this stage, users become aware of your product, site, or service, often due to marketing efforts, word-of-mouth, or organic search. It also includes their initial reactions or first impressions.

2. Research/Consideration : Here, users dig deeper, exploring features, comparing with alternatives, and evaluating if your offering suits their needs and preferences.

3. Interaction/Use : Users actively engage with your product or service. They first-hand experience your solution's functionality, usability, and usefulness to achieve their goal.

4. Problem-solving : If they encounter any issues, how they seek help and resolve their issues fall into this stage. It covers user support, troubleshooting, and other assistance.

5. Retention/Loyalty : This stage involves how users stay engaged over time. Do they continue using your product, reduce usage, or stop altogether? It includes their repeated interactions, purchases, and long-term engagement over time.

6. Advocacy/Referral : This is when users are so satisfied they begin to advocate for your product, leaving positive reviews and referring others to your service.

Download this user journey map template featuring an example of a user’s routine. 

Understanding these stages can help optimize the user experience, providing value at each stage and making the journey seamless and enjoyable. 

Always remember the journey is as important as the destination. Customer relationships start from the first website visit or interaction with marketing materials. These initial touchpoints can influence the ongoing relationship with your customers.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0

Drawbacks of Customer Journey Maps

Customer journey mapping is valuable yet has limitations and potential drawbacks. Recognize these challenges and create more practical and realistic journey maps.

Over-simplification of Customer Experiences

Customer journey maps often risk simplifying complex customer experiences . They may depict varied and unpredictable customer behaviors as straightforward and linear. This simplification can lead to misunderstandings about your customers' needs and wants. As a result, you might overlook customers' diverse and unique paths. 

Always remember that real customer experiences are more complex than any map. When you recognize this, you steer clear of decisions based on simple models.

Resource Intensity

Creating detailed customer journey maps requires a lot of resources and time. You must gather extensive data and update the maps to keep them relevant. This process can strain small businesses or those with limited resources. 

You need to balance the need for comprehensive mapping with available resources. Efficient resource management and prioritization are crucial to maintaining effective journey maps.

Risk of Bias

Creating customer journey maps carries the inherent risk of biases . These biases can arise from various sources. They can impact the accuracy and effectiveness of the maps. 

Alan Dix, an expert in HCI, discusses bias in more detail in this video.  

Common biases in customer journey mapping include:

Assumption Bias: When teams make decisions based on preconceived notions rather than customer data.

Selection Bias: When the data doesn’t represent the entire customer base..

Confirmation Bias : When you focus on information that supports existing beliefs and preferences. Simultaneously, you tend to ignore or dismiss data that contradicts those beliefs.

Anchoring Bias : Relying on the first information encountered (anchor) when making decisions.

Overconfidence Bias : Placing too much trust in the accuracy of the journey map. You may overlook its potential flaws.

These biases may misguide the team, and design decisions based on these maps might not be effective.

To address these biases, review and update journey maps with real user research data. Engage with different customer segments and gather a wide range of feedback to help create a more accurate and representative map. This approach ensures the journey map aligns with actual customer experiences and behaviors.

Evolving Customer Behaviors

Customer behaviors and preferences change with time. A journey map relevant today can become outdated. You need to update and adapt your maps to reflect these changes. This requires you to perform market research and stay updated with trends and customer feedback. 

Getting fresh data ensures your journey map stays relevant and effective. You must adapt to evolving customer behaviors to maintain accurate and valuable customer journey maps.

Challenges in Capturing Emotions

Capturing emotions accurately in customer journey maps poses a significant challenge. Emotions influence customer decisions, yet you may find it difficult to quantify and represent them in maps. Most journey maps emphasize actions and touchpoints, often neglecting the emotional journey. 

You must integrate emotional insights into these maps to understand customer experiences. This integration enhances the effectiveness of customer engagement strategies. You can include user quotes, symbols such as emojis, or even graphs to capture the ups and downs of the users’ emotions..

Misalignment with Customer Needs

Misalignments in customer journey maps can manifest in various ways. It can impact the effectiveness of your strategies. Common misalignments include:

Putting business aims first, not what customers need.

Not seeing or serving the varied needs of different customer types.

Not using customer feedback in the journey map.

Thinking every customer follows a simple, straight path.

Engage with your customers to understand their needs and preferences if you want to address these misalignments. Incorporate their direct feedback into the journey map. This approach leads to more effective customer engagement and satisfaction.

Over-Reliance on the Map

Relying too much on customer journey maps can lead to problems. These maps should serve as tools rather than definitive guides. Viewing them as perfect can restrict your responsiveness to customer feedback and market changes. Treat journey maps as evolving documents that complement direct customer interactions and feedback. 

Make sure you get regular updates and maintain flexibility in your approach. Balance the insights from the map with ongoing customer engagement. This approach keeps your business agile and responsive to evolving customer needs.

Data Privacy Concerns

Collecting customer data for journey mapping poses significant privacy concerns. Thus, you need to create a balance. You must adhere to data protection laws and gather enough information for mapping. 

You need a careful strategy to ensure customer data security. Stay vigilant to adapt to evolving privacy regulations and customer expectations. This vigilance helps maintain trust and compliance.

Learn More about Customer Journey Maps

Take our Journey Mapping course to gain insights into the how and why of journey mapping. Learn practical methods to create experience maps , customer journey maps, and service blueprints for immediate application.

Explore this eBook to discover customer journey mapping .

Find some additional insights in the Customer Journey Maps article.

Questions related to Customer Journey Maps

Creating a customer journey map requires visually representing the customer's experience with your product or company. Harness the strength of visual reasoning to understand and present this journey succinctly. Instead of detailing a lengthy narrative, like a book, a well-crafted map allows stakeholders, whether designers or not, to grasp the journey quickly. It's a democratized tool that disseminates information, unifies teams, and aids decision-making by illuminating previously unnoticed or misunderstood aspects of the customer's journey.

The customer journey encompasses five distinct stages that guide a customer's interaction with a brand or product:

Awareness: The customer becomes aware of a need or problem.

Consideration: They research potential solutions or products.

Purchase: The customer decides on a solution and makes a purchase.

Retention: Post-purchase, the customer uses the product and forms an opinion.

Advocacy: Satisfied customers become brand advocates, sharing their positive experiences.

For a comprehensive understanding of these stages and how they intertwine with customer touchpoints, refer to Interaction-Design.org's in-depth article .

A perspective grid workshop is a activity that brings together stakeholders from various departments, such as product design, marketing, growth, and customer support, to align on a shared understanding of the customer's journey. These stakeholders contribute unique insights about customer needs and how they interact with a product or service. The workshop entails:

Creating a matrix to identify customers' jobs and requirements, not initially linked to specific features.

Identifying the gaps, barriers, pains, and risks associated with unmet needs, and constructing a narrative for the journey.

Highlighting the resulting value when these needs are met.

Discuss the implied technical and non-technical capabilities required to deliver this value.

Brainstorming possible solutions and eventually narrowing down to specific features.

The ultimate aim is to foster alignment within the organization and produce a user journey map based on shared knowledge. 

Learn more from this insightful video:

Customer journey mapping is vital as it harnesses our visual reasoning capabilities to articulate a customer's broad, intricate journey with a brand. Such a depiction would otherwise require extensive documentation, like a book. This tool offers a cost-effective method to convey information succinctly, ensuring understanding of whether one is a designer or lacks the time for extensive reading. It also helps the team to develop a shared vision and to encourage collaboration.  Businesses can better comprehend and address interaction points by using a journey map, facilitating informed decision-making and revealing insights that might otherwise remain obscured. Learn more about the power of visualizing the customer journey in this video.

Pain points in a customer journey map represent customers' challenges or frustrations while interacting with a product or service. They can arise from unmet needs, gaps in service, or barriers faced during the user experience. Identifying these pain points is crucial as they highlight areas for improvement, allowing businesses to enhance the customer experience and meet their needs more effectively. Pain points can relate to various aspects, including product usability, communication gaps, or post-purchase concerns. Explore the detailed article on customer journey maps at Interaction Design Foundation for a deeper understanding and real-world examples.

Customer journey mapping offers several key benefits:

It provides a holistic view of the customer experience, highlighting areas for improvement. This ensures that products or services meet users' needs effectively.

The process fosters team alignment, ensuring everyone understands and prioritizes the customer's perspective.

It helps identify pain points, revealing opportunities to enhance user satisfaction and loyalty.

This visualization allows businesses to make informed decisions, ensuring resources target the most impactful areas.

To delve deeper into the advantages and insights on journey mapping, refer to Interaction Design Foundation's article on key takeaways from the IXDF journey mapping course .

In design thinking, a customer journey map visually represents a user's interactions with a product or service over time. It provides a detailed look at a user's experience, from initial contact to long-term engagement. Focusing on the user's perspective highlights their needs, emotions, pain points, and moments of delight. This tool aids in understanding and empathizing with users, a core principle of design thinking. When used effectively, it bridges gaps between design thinking and marketing, ensuring user-centric solutions align with business goals. For a comprehensive understanding of how it fits within design thinking and its relation to marketing, refer to Interaction Design Foundation's article on resolving conflicts between design thinking and marketing .

A customer journey map and a user journey map are tools to understand the experience of users or customers with a product or service.

A customer journey map is a broader view of the entire customer experience across multiple touchpoints and stages. It considers physical and digital channels, multiple user personas, and emotional and qualitative aspects.

A user journey map is a detailed view of the steps to complete a specific task or goal within a product or service. It only considers digital channels, one user persona, and functional and quantitative aspects.

Both are useful to understand and improve the experience of the users or customers with a product or service. However, they have different scopes, perspectives, and purposes. A customer journey map provides a holistic view of the entire customer experience across multiple channels and stages. A user journey map provides a detailed view of the steps to complete a specific task or goal within a product or service.

While user journeys might emphasize specific tasks or pain points, customer journeys encapsulate the entire experience, from research and comparison to purchasing and retention. 

Customer journey maps and service blueprints are tools to understand and improve the experience of the users or customers with a product or service. A customer journey map shows the entire customer experience across multiple touchpoints and stages. It focuses on the front stage of the service, which is what the customers see and experience. It considers different user personas and emotional aspects.

A service blueprint shows how a service is delivered and operated by an organization. It focuses on the back stage of the service, which is what the customers do not see or experience. It considers one user persona and functional aspects. What are the steps that the customer takes to complete a specific task or goal within the service? What are the channels and devices that the customer interacts with at each step?

For an immersive dive into customer journey mapping, consider enrolling in the Interaction Design Foundation's specialized course . This course offers hands-on lessons, expert guidance, and actionable tools. Furthermore, to grasp the course's essence, the article “4 Takeaways from the IXDF Journey Mapping Course” sheds light on the core learnings, offering a snapshot of what to expect. These resources are tailored by industry leaders, ensuring you're equipped with the best knowledge to craft impactful customer journey maps.

Answer a Short Quiz to Earn a Gift

Why do designers create customer journey maps?

• To document internal company processes and designer feedback
• To replace other forms of customer feedback
• To visualize customer experiences and identify pain points

In which stage do customers first recognize they have a problem?

What element is essential in a customer journey map?

• Competitor analysis
• Customer's thoughts and feelings
• Empathy maps and user stories

Why are scenarios included in a customer journey map?

• To exemplify the design thinking process
• To list product features
• To show the context and sequence of events

Why should designers iterate and refine customer journey maps?

• To ensure it remains relevant and accurate
• To keep the map visually appealing
• To reduce the number of customer interactions

Better luck next time!

Do you want to improve your UX / UI Design skills? Join us now

Congratulations! You did amazing

You earned your gift with a perfect score! Let us send it to you.

Check Your Inbox

We’ve emailed your gift to [email protected] .

Literature on Customer Journey Maps

Here’s the entire UX literature on Customer Journey Maps by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Learn more about Customer Journey Maps

Take a deep dive into Customer Journey Maps with our course Journey Mapping .

This course will show you how to use journey mapping to turn your own complex design challenges into simple, delightful user experiences . If you want to design a great shopping experience, an efficient signup flow or an app that brings users delight over time, journey mapping is a critical addition to your toolbox. 

We will begin with a short introduction to mapping — why it is so powerful, and why it is so useful in UX. Then we will get familiar with the three most common types of journey map — experience maps, customer journey maps and service blueprints — and how to recognize, read and use each one. Then you will learn how to collect and analyze data as a part of a journey mapping process. Next you will learn how to create each type of journey map , and in the final lesson you will learn how to run a journey mapping workshop that will help to turn your journey mapping insights into actual products and services. 

This course will provide you with practical methods that you can start using immediately in your own design projects, as well as downloadable templates that can give you a head start in your own journey mapping projects. 

The “Build Your Portfolio: Journey Mapping Project” includes three practical exercises where you can practice the methods you learn, solidify your knowledge and if you choose, create a journey mapping case study that you can add to your portfolio to demonstrate your journey mapping skills to future employers, freelance customers and your peers. 

Throughout the course you will learn from four industry experts. 

Indi Young will provide wisdom on how to gather the right data as part of your journey mapping process. She has written two books,  Practical Empathy  and  Mental Models . Currently she conducts live online advanced courses about the importance of pushing the boundaries of your perspective. She was a founder of Adaptive Path, the pioneering UX agency that was an early innovator in journey mapping. 

Kai Wang will walk us through his very practical process for creating a service blueprint, and share how he makes journey mapping a critical part of an organization’s success. Kai is a talented UX pro who has designed complex experiences for companies such as CarMax and CapitalOne. 

Matt Snyder will help us think about journey mapping as a powerful and cost-effective tool for building successful products. He will also teach you how to use a tool called a perspective grid that can help a data-rich journey mapping process go more smoothly. In 2020 Matt left his role as the Sr. Director of Product Design at Lucid Software to become Head of Product & Design at Hivewire. 

Christian Briggs will be your tour guide for this course. He is a Senior Product Designer and Design Educator at the Interaction Design Foundation. He has been designing digital products for many years, and has been using methods like journey mapping for most of those years.  

All open-source articles on Customer Journey Maps

14 ux deliverables: what will i be making as a ux designer.

• 1.2k shares

What are Customer Touchpoints & Why Do They Matter?

• 3 years ago

How to Visualize Your Qualitative User Research Results for Maximum Impact

How to Resolve Conflicts Between Design Thinking and Marketing

How to Create a Perspective Grid

4 Takeaways from the IxDF Journey Mapping Course

• 2 years ago

The Power of Mapping

User Story Mapping in Design

Enhance UX: Top Insights from an IxDF Design Course

• 3 weeks ago

Open Access—Link to us!

We believe in Open Access and the  democratization of knowledge . Unfortunately, world-class educational materials such as this page are normally hidden behind paywalls or in expensive textbooks.

If you want this to change , cite this page , link to us, or join us to help us democratize design knowledge !

Privacy Settings

Our digital services use necessary tracking technologies, including third-party cookies, for security, functionality, and to uphold user rights. Optional cookies offer enhanced features, and analytics.

Experience the full potential of our site that remembers your preferences and supports secure sign-in.

Governs the storage of data necessary for maintaining website security, user authentication, and fraud prevention mechanisms.

Enhanced Functionality

Saves your settings and preferences, like your location, for a more personalized experience.

Referral Program

We use cookies to enable our referral program, giving you and your friends discounts.

Error Reporting

We share user ID with Bugsnag and NewRelic to help us track errors and fix issues.

Optimize your experience by allowing us to monitor site usage. You’ll enjoy a smoother, more personalized journey without compromising your privacy.

Analytics Storage

Collects anonymous data on how you navigate and interact, helping us make informed improvements.

Differentiates real visitors from automated bots, ensuring accurate usage data and improving your website experience.

Lets us tailor your digital ads to match your interests, making them more relevant and useful to you.

Advertising Storage

Stores information for better-targeted advertising, enhancing your online ad experience.

Personalization Storage

Permits storing data to personalize content and ads across Google services based on user behavior, enhancing overall user experience.

Advertising Personalization

Allows for content and ad personalization across Google services based on user behavior. This consent enhances user experiences.

Enables personalizing ads based on user data and interactions, allowing for more relevant advertising experiences across Google services.

Receive more relevant advertisements by sharing your interests and behavior with our trusted advertising partners.

Enables better ad targeting and measurement on Meta platforms, making ads you see more relevant.

Allows for improved ad effectiveness and measurement through Meta’s Conversions API, ensuring privacy-compliant data sharing.

LinkedIn Insights

Tracks conversions, retargeting, and web analytics for LinkedIn ad campaigns, enhancing ad relevance and performance.

LinkedIn CAPI

Enhances LinkedIn advertising through server-side event tracking, offering more accurate measurement and personalization.

Google Ads Tag

Tracks ad performance and user engagement, helping deliver ads that are most useful to you.

Share Knowledge, Get Respect!

or copy link

Cite according to academic standards

Simply copy and paste the text below into your bibliographic reference list, onto your blog, or anywhere else. You can also just hyperlink to this page.

New to UX Design? We’re Giving You a Free ebook!

Download our free ebook The Basics of User Experience Design to learn about core concepts of UX design.

In 9 chapters, we’ll cover: conducting user interviews, design thinking, interaction design, mobile UX design, usability, UX research, and many more!

• Resources Resources Practical advice from the experts Help Center Get support and explore best practices REST API Check out our API docs Case Studies Delighted customer case studies Blog Industry news and guidance Delighted Core Certification Core training & certification for Delighted CX Delighted Admin Certification Admin training & certification Community Get support and explore best practices
• Contact sales
• Get started
• Experience Management 101
• Creating Surveys
• Distributing Surveys
• Reporting & Analysis
• Taking Action

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

Start collecting feedback from customers and employees today

• Free survey maker
• Survey templates
• CX solution
• NPS software
• CSAT software
• Email survey
• Delighted AI
• Testimonials
• Integrations
• What is NPS?
• NPS examples
• NPS calculator
• NPS benchmarks
• What is CSAT?
• What is CES?
• What is product/market fit?
• Employee experience management
• Customer experience metrics
• Sample size calculator
• Surveys Help
• Mobile apps
• Delighted + Qualtrics

© 2013–2024 Delighted, LLC

Security Terms Privacy Cookie Preferences Sitemap

NPS is a registered trademark, and Net Promoter Score is a service mark of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc. and Fred Reichheld.

Root out friction in every digital experience, super-charge conversion rates, and optimize digital self-service

Uncover insights from any interaction, deliver AI-powered agent coaching, and reduce cost to serve

Increase revenue and loyalty with real-time insights and recommendations delivered to teams on the ground

Know how your people feel and empower managers to improve employee engagement, productivity, and retention

Take action in the moments that matter most along the employee journey and drive bottom line growth

Whatever they’re are saying, wherever they’re saying it, know exactly what’s going on with your people

Get faster, richer insights with qual and quant tools that make powerful market research available to everyone

Run concept tests, pricing studies, prototyping + more with fast, powerful studies designed by UX research experts

Track your brand performance 24/7 and act quickly to respond to opportunities and challenges in your market

Explore the platform powering Experience Management

• Free Account
• For Digital
• For Customer Care
• For Human Resources
• For Researchers
• Financial Services
• All Industries

Popular Use Cases

• Customer Experience

Employee Experience

• Net Promoter Score
• Voice of Customer
• Customer Success Hub
• Product Documentation
• Training & Certification
• XM Institute
• Popular Resources
• Customer Stories
• Artificial Intelligence
• Market Research
• Partnerships
• Marketplace

The annual gathering of the experience leaders at the world’s iconic brands building breakthrough business results, live in Salt Lake City.

• English/AU & NZ
• Español/Europa
• Español/América Latina
• Português Brasileiro
• REQUEST DEMO

6 steps to mapping the employee journey at your organization

Close employee experience gaps by mapping your people’s journey with your organization.

In order to master employee experience, you must listen to your people at each stage of their journey with your organization. To do so you first need to map that journey, an easy and impactful exercise that reveals opportunities for improvement and optimization. Here’s how to do it.

eBook: Use Employee Lifecycle Feedback to improve your EX

What is the employee journey?

From the moment someone looks at your careers page to the moment they leave your organization, everything an employee learns, does, sees, and feels is part of the employee journey. The employee journey is a framework used to understand the sum of all the employee's experiences during their time with an organization and it's used by HR to understand and enhance the employee experience.

These moments and milestones (big and small) contribute to their employee experience – and present opportunities to tune in to your employees’ needs, to be more equitable and inclusive , and to close the gaps that exist for employees.

If you want to improve employee experience you need to map the journey your employees go through while they’re employed by your organization.

What is employee journey mapping?

An employee journey map is a visual representation of each stage of an employee's time within an organization from recruitment, through onboarding, right up until the time they leave.

Employee journey mapping enables organizations to prioritize resources and funding, clarify roles, and identify critical moments that matter by visually mapping the various steps and emotional states which employees experience while interacting with the company.

Employee journey mapping allows you to:

• Align the organization on a common view of the actual employee experience.
• Focus the EX program on moments that matter most.
• Facilitate employee-centric thinking and actions.
• Prioritize resources and funding.
• Clarify critical roles within the organization and moments that matter most.

Learn how Southwest Airlines rebuilt its understanding of employee needs along all the moments that matter.

What are the benefits of employee journey mapping?

More and more organizations are looking to capture feedback and insights at every stage of the employee journey. Doing so allows you to understand the moments that matter most, how those moments impact employee experience, and what to do at each stage to have a positive impact on metrics like engagement , attrition , and productivity.

A key benefit of employee journey mapping is to use the insights from the mapping process to design and execute better experiences throughout. You do this by:

• Revealing and optimizing unseen experiences . Journey mapping helps you think about the more hidden aspects of the employee journey.
• Finding out where the employee journey runs smoothly and leveraging what’s working well in other moments of the journey so as to meet employees’ needs at various moments in time.
• Fixing bad experiences more effectively . Journey mapping helps reveal why you haven’t met employee expectations and what you need to do to make amends.
• Identifying opportunities to foster equity and inclusion . There is rarely a single critical point in the employee journey that creates inequity. It’s often the cumulative impact of bias and systemic inequity over many moments that create significant gaps in experience.

Collect and apply employee feedback with our 360-Feedback eBook: Download Now

What are the stages of the employee journey?

Every employee goes through a series of stages from the day they apply for a job right through to the day they leave. This journey can be summarized into five stages:

Stage #1: Recruitment . This includes all the steps that lead to hiring a new employee. Considerations are: how long it takes to hire, how much it costs to hire, the rate of offer acceptance, and the hire’s quality. Were your job postings attractive and clear enough to catch the attention and applications of the best candidates? Did your interview process engage and reassure great candidates so they quickly accepted your job offer?

Stage #2: Onboarding . Where a new hire gets up to speed with the systems, tools, and processes, as well as the role’s expectations. Most new employees need ‘ramp time’ to get up to speed and become productive in their job. An effective onboarding process translates someone’s initial enthusiasm for their new job into a more meaningful, long-term connection to the organization and a commitment to doing great things while they’re there.

Stage #3: Development . This is the ongoing stage in the employee journey, with individuals developing at different rates and across a variety of skills. As the employee develops within his or her role, you need to quantify their productivity, ability to be a team player, and promotion aspirations. You also want to offer them the chance to expand their skill sets, an increasingly important differentiator for many employees looking to have a ‘portfolio career’ consisting of many different experiences.

This stage often includes incremental steps or annual events, like:

• Role changes
• Performance evaluations (e.g., career conversations, training and development)

Stage #4: Retention . Employees are now fully ramped and integrated into the organization. Your challenge then is to keep them performing, developing, and contributing to the company’s success. Plus, to ensure they’re inspired by and connected to the company’s core vision.

While there are countless strategies organizations use to retain talent , programs that support EX can often look like:

• Inclusive parental leave
• Extended leave or sabbaticals
• Celebrating anniversaries and birthdays (or other personal milestones)

Stage #5: Exit . Employees can leave for a whole host of reasons: they may retire, move to another employer, or make a life change. Every employee will leave your company at some stage, and finding out why is an opportunity to improve and develop the employee experience for current and future employees. Those who leave may be more candid about why they’re going as they may feel they have nothing to lose by being brutally honest.

How to design an employee journey map

An employee journey map allows you to plot out every moment that matters and understand what you can do to improve the experience. Here’s how to start building your employee journey map.

Step #1: Segment your employees.

Start by identifying your employee segments, also known as employee personas . Ideally, segments should be based on role, not on demographics like age or gender – you can use the latter to parse out the data later. An engineer, for example, is likely to have a very different experience from someone in your marketing team. Segment employees in this way, rather than demographics like age and gender

Step #2: Establish the journey for each persona.

Now that you know your personas, you can start to map out the interactions they have with the organization from their first contact (usually before they’re hired) all the way through to them eventually leaving. You’ll need to bring in a cross-functional team for input on this, as different teams and departments will likely have different interactions along the way. You may even want to consider looking at the interactions post-exit as in some cases retirees or past employees may come back or have an interaction with the organization later on or act as advocates for the organization.

Step #3: Map feedback and insights to the employee journey.

To truly understand the impact of each interaction on the employee experience, you need to be able to map feedback to each stage in the lifecycle. So for each persona, make sure there is a feedback mechanism attached to each stage in the journey that meets them where they are and provides them with the opportunity to give feedback in the moment – this is much more useful than waiting up to 12 months to ask them about it, as you’ll get the most honest and useful feedback while the experience is still fresh in their mind.

Step #4: Align your measurements at different stages in the employee journey.

It’s likely that different stages in the journey will be managed by different teams, e.g. your recruiting, training, or onboarding teams. In order to link insights across the journey, you need to make sure that everyone agrees on a consistent approach to measurement, whether that’s using a simple metric like eNPS with open-text follow-up questions or a set of core 5-point Likert scale items (e.g., Engagement) that are consistent across each measurement. The key is to have a set of core metrics that are consistent across many of your measurements. Exit and onboarding surveys may still have custom questions unique to those processes, but having a consistent set of items in each measurement allows you to look at connections to see how the experience at one touchpoint impacts the other.

Step #5: Use automation to manage feedback at scale.

Manually sending out a survey every time someone takes a training course, goes for promotion, or interacts with any of the other moments that matter along the journey is a drain on resources. Instead, make sure you integrate your employee experience program with your HRIS and set up triggers to automatically send a request for feedback when an employee hits a certain milestone.

Step #6: Combine the employee journey with your engagement survey.

A lifecycle approach to employee experience doesn’t mean giving up on your employee engagement survey altogether. In fact, the engagement survey should be your cornerstone – but more in-depth view of the state of employee experience and the key drivers that are impacting it either positively or negatively. Many organizations choose to do shorter, more frequent surveys like bi-annual engagement surveys or monthly employee pulse surveys as an alternative to the annual survey. However you run it, it’s essential you connect it to your feedback mechanisms across the lifecycle.

As an example, employee onboarding feedback, on its own, will likely show you how your onboarding process is perceived and what can be improved, but it won’t necessarily show the impact on engagement, productivity, or attrition. When you combine it with your engagement survey (which does measure these things) you can then start to see connections – how did that improvement to onboarding affect engagement for employees in their first year? Did it reduce attrition? Did it promote cross-functional collaboration? Do those employees who went through the new program understand better how their work contributes to the organization’s success?

It’s only by connecting all these different feedback mechanisms that you’ll know the answer.

Learn how to create actionable insights with employee journey analytics

The dos and don'ts of employee journey mapping

Do: look at each phase from multiple angles.

Each stage in the employee journey is different, so it’s important to look at each individually while considering multiple components of the stage. For example, if you just look at a stage from the vantage point of an employee, you may miss important considerations related to current business challenges. In that example, you may have employee feedback on your onboarding process that tells you employees do not feel supported, but that insight becomes much more tangible when you pair that with the knowledge that the onboarding team is currently very short staffed.

Do: Know your end game

An effective employee journey mapping process should always start with clearly defined outcomes. Without them, it’s impossible to know when the journey if complete or how you’ll use it to drive improvements. Here are a few questions to ask yourself up front:

• What does a best-case output of the journey mapping work look like?
• What will this work inform?
• How will it influence people, processes, and tools?
• How will you measure its success?
• What problem are you trying to solve?
• How are you aligning this process and conversation to the metrics that matter and the current business problems in the organization?

Do: Be intentional about who you involve

This can be a tricky balancing act. It’s important to avoid “decision by committee” by involving too many people in your journey mapping session, however it’s essential to ensure those familiar with various steps in the journey are involved as they’ll have the best knowledge of all the components you need to take into account.

Here are a few roles to consider including on your journey mapping exercise:

• Cross-functional HR
• Learning and development representative
• Cross-representation of key employee groups
• Corporate and internal communications
• Business leaders and frontline managers

Do: Focus on key groups within the organization

Within any organization there will be multiple employee journeys — after all one person’s pathway through the organization is likely to be very different from the next person’s. But here is where it’s important to keep the end-game in mind - don’t get lost in small differences, otherwise you risk overcomplicating the process with too many journeys with very minor differences between them.

Think about distinct and significant groups, such as remote versus corporate office workers, where clear differences in experience exist or are already apparent. Take a retail company for example, the experience of your frontline employees in your stores is likely to be very different from that of your marketing team in your corporate office. In contrast it’s unlikely there will be significant differences between different store departments, say menswear and children’s clothing.

Don't: Take a ‘one size fits all’ approach

Don’t feel like you have to use a specific template or format to create your journey map. What is most important is the framework behind what you create – from there, organizations often use whiteboards or large sticky paper to brainstorm their journey maps.

Don't: Allow your journey map to stagnate

As the organization changes — say for example a reorganization occurs or a new succession planning process is put in place — you’ll want to revisit and update your employee journey maps to reflect any significant changes.

Journey maps are a supporting tool for the organization, the frequency with which you update them should be based on how you are utilizing them internally and the extent to which the organization and the roles within it have changed.

Remember - it’s a tool, not a solution

Most importantly, remember that journey maps are just a starting point to help your organization identify the next steps necessary to improving your overall employee experience. Journey maps should be a part of forming a broader employee experience strategy, - the real value and impact will come from the actions the organization takes whether that’s gathering additional feedback or giving people in the organization the tools they need to make improvements at each moment that matters.

Break down silos by combining your listening programs with employee journey analytics

Amanda Wowk

Amanda Wowk is a freelance writer, founder of Amanda Wowk Creative—a content writing services company—and contributor to the Qualtrics blog. She creates content for clients in a variety of industries, including travel, tech startup, healthcare, and consumer products. Prior to freelancing, she spent 9+ years in human resources and HR communications.

Related Articles

March 27, 2024

A timeline of the gender pay gap in the United States

February 21, 2024

6 effective employee engagement programs

January 11, 2024

Top 7 recruitment strategies for 2024

December 11, 2023

How to be a better manager

November 3, 2023

UNLEASH World: Unveiling what’s next in the world of HR

October 31, 2023

Forrester’s employee listening solutions landscape 2023 – Top three takeaways

October 24, 2023

The 5 employee experience trends redefining work in 2024

October 12, 2023

Psychological safety in the workplace

Stay up to date with the latest xm thought leadership, tips and news., request demo.

Ready to learn more about Qualtrics?

Guide to Building a B2B SaaS Customer Journey Map

10 min read

A B2B SaaS customer journey map is key to creating a wholesome product experience for your customers.

To get it right, SaaS companies must step back and see the product from the customer’s viewpoint. Starting from their first point of contact to when they subscribe and eventually become raving fans of your product.

In this piece, we’ll break down what a SaaS customer journey map is all about, its importance, and practical steps for building one that boosts product adoption.

• A SaaS Customer Journey Map refers to the path a customer takes from the moment they discover your product till they become paid users.
• The SaaS customer journey consists of six different stages: awareness, acquisition , adoption , expansion , renewal , and advocacy .
• At the awareness stage, customers are searching for a solution to a problem.
• The acquisition comes when your target audience begins using your tool. Impress users with a seamless onboarding process to win this stage.
• The adoption stage is when users transition into paying customers.
• At the renewal stage, a customer has tried a product and is satisfied enough to renew their subscription.
• Expansion is the stage of upsells and feature upgrades for existing customers. Here, you’re trying to upsell your customer to upgrade to a premium account.
• In the advocacy stage, customers become true fans of your products. They act as referrals, answer questions and eventually, help you with user-generated content.

Steps to build your B2B SaaS customer journey map:

• Establish your company’s goals and align them to the intended customer journey mapping.
• Create your user persona to gather important information about your target audience.
• Identify important customer milestones for the journey you are mapping.
• Analyze existing gaps to uncover gaps that could cause friction
• Continuously collect user feedback and optimize your map for a more accurate result.

What is a SaaS customer journey map?

A SaaS customer journey map is the visual storyline of every interaction a customer has with your company and software. Typically, customer journey maps include touchpoints , emotions, pain points, and actions.

It’s not just about creating a timeline—it’s about encouraging empathy and understanding how customers’ needs and feelings fluctuate throughout their journey. Thanks to this shared understanding, teams can identify opportunities for improvement and innovation.

Why is it important to map your customer journey?

For SaaS companies, the customer journey map unravels the answers to questions about your customers. It shows you what problems they want to be solved and how you can help them.

It also helps you achieve the following:

Understand where customers get stuck and remove friction

A customer journey map helps you identify unhappy paths in the user experience .

Ask yourself: did a customer reach a milestone and get stuck there? For example, did they click on the “create an account” button but never finished the signup process? Identify the friction, and remove it.

Understanding what the next milestone is can help you pinpoint where users get stuck so you can remove friction and improve customer retention.

Enhance customer experience and prevent churn

Instead of generic in-app help, using a customer success journey map can help you anticipate your customer’s next steps to achieve success with your app

This means your communication strategy can focus on micro conversions , driving users to success with in-app guidance , or 1 on 1 help, etc, that’s specific and relevant to where the customer is in the journey.

By offering granular help when and where they need it, you decrease the risk of churn .

You can also monitor engagement to spot inactivity and proactively reach out to users when they show signs of churning. But first, you need to know what to monitor, and a journey map helps you understand that.

Boost customer lifetime value

Knowing where your customers are in the buying process allows you to always recommend upgrades that are contextual and relevant.

So, instead of randomly trying to upsell, with a journey map you’ll know when a customer has reached the point in their journey where an upsell would bring them more value.

Types of SaaS customer journey maps

There are four main types of customer journey maps, which include:

• Current State Map: this is mapped around the present state of the customer in their journey. It takes into consideration the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of the customers while interacting with your product.
• Future state map: this map is developed around predictions or projections of the customer’s experience with your product. It should be mapped after effecting the corrections based on insights gotten with your present state map.
• Day in the life map: this map illustrates your customer’s day-to-day activities outside their interaction with your product. It covers their overall lifestyle including their fun time, work time, etc.
• Empathy map: an empathy map dives deep into the customer’s behavior to create a personalized product experience. With an empathy map , you’ll dig down to the unique actions of your target persona from their own point of view.
• Service blueprint maps: this map accesses other types of maps to identify hidden elements that can disrupt the customer’s journey.
• Circular customer journey maps: this helps you visualize the customer journey in a loop or circle.

Stages in the SaaS customer journey maps

There are six stages involved in the SaaS customer journey, each of which comes with its own touchpoints.

Let’s look at them in detail.

Awareness and Consideration

The SaaS customer journey starts at the awareness stage. Here, your customers are triggered to search for a solution to a problem. It’s also when they first discover and develop an interest in your product through an ad, referral, review, or SERP results.

Think of this stage as an evaluation stage. Your customers are comparing you with competitors and evaluating their options.

Awareness and consideration stage touchpoint examples

• Reviews on review sites like G2, Capterra, etc
• Testimonials on your website
• Search engine result page
• Influencer marketing campaign
• Ads e.g social media ads, Google ads, etc
• Top of the funnel content on blogs
• Social media content
• Whitepapers
• Digital billboards

Here’s an example of a touchpoint of the awareness stage: a paid social media ad from PromoRepublic explaining their product benefits.

Acquisition

Acquisition comes next, after awareness and consideration. At this point in the process, your target audience signs up for a free trial.

Creating a seamless onboarding process is the ultimate way to win over your user at this stage. After all, it determines the first impression a user will have about your product.

Most times, the slightest hiccup here can make a user opt-out before they experience the ‘ aha ‘ moment or reach the adoption stage. This is why SaaS companies must invest in product-led marketing to paint users a picture of what to expect with a product and how it will work for them.

Acquisition stage touchpoint examples

• Free trial or freemium tier
• Demo requests
• Account registration and sign in
• SaaS comparison pages
• Middle-of-funnel blog posts
• Onboarding emails

A seamless onboarding experience can work wonders for how your users see your product, and whether they choose to become paying customers.

When users transition into paying customers, don’t leave them alone to figure things out for themselves. Provide in-app guidance to drive product adoption faster.

Use checklists to help users get quick wins during the customer onboarding process. Tooltips and hotspots are great for describing product features and directing the user on the right path.

Adoption stage touchpoint examples

• In-app notifications
• Video tutorials and webinars
• Virtual customer communities and forums
• Email sequences on more advanced usage of the product
• Self-serve resources, like a knowledge base

As many SaaS products use a subscription model to generate recurring revenue, this stage is a major determinant of whether or not a SaaS company breaks even.

This stage is especially important at the end of a free trial since this isn’t a subscription renewal , but the first purchase from your user.

To hit this stage, dig into your customer data to uncover what makes customers hesitate in their customer journeys. Then implement customer retention strategies to keep them.

Renewal stage touchpoint examples

• Sales calls (b2b SaaS pre-purchase)
• Educational and promotional emails (pre-purchase)
• In-app notifications and surveys (pre-purchase)

• Subscription purchase screen (moment of purchase)
• Account and billing features (post-purchase)

Expansion is the stage of upsells and feature upgrades for current customers. At this stage, you’re trying to achieve revenue growth without acquiring new customers.

An example of an upsell in SaaS is the tiered pricing model. Most SaaS companies offer multiple features—as part of different packages—to entice customers to opt for a more expensive plan.

It could also be getting them to increase the number of seats or users for products that come with a per-user charge.

To drive account expansion, start with a problem compass. Understand your users’ challenges and align your expansion strategy with their journey.

At this stage, you’ve unlocked the true fans of your products.

Because of how complex the SaaS customer journey is, advocacy can happen at any point of the customer lifecycle . Someone could be an avid reader of your company’s blog, fall in love with the content, and recommend your product—all without ever using it.

The probability of advocacy happening is higher with companies that have a product-led strategy. People have a first-hand experience with your product and see it in action without paying upfront.

Advocacy is better done by your customers; they act as referrals, answer prospect questions on your behalf, and eventually help you with user-generated content.

Advocacy stage touchpoint examples

• Social sharing
• Referral and loyalty programs
• Reviews and testimonials

Steps to build your B2B SaaS customer journey map

Building a customer journey map sounds simple, but how exactly can we build one that works?

Here are five steps to creating a successful SaaS customer journey map:

• Establish your company’s goals and objectives.
• Create and describe your target personas.
• Determine customer milestones and touchpoints for the journey stages you are mapping.
• Analyze gaps between existing strategies and expectations.
• Constantly improve and optimize your map.

Establish your company’s goals and objectives

Every product decision, campaign or strategy you come up with, should be in line with your company’s overall goals.

With that in mind, consider the final results you’ll like to get from the intended customer journey mapping.

In doing this, factor in the type of product you offer, the industry you play in, trends, and your customer insights. All of these will help you determine if the goals you set are realistic.

Here are some examples of objectives you may want to achieve with journey mapping:

• Generating more leads
• Increased conversion rate
• Reduced customer complaints
• Relaunching of brand messaging
• New feature or product update
• Shortened customer onboarding process

Create and describe your target personas

Your user persona is a fictitious representation of a subset of your target audience. This is based on factors like demographics, behavior, lifestyle, and more.

There is a multitude of ways to collect the information needed to create personas , and one of them is through in-app microsurveys .

Take note of your target audience. Are they the decision-makers or end-users? This way, you’ll know exactly who to design for. For instance, your end-users might be the social media team. Meanwhile, the decision-makers could be the marketing lead.

Determine customer milestones and touchpoints for the journey stages you are mapping

What are the main goals? What does the customer want to achieve, and what should they do to get to that stage?

Lincoln Murphy defines success milestones as “functional milestones within the product, but they won’t just be an activity for activity’s sake”.

They must be the result of meaningful activity and should be tied to other inputs to ensure that the customer is achieving the “desired outcome”.

For example, in a social media app, creating a new post is a functional milestone. So is reaching the activation point in SaaS. The point is, customers must engage with specific features to achieve this.

Analyze gaps between existing strategies and expectations

Finally, you need to determine what customers expect from each touchpoint, as well as how your company is currently performing.

For instance, your customers may expect advance notice and a seamless renewal process at the billing touchpoint. But what your company provides is a three-day notice, and it requires several manual steps to renew.

You can also check customer tickets and reviews for hidden clues. Likewise, you can collect feedback at multiple touchpoints with in-app surveys to listen to what your customers have to say.

Constantly improve and optimize your map

SaaS customer journey mapping is not a once-and-done deal. You need to continually update the information you’ve collected and iterate designs as you go. This way, your customers will have a better experience with your product.

Using product adoption tools like Userpilot can help you set specific goals. You can also add your milestones as your main goals.

Track in-app customer behavior and see where users get stuck and drop off in the journey and optimize the low-converting touchpoints.

By mapping the customer journey and carefully optimizing the critical touchpoints, you’re setting your product up for success.

And if you need a tool to build better product experiences without coding, sign up for a Userpilot demo to get started.

Leave a comment Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Get The Insights!

The fastest way to learn about Product Growth,Management & Trends.

The coolest way to learn about Product Growth, Management & Trends. Delivered fresh to your inbox, weekly.

The fastest way to learn about Product Growth, Management & Trends.

You might also be interested in ...

Salesforce is closed for new business in your area.

Money blog: UK's best pub chef shares amazing cheap pasta recipe; beach-goers face £1,000 fine for taking pebbles

For the latest instalment of our Cheap Eats series, we speak to Dave Wall, head chef at the UK's number one gastropub, The Unruly Pig in Suffolk. Read this and the rest of today's consumer and personal finance news in the Money blog below, and leave your thoughts in the comments box.

Wednesday 29 May 2024 06:48, UK

• Beach-goers warned they face £1,000 fine if they take pebbles
• Average amount spent on holiday revealed - and it's higher than two years ago
• UK has highest diesel prices in Europe
• Raheem Sterling to pay for 14 people to go to university and applications close this Thursday

Essential reads

• Best pub chef in UK shares amazing cheap pasta recipe  
• Women in Business : 'A truck unloaded a £600 car that her son bought on eBay thinking it was a toy' - the schoolgate stories that led to GoHenry
• Money Problem : 'My mortgage lender is ending my two-year fix and I haven't been in the house for two years - can they do this?'
• Best of the Money blog - an archive

Ask a question or make a comment

Every Wednesday we ask Michelin chefs to pick their favourite Cheap Eats where they live and when they cook at home. This week we speak to Dave Wall, head chef at the UK's number one ranked gastropub, The Unruly Pig in Suffolk.

Hi Dave , c an you tell us your favourite places in Suffolk  where you can get a meal for two for less than £40?

Honey + Harvey . A cracking spot for breakfast, brunch or lunch. They have the most delicious coffee and a cracking full English, the vibe is super-chilled and laidback and I always feel so relaxed there.

Lark . A beautiful little independent restaurant in Bury St Edmunds with the most incredible selection of small plates and top-drawer cooking. Admittedly, I find myself spending a fair bit more than £40 at Lark because I love James Carn's cooking so much that I end up going way over the top and ordering far too many dishes.

What's your go-to cheap meal at home?

Anchovy pasta is one. I get that anchovy is often considered a Marmite ingredient. I love them, but if you are in the "hate" camp, then please bear with me, as I want to persuade you to give these versatile little wonders a second look (and perhaps not tar all anchovies with the same brush).

My recipe below uses both brown and brined anchovies. It is an easier but still utterly delicious version of the dish I've served at The Unruly Pig (which also comes with an oyster velouté). This is comfort food at its best. Buon appetito!

• 250g butter
• 70g brown anchovies (ideally Cantabrian)
• 1 clove garlic
• 30g double cream
• 25g of brined anchovies

Add all the ingredients to a pan. Bring to a slow simmer on a low heat. Once the mixture starts to boil, remove, and transfer to blender. Blend for two minutes until the mixture is well emulsified. Set aside.

Pangrattato

Three bread slices, crusts removed (staler the better)

• 1 garlic clove
• 1 lemon zest
• Pinch salt & pepper

Blend all the ingredients in food processor, making sure the crumb is fine. On a low heat, gently toast the crumbs until they become golden.

• 125 g of fresh spaghetti per person
• Grated Parmesan, brined anchovy, celery leaf to garnish 

Gently the cook the pasta in simmering boiling water, add plenty of salt to the pasta water so it tastes like sea water. Cook for 1-2 minutes - or to instructions if using dried.

Bring it all together

Meanwhile, gently heat the anchovy pasta sauce in a large pan so it becomes warm. Be careful not to boil. Once the pasta is cooked, gently remove and put it straight in to the warmed anchovy sauce. Add a splash of the pasta water to retain some of the starch (as this will help thicken your sauce).

Gently cook the pasta in the anchovy sauce until it becomes thick and creamy, and the sauce coats the pasta. Serve into a bowl and add the Parmesan, fresh anchovies and celery leaf on top.

Generously sprinkle the pasta with the golden pangrattato to add a wonderful texture and crunch.

We've spoken to lots of top chefs and bloggers - check out their cheap eats from around the country here...

Beach-goers in Cumbria have been warned they could face a fine of up to £1,000 if they remove pebbles or shells across the area.

Cumberland Council has told visitors it is unlawful to take natural materials such as sand, shells and pebbles from the beach under the Coast Protection Act.

Cumberland councillor Bob Kelly said it was important to "ensure that our beaches remain vibrant and intact for future generations".

"I understand people's reluctance to follow this guidance, as I have been a collector of shells myself. But taking a pebble or a shell from a beach can in fact damage the environment," he said.

"Pebbles and other natural matter act as a natural sea defence against coastal erosion, natural flood defences and wildlife habitats, which many experts warn has become even more of an issue due to climate change."

People are spending more on holiday than they were two years ago, the latest data from ABTA Travel Money has shown. 

On average, UK travellers are spending £369 each during a short break abroad - up more than £59 since 2022. 

For a longer break, the typical amount rises to £660, which is up £231 a person since 2022. 

Families with children over five are likely to spend the most while on a short holiday, totalling £431.

But the highest spend comes from travellers aged 55-64, who spend an average of £721.  

"People are spending more while on holiday overseas and that can't just be put down to inflation," Graeme Buck, director of communications for ABTA Travel Money, said. 

"Over the past two years, UK prices have risen by a total of 9.3% whereas overseas holiday spend is up by 54% for a longer holiday.

"Add in more favourable exchange rates for many holiday destinations, we see over the last few years that there has been a clear shift towards people spending the spare money they may have on holidays and creating memories that will last a lifetime." 

Visitors to all Euro currency destinations this summer will see a little more for their money, as the pound has increased against the Euro (up 2.1%). 

The UK has the highest diesel prices in Europe, according to new analysis.

The RAC, which carried out the research, found the average price of a litre of diesel at UK forecourts is 155p - 5p more than Ireland and Belgium.

Although duty on both petrol and diesel was cut from 57.95p to 52.95p in spring 2022, the UK still has the highest rate of duty on diesel in Europe alongside Italy, but Italy's average pump price is 7p per litre cheaper at 148p.

France's duty rate is the equivalent of just 1p per litre lower than in the UK, but its average price for diesel is 9p per litre cheaper at 146p.

The analysis is based on figures from the European Commission and the UK's Competition and Markets Authority.

Simon Williams, fuel spokesman for the RAC, said: "Having the most expensive diesel in Europe despite the current 5p duty cut is a very dubious honour."

Despite the RAC bringing the issue to the attention of energy secretary Claire Coutinho in a letter just over a week ago, he said, "the price of diesel at the pump has barely fallen".

"We can see no good reason why retailers in Great Britain aren't cutting their prices at the pumps," he added.

Thieves are targeting electric car charging cables in the latest spate of car crimes.

Data from Instavolt, the UK's largest operator of rapid chargers, found gangs had targeted 27 sites in Yorkshire and the Midlands since last November and stolen 174 cables.

With each cable costing at least £1,000, the operator, which runs Osprey Charging and BP Pulse, said this was affecting electric vehicle drivers.

It also risked deterring prospective drivers who wanted to make the move to electric cars, they said.

The company is now introducing a range of measures at charging stations to deter thieves, including installing extra CCTV, security patrols, using SmartWater to tag property and tracking devices.

Instavolt CEO Delvin Lane told Autocar : "These thefts are extremely frustrating for our customers and for us."

He also noted that it was a "misconception" that the copper in chargers brought real financial gain. 

"The value of any metal stolen is insignificant. The thefts just cause disruption to EV drivers - including those in the emergency services - looking to charge their vehicles," he said.

By Sarah Taaffe-Maguire , business reporter

A company that makes microchips for artificial intelligence and became the first chipmaker to be worth first $1trn then $2trn has today reached another record high.

Nvidia shares are now going for a record $1,132.19 after it posted higher-than-expected quarterly profits and made strong forecasts. Its value is now $2.62trn (£2.05trn)

The US-based, New York-listed company is in the ranks of tech giants worth the eye-watering trillion sum, including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google parent company Alphabet, as investors expect the company will benefit from the AI revolution.

Also making headlines was UK company Boohoo, the Manchester-based fast fashion retailer, as it cancelled annual bonuses worth £3m. 

A pay proposal for bosses was also ditched after talks with shareholders as the company has experienced losses after the pandemic-era online shopping boom faded and a cost of living crisis eroded consumer spending power.

Revolution Bars has rejected a proposed offer from rival Nightcap, warning it is "incapable of being delivered".

The hospitality group launched a sale process and restructuring plans last month amid efforts to stay afloat. The company's restructuring plans include £12.5m in fundraising and the closure of 18 venues.

But Revolution has said the non-binding proposal from Nightcap  did not include the proposed fundraising and would not work as it was "highly conditional".

Read the full story here ...

The rate of price rises in UK shops has returned to "normal levels", according to new industry figures.

Overall annual shop inflation eased to 0.6% in May, down from 0.8% in April, the British Retail Consortium (BRC) and NielsenIQ said.

The figure is the lowest since November 2021.

More than 120 business leaders have written an open letter giving their backing to Labour in the general election.

The letter printed in The Times has been signed by figures including the founders of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales, chef Tom Kerridge and former CEOs of Heathrow, JP Morgan and Aston Martin.

Openreach plans to build full fibre broadband in over 500 more locations across the UK, it has been announced.

The new locations include 400,000 sites in the hardest to reach, most rural parts of the country, including Tobermory in Argyll and Bute, Haworth in West Yorkshire, Saundersfoot in South Wales, Pinxton in Derbyshire, Harlow in Essex and Roborough in Devon.

The work, which is part of Openreach's £15bn project to upgrade the UK's broadband infrastructure, will cover a further 2.7 million homes and businesses by the end of 2026.

Clive Selley, chief executive of Openreach, said the plan was to build right across the UK, "from cities and towns to far-flung farms and island communities".

"Over time, we've learnt to deliver predictably, consistently and at a rapid pace - despite this being a hugely complex national engineering project," he said.

Check your full fibre availability here .

London is officially the world's cleverest city, according to an annual study.

Oxford Economics , an independent economic advisory firm, found the capital topped the list when it came to "human capital" - this encompasses the collective knowledge and skills of a city's population.

In its report, the firm found London came out on top in part due to the number of higher education institutions in the city, "which helps it achieve one of the highest rates of educational attainment in the world".

"London also attracts many highly educated people from abroad and several global corporations are headquartered in the city to take advantage of this world-class talent pool," the report added.

In second place was Tokyo and in third place was Riyadh.

Top cities by human capital score: 

1. London, UK

2. Tokyo, Japan

3. Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

4. New York, US

5. Seoul, South Korea

6. Paris, France

7. Washington, DC, US

8. Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

9. Sydney, Australia

10. Boston, US

Concerns are being raised as fast fashion retailer Shein has its sights set on a London stock market listing.

Our City editor Mark Kleinman previously reported the fast fashion giant had held talks with the London Stock Exchange about staging a blockbuster public listing in the UK. 

Shein has quickly become one of the world's biggest online clothing retailers and the talks came at a time of crisis for the City as a listing venue for large multinationals.

But senior MPs are calling for more scrutiny of the Chinese company, which sells ultra-cheap clothing and has faced allegations of labour malpractices. 

Alicia Kearns, the Conservative chair of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, wrote on X: "With Shein's prices so low, the London Stock Exchange needs to ask itself, whose suffering is subsiding those prices?

"A company which has failed to make full disclosures about its supply chains as required by UK law, and where there are grave concerns about its factory working conditions, has no place in London."

Sarah Champion, the Labour chair of the International Development Committee, told The Guardian: "Transparency in supply chains is vital and something all governments should be demanding. Serious concerns have been raised about the use of modern slavery by Shein which need investigating."

A Shein spokesperson told the Money blog that it acknowledged its role in "creating a more sustainable and responsible fashion industry" and "believed it was healthy to attract scrutiny and transparency" and "wanted to be held to the highest standards".

"Shein has a zero-tolerance policy for forced labour and we are committed to respecting human rights," they said in a statement.

"We take visibility across our entire supply chain seriously and we require our contract manufacturers to only source cotton from approved regions."

The company also said it was "investing millions of pounds in strengthening governance and compliance across its supply chain".

"Our regular supplier audits are showing a consistent improvement in performance and compliance by our supplier partners. This includes improvements in ensuring that workers are compensated fairly for what they do," they added.

Be the first to get Breaking News

Install the Sky News app for free

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• My Account Login
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts
• Open access
• Published: 23 May 2024

Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics analysis of non-small cell lung cancer

• Marco De Zuani   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1230-2714 1 , 2 , 3 , 4   na1 ,
• Haoliang Xue   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1264-5303 1 , 2 , 3 , 4   na1 ,
• Jun Sung Park   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7149-6769 1 , 2 , 5 ,
• Stefan C. Dentro 5 , 6 ,
• Zaira Seferbekova   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3131-3697 5 ,
• Julien Tessier 7 ,
• Sandra Curras-Alonso 8 ,
• Angela Hadjipanayis 7 ,
• Emmanouil I. Athanasiadis   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2771-5562 2 , 9 ,
• Moritz Gerstung 2 , 5 , 6 ,
• Omer Bayraktar   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6055-277X 1 , 2 &
• Ana Cvejic   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3204-9311 1 , 2 , 3 , 10  

Nature Communications volume  15 , Article number:  4388 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

21 Altmetric

Metrics details

• Non-small-cell lung cancer
• Tumour immunology

Lung cancer is the second most frequently diagnosed cancer and the leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide. Tumour ecosystems feature diverse immune cell types. Myeloid cells, in particular, are prevalent and have a well-established role in promoting the disease. In our study, we profile approximately 900,000 cells from 25 treatment-naive patients with adenocarcinoma and squamous-cell carcinoma by single-cell and spatial transcriptomics. We note an inverse relationship between anti-inflammatory macrophages and NK cells/T cells, and with reduced NK cell cytotoxicity within the tumour. While we observe a similar cell type composition in both adenocarcinoma and squamous-cell carcinoma, we detect significant differences in the co-expression of various immune checkpoint inhibitors. Moreover, we reveal evidence of a transcriptional “reprogramming” of macrophages in tumours, shifting them towards cholesterol export and adopting a foetal-like transcriptional signature which promotes iron efflux. Our multi-omic resource offers a high-resolution molecular map of tumour-associated macrophages, enhancing our understanding of their role within the tumour microenvironment.

Similar content being viewed by others

Single-cell RNA sequencing demonstrates the molecular and cellular reprogramming of metastatic lung adenocarcinoma

Single-cell RNA sequencing reveals distinct tumor microenvironmental patterns in lung adenocarcinoma

Systematic dissection of tumor-normal single-cell ecosystems across a thousand tumors of 30 cancer types

Introduction.

Lung cancer is the second most commonly diagnosed cancer and the first cause of cancer death worldwide 1 , with a 5-year survival of ~6% in patients with the most advanced stages 2 . Non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is the most common type of lung cancer (~85% of total cases), followed by small-cell lung cancer (15% of total cases) 3 . Lung cancer is a complex disease in which the tumour microenvironment plays a critical role and macrophages (Mɸ) are intimately involved in the progression of the disease. In particular, tumour-associated Mɸ (TAMs) can exhibit a dual role, contributing to tumour promotion by suppressing the immune response, facilitating angiogenesis, and aiding in tissue remodelling, but also tumour suppression by promoting inflammation and engaging in cytotoxic activity against cancer cells 4 , 5 . The intricate interplay between lung cancer and Mɸ highlights the importance of understanding their dynamic relationship in order to develop more effective therapeutic strategies.

Within NSCLC, adenocarcinoma (LUAD) is the most common histological subtype, followed by squamous-cell carcinoma (LUSC). Lobectomy (i.e., the anatomical resection of a lung lobe) is currently the gold standard for the treatment of early stages of NSCLC (stage I/II), while patients with unresectable stage III or metastatic stage IV NSCLC are treated with a combination of chemotherapy and neoadjuvant targeting vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) or immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) like PD1, PDL1 and CTLA4. Advancements made in the last decade in uncovering predictive biomarkers have paved the way for novel therapeutic prospects in the fields of targeted therapy and immunotherapy on the basis of tumour histology and PDL1 expression 6 .

A number of studies have employed single-cell technologies to explore transcriptional changes in NSCLC 7 , 8 , 9 . They have extensively examined the lung tumour microenvironment revealing diverse T-cell functions linked to patient prognosis, relevance of diversity of B cells in NSCLC for anti-tumour therapy, multiple states of tumour-infiltrating myeloid cells, proposing them as a new target in immunotherapy, as well as the association of tissue-resident neutrophils with anti-PDL1 therapy failure 7 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 . They further unveiled tumour heterogeneity and cellular changes in advanced and metastatic tumours 8 , 9 as well as tumour therapy-induced transition of cancer cells to a primitive cell state 15 . In many of these studies, a limited number of cells was analysed per patient, and often there was no systematic collection of patient-matched non-tumour tissue, thus restricting dissection of the biological heterogeneity within tumour and adjacent non-tumour tissue. Additionally, with some exceptions 9 , 14 , LUAD and LUSC were considered as a single entity thus hindering the investigation of specific hallmarks of the two cancer types which are radically distinct both at the molecular and pathological level. While single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) can identify cell types and their states at high resolution within tissues, it lacks the capability to pinpoint their spatial distribution or capture the local cell–cell interactions as well as ligands and receptors that mediate these interactions. Therefore, impeding our ability to fully explore the tumour microenvironment (TME) and the complexity of cell–cell interactions therein.

To overcome above mentioned limitations, we combined scRNA-seq data from nearly 900,000 cells from 25 treatment-naive patients with LUAD or LUSC and spatial transcriptomics from eight patients to investigate the differences in cellular organisation in tumour and adjacent non-tumour tissue. We further examined Mɸ populations and molecular changes they undergo in the tumour environment, some of which resemble those observed in Mɸ during human foetal development.

ScRNA-seq and spatial atlas of NSCLC samples

To determine the heterogeneity of immune and non-immune cellular states and their spatial landscape in LUAD and LUSC, we collected lung tissue resections from 25 treatment-naive patients with either LUAD ( n  = 13), LUSC ( n  = 8) or undetermined lung cancer (LC, n  = 4), and two healthy deceased donors (Fig.  1A, B and Supplementary Data  1 ). We collected both tumour and matched normal non-tumorigenic tissue (i.e., background), isolated CD45+ immune cells (Supplementary Fig.  1A ) as well as tumour and other non-immune populations (using CD235a column to deplete erythroid cells), and performed scRNA-seq. In addition, tumour and background tissue sections from eight patients (of the aforementioned 25) were processed for spatial transcriptomics using the 10x Genomics Visium platform ( n  = 36 sections in total) (Fig.  1A and Supplementary Data  1 ).

A Study overview. Single-cell suspensions of resected tumour tissue, adjacent non-involved tissue (background) and healthy lung from deceased donors were enriched for CD45+ or CD235− and subjected to scRNA-seq. Cryosections of fresh, flash-frozen tumour, background and healthy tissues were used for 10x Visium spatial transcriptomics. B Cohort overview. Symbols represent individual patients and performed analyses. C UMAP projection of tumour and combined background+healthy datasets. D Dotplot of representative genes used for broad cell-type annotations in tumour samples. E Contour plot showing the co-expression of myeloid ( LYZ, CD68, MRC1 ) and epithelial ( EPCAM ) genes in AT2 cells (44,399 cells), CAMLs (2520 cells) and AIMɸ (16,120 cells). Normalised, scaled and log-transformed gene expression. F Boxplot showing normalised, scaled and log-transformed gene expression of myeloid ( LYZ, APOE, CD68, MRC1 ) and epithelial ( EPCAM, KRT8, KRT19 ) genes in AT2 cells, CAMLs and AIMɸ. Boxes: quartiles. Whiskers: 1.5× interquartile range. G Relative proportion of non-immune cell subsets in tumour and background, calculated within the CD235− enrichment. Arrows indicate increase (↑) or decrease (↓) in tumour versus background. Pairwise comparisons by two-sided Wilcoxon rank test and Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons. ** P  < 0.01. Arrows without asterisks indicate that the cell type was found only in tumour or background. H Relative proportion of broad immune cells in tumour and background, calculated within all immune cells identified in the CD235- enrichment. Arrows indicate an increase (↑) or decrease (↓) in tumour versus background. Pairwise comparisons by two-sided Wilcoxon rank test and Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons. * P  < 0.05, ** P  < 0.01, *** P  < 0.001. Arrows without asterisks indicate that the cell type was found only in tumour or background. I Relative proportion of NK, DC, B, T and macrophage subsets within the broad annotations in tumour and background, calculated within the CD235- enrichment. Arrows indicate increase (↑) or decrease (↓) in tumour versus background. Pairwise comparisons by two-sided Wilcoxon rank test and Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons. *** P  < 0.001. Arrows without asterisks indicate that the cell type was found only in tumour or background.

Tumours exhibit a higher diversity of immune and non-immune cells compared to adjacent lung tissue

Following quality control (QC) on the scRNA-seq dataset, we identified 895,806 high-quality cells in total, of which 503,549 were from tumour and 392,257 from combined background and healthy tissue (from here on referred to as B/H). After performing normalisation and log1p transformation, highly-variable gene selection, dimensionality reduction, batch correction, and Leiden clustering, cells originating from tumour and B/H were separately annotated into distinct broad cell types and visualised via Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) (Fig.  1C , Supplementary Fig.  1B, C , and “Methods”). We identified clusters of myeloid cells with transcriptional signatures of monocytes, macrophages, dendritic cells (DCs), as well as mast cells, natural killer (NK) cells, T cells, B cells and non-immune cells (Fig.  1C, D ). We did not detect neutrophilic granulocytes, most probably due to their sensitivity to degradation after collection and in particular to the freezing-thawing cycle. Finally, we identified a cluster characterised by the co-expression of myeloid ( LYZ, CD68, CD14, MRC1 ) and epithelial genes ( KRT19, EPCAM ) (Fig.  1D–F ). These cells were found within the tumour and exhibited similarities to previously described cancer-associated macrophage-like cells (CAMLs) 16 , 17 , 18 . CAMLs represent a distinct population of large myeloid cells with concomitant epithelial tumour protein expression 19 . These unique cells have been observed in blood samples of patients with various malignancies, including NSCLC 20 . The abundance of CAMLs exhibits a direct correlation with response to therapeutic interventions, highlighting their functional significance 21 . Even after further subclustering, CAMLs maintained their distinct dual myeloid-epithelial signature (Supplementary Fig.  1D ). It is noteworthy that doublet detection software Scrublet assigned a low doublet score to CAMLs, suggesting their expression profile is unlikely to be explained as a combined signature arising from the coincidental sequencing of a tumour cell and a macrophage (Supplementary Fig.  1E ). All clusters included cells from multiple patients, with the cluster size ranging from 2520 to 124,459 cells (Supplementary Fig.  1F, G ). Furthermore, we conducted reference-query mapping using scArches 22 to confirm the consistency of our annotations in the tumour and B/H dataset (Supplementary Fig.  2A–C and Supplementary Notes ).

The composition of the immune and non-immune compartment was markedly different between the tumour and background. In the tumour, we detected fibroblasts and a decrease in the fraction of lymphatic endothelial cells (LECs) ( P adj  = 0.0025, Fig.  1G and Supplementary Data  2 ). Furthermore, the population of epithelial cells showed higher diversity, with the presence of alveolar type II (AT2), atypical epithelial cells which downregulated epithelial markers ( KRT19 , EPCAM , CDH1 ), transitioning epithelial cells which upregulated myeloid markers ( LYZ ), and cycling epithelial cells in tumour tissues (Fig.  1G , Supplementary Notes , and Supplementary Fig.  2D, E ). These differences are in agreement with the fact that in tumour specimens, epithelial cells are likely to be a mixture of mutant tumour and non-mutant normal cells, and suggest that neoplastic transformation leads to further diversity of cell states. We did not detect alveolar type I (AT1) or basal cells, possibly due to their loss during dissociations, as previously reported by others 8 .

As previously reported, the proportion of monocytes and immature myeloid cells was significantly reduced in tumour samples compared to background ( P adj = 0.022 and P adj  = 0.00001, respectively) 7 , while DCs and B cells were overall expanded 7 ( P adj = 0.0023 and P adj  = 0.0044, respectively; Fig.  1H and Supplementary Data  3 ). To get further insight into the cellular composition of tumour versus background tissue, we subclustered each of the broad clusters and identified 46 cell types/states (Supplementary Fig.  2D, E , Supplementary Data  4 and 5 , Supplementary Fig.  3 , and Supplementary Notes ). In the tumour, we found that a significantly higher proportion of NK cells had a lower cytotoxicity phenotype ( Supplementary Notes ), and that the significant majority of DCs were derived from monocytes (i.e., mo-DC2), ( Supplementary Notes ) compared to background ( P adj = 0.00002 and P adj  = 0.00002, respectively, Fig.  1I and Supplementary Data  6 ). This is consistent with the monocytic origin of mo-DC2s under inflammatory conditions 23 . Similarly, we found an expansion of B cells expressing LYZ and TNF , and depletion of NKB cells (Fig.  1I and Supplementary Notes ). Among T cells, tumour samples showed an accumulation of regulatory T cells (Tregs), known to hinder the immune surveillance of tumours 24 (Fig.  1I ). Conversely, there was a reduction of exhausted cytotoxic T cells ( P adj  = 0.00002) in the tumour and absence of \(\gamma \delta\) T cells, which have been associated with survival in NSCLC 25 (Fig.  1I and Supplementary Data  6 ). \(\gamma \delta\) T cells are capable of recognising and lysing diverse ranges of cancer cells, and thus have been suggested for a role in pan-cancer immunotherapy 26 . Finally, we saw an increase in heterogeneity and proportion of anti-inflammatory Mɸ (AIMɸ), with a subset of cycling anti-inflammatory Mɸ, STAB1  + Mɸ (Fig.  1I ) and CAMLs (Fig.  1H ) being abundantly present in tumour tissue. Interestingly, we found a strong negative correlation between the frequency of STAB1  + Mɸ/AIMɸ and T/NK cells across patients, highlighting the key role of Mɸ in restraining the infiltration of cytotoxic cells in the lung tumour tissue (Fig.  2A ). This is in line with a recent work describing that monocyte-derived Mɸ in human NSCLC acquire an immunosuppressive phenotype and restrain the infiltration of NK cells 27 .

A Heatmap showing the Pearson correlation between the relative cell-type abundance for each immune cell type (calculated within the CD235− enrichment). Colour indicates the Pearson correlation value, asterisks indicate the level of significance of the two-sided association test computed on Pearson’s product-moment correlation coefficients (* P  < 0.05, ** P  < 0.01, *** P  < 0.001). B Heatmap showing the number of LR interactions between all cell types summarised by broad cell annotations in LUAD (left) and LUSC (right). Rows were hierarchically clustered using the complete linkage method on euclidean distances. C Sankey diagram showing the tumour-specific interactions in LUAD and LUSC for selected ICIs detected by cellphoneDB. Line colour identifies whether the LR interaction between each cell type was found in LUAD only (orange), in LUSC only (green) or in both tumour types (blue). D Dotplot for the ICI genes and cell types highlighted in ( C ), split by tumour type. The size of each dot represents the percentage of cells in the cluster expressing the gene, while the colour represents the mean normalised scaled log-transformed expression of each gene in each group. E Sankey diagram showing the tumour-specific interactions in LUAD and LUSC for VEGFA/B interactors detected by cellphoneDB. Line colour identifies whether the LR interaction between each cell type was found in LUAD only (orange), in LUSC only (green) or in both tumours (blue). F Sankey diagram showing the tumour-specific interactions in LUAD and LUSC for EGFR interactors detected by cellphoneDB. Line colour identifies whether the LR interaction between each cell type was found in LUAD only (orange), in LUSC only (green) or in both tumours (blue).

LUAD and LUSC have similar cellular composition but utilise different cell–cell interaction networks

LUAD and LUSC have very different prognoses and are often considered as different clinical entities 28 . To examine if differences in clinical features stem from distinct cellular composition, we compared the frequency of immune and non-immune cell subsets within CD235- samples from LUAD versus LUSC patients. We observed minor differences in cell frequency that did not reach statistical significance after P value correction (Supplementary Fig.  4A and Supplementary Data  7 and 8 ). Furthermore, there was no clear association between the frequency of immune and non-immune cells observed in patients and the cancer subtype, cancer stage or sex (Supplementary Fig.  4B, C ), suggesting that the TME composition is rather similar in LUAD and LUSC. While LUAD and LUSC shared similar cellular compositions, the observed clinical distinctions may arise from varying intercellular interactions. Therefore, we examined whether different cell–cell interaction networks were employed within the TME in LUAD versus LUSC. To this end, we identified a putative list of cell–cell interactions exclusively observed in each tumour type environment by inferring statistically significant ligand–receptor pairs (L–Rs) that were not detected in background or healthy and their corresponding cell types, using CellPhoneDB 29 . Although the two tumour subtypes showed a similar interaction network that mostly involved interactions between non-immune cells, AIMɸ and T cells (Fig.  2B ), there were also some notable differences.

First, we identified overall a higher number of L–Rs in the LUAD dataset (Supplementary Fig.  4D and Supplementary Data  9 – 12 ), which was not driven by a difference in the number of cells in the LUAD ( n  = 105,749 cells) vs LUSC ( n  = 230,066 cells) dataset. Secondly, several pairs of immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI) and their respective inhibitory molecules were differentially co-expressed in LUAD versus LUSC (Fig.  2C, D ). For example, LGALS9-HAVCR2 (TIM3), NECTIN2-CD226 (DNAM1) and NECTIN2/NECTIN3-TIGIT were frequently identified in LUAD, and the putative ICI CD96-NECTIN1 was found preferentially in LUSC (Fig.  2C, D ). In contrast, CD80/CD86-CTLA4 and HLAF-LILRB1/2 were found in both tumour subtypes (Fig.  2C, D ). LILRBs (leucocyte Ig-like receptors) are emerging as potential targets for next-generation immunotherapeutics as their blocking can potentiate immune responses 30 . The most commonly used immunotherapies for lung cancer block the interaction between PD1 and PDL1, and recent clinical trials suggested that anti-CTLA4 and anti-PD1 combination therapy improved the survival of patients independent of tumour PD1 expression 31 , 32 . Within our dataset, we did not observe PD1-PDL1 interactions in either of the tumour subtypes (Fig.  2C, D ). Our initial analysis suggests that other ICIs (such as CTLA4, TIGIT, LILRB1/2 and TIM3) might be promising targets in the treatment of NSCLC.

Of the significant L–Rs detected in both LUAD and LUSC we noted several pairs involved in angiogenic signalling in different populations of myeloid cells such as VEGFA/B-FLT1, VEGFA-KDR and VEGFA-NRP1/2 . Although VEGFA and VEGFB were found to be expressed in both LUAD and LUSC, their receptors were more frequently found in LUAD, especially in fibroblasts (Fig.  2E and Supplementary Fig.  4E ). Similarly, we observed significant expression of EGFR ligands signalling in AT2 and cycling epithelial cells, such as EGFR-EREG , EGFR-AREG , EGFR-HBEGF and EGFR-MIF , although MIF expression was found more frequently in cells from LUSC (Fig.  2F and Supplementary Fig.  4F ). Finally, we observed key co-stimulatory signals required to support lymphoid cell activation, such as CD40-CD40LG , CD2-CD58 , CD28-CD86 , CCL21-CCR7 , and TNFRSF13B/C-TNFSF13B ( TACI/BAFFR-BAFF ) (Supplementary Fig.  4G ), which are often associated with the presence of ectopic lymphoid organs mainly consisting of B cells, T cells, and DCs i.e., tertiary lymphoid structures (TLS). TLS are usually correlated with the longer relapse-free survival in NSCLC 33 .

Integration of scRNA-seq and spatial transcriptomics validates L–R interactions in situ

The significant L–Rs and their interacting cell types were calculated based on the co-expression of genes in different cell-type clusters from the scRNA-seq dataset using CellPhoneDB. However, in order to discern biologically significant interactions, it is essential to ascertain whether the cell types identified as interacting are indeed physically co-located. To achieve this, we considered how the scRNA-seq-identified cell types are spatially arranged on tissue sections. We applied an integrative approach which combines the scRNA-seq of the tumour and background samples with the spatial transcriptomic (STx) profile of the fresh frozen tumour and background tissue sections. We performed 10× Visium on two consecutive, 10-µm sections, from eight patients, seven of which matched the samples used for the scRNA-seq. We analysed 36 sections in total ( n tumour  = 20, n background  = 16) with an average UMI count of 6894/spot in tumour and 3350/spot in the background. Next, we used cell2location 34 and cell-type specific expression profiles from our scRNA-seq dataset to deconvolute cell-type abundances on the tissue (Fig.  3A , see “Methods”).

A Spatial images depicting the cell abundance estimated by cell2location for AT2 cells, AIMɸ and Tregs on a representative tumour section. B Relative proportion of immune (left) and non-immune (right) cell types calculated on the cell abundance estimations by cell2location in tumour and background sections. Immune cells were grouped according to their broad annotations. Arrows indicate an increase (↑) or a decrease (↓) in the tumour, compared to the background. Pairwise comparisons were performed with a two-sided Wilcoxon rank test and Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons. * P  < 0.05, ** P  < 0.01, *** P  < 0.001. Arrows without asterisks indicate that the cell type was found only in the tumour or background. Please refer to Supplementary Data  13 and 14 for the exact P values. C Heatmap of spatial LR colocalization. LR gene pair co-expression was estimated in each spot for all sections, and the frequency of colocalising vs. non-colocalising spots in the tumour and background was compared using a χ 2 test followed by Bonferroni multiple comparison correction. Dark-grey tiles indicate that the frequency of colocalising gene pairs was significantly different in tumour and background sections. Green column annotations indicate the LR pairs which were significant in at least four out of eight patients. Row annotations indicate tumour type. D Boxplot showing the frequency of colocalising LR pairs significantly different in tumour vs background in each section analysed. N  = 8 patients. Boxes are plotted with default settings in the Python Seaborn package, i.e., boxes show quartiles with whisker length being 1.5 times the interquartile range. Source data is provided as a Source Data file. E Spatial images depicting the location of spots in which the LR pair was found co-expressed in tumour (top) and background (bottom), for NRP1-VEGFA, NECTIN2-TIGIT, PD1-PDL1, CD96-NECTIN1 and HAVCR2-LGALS9 . Representative sections from one patient.

Once the cell types were resolved on the tissue sections, we examined the frequency of different cell types across all sections from tumour and background tissue. The cell-type abundance in tumour and background were computed by summing up the posterior 5% quantile (q05) value of estimated cell abundance by cell2location, across spots that passed QC (“Methods”). Our analysis confirmed that the differences in the frequency of cell types across all sections in tumour versus background was in line with the results obtained in the scRNA-seq data (Fig.  3B ). For example, in tumours we found an increase in the proportion of B cells ( P adj  = 0.0372) and cycling AT2 cells ( P adj  = 0.0147) compared to the background tissue, and a decrease in the proportion of immature cells ( P adj  = 0.0012), NK cells ( P adj  = 0.0012), and LECs ( P adj  = 0.00077, Supplementary Data  13 and 14 ). However, the proportions of other cell types estimated from the scRNA-seq data or the STx data within the tumour or background showed some discrepancies (Supplementary Fig.  4H, I ). This was particularly evident within the non-immune populations, where STx estimated higher proportions of LECs, activated adventitial fibroblasts and cycling subsets, compared to scRNA-seq. Disparities in cell proportions between different methodologies were previously shown by others 35 , 36 , underscoring the potential influence of distinct sampling biases inherent to scRNA-seq and STx techniques like Visium. In the case of scRNA-seq, variations in cell digestion sensitivity can lead to differential representation of cell types. Meanwhile, with Visium, discrepancies might arise from variations in the location of tumour resections as well as differences in sample sizes compared to scRNA-seq studies. Nevertheless, the overall concordance in the results obtained by scRNA-seq and Visium suggests that our spatial “map” of different cell types faithfully represents their distribution in the tissue.

Next, we examined the spatial co-localisation of the L–Rs identified by cellphoneDB. The L–Rs were considered to co-localise if both genes were expressed in the same spot and above median value for the given genes across the section spots. We then compared the frequency of spots in which L–R genes were colocalising versus non-colocalising in the matched tumour versus background sections, using a χ 2 test (“Methods”). Due to the low number of tissue blocks collected from LUSC and LUAD patients (N LUSC  = 3, N LUAD  = 5), the statistical power was not sufficient to perform a comparative analysis between spatial localisation of LUAD/LUSC-specific L–Rs. Nevertheless, we confirmed that several of the aforementioned tumour-specific L–Rs colocalized significantly more in tumour than in background sections, including NRP1-VEGFA and the ICIs NECTIN2-TIGIT , LGALS9-HAVCR2 , and CD96-NECTIN1 (Fig.  3C–E and Supplementary Data  15 ). Consistent with the cellphoneDB results, we found no significant colocalization of PD1-PDL1 in the tumour sections.

CAMLs share similar copy number aberrations (CNAs) with tumour cells

Tumour samples obtained from surgical resection contain both malignant and residual normal epithelial cells. A significant challenge in scRNA-seq of human tumours lies in the differentiation of cancer cells from non-malignant counterparts. Therefore, we applied Copynumber Karyotyping of Tumors (CopyKAT 37 ) to discern genome-wide aneuploidy within individual cells. The principle driving the computation of DNA copy number events from scRNA-seq data is rooted in the notion that the expression levels of neighbouring genes can provide valuable information to infer genomic copy numbers within that specific genomic segment. Since aneuploidy is common in human cancers, cells with genome-wide CNAs are considered as tumour cells.

Analysis using CopyKAT revealed extensive, patient-specific CNAs in tumour tissue (Fig.  4A and Supplementary Fig.  5A ) but not in the background. Within individual tumour samples, the CNAs were detected in AT2 and cycling AT2 cells, and in some patients these genetic alterations were shared between AT2/cycling AT2 cells and atypical epithelial cells, suggesting a close lineage relationship between different epithelial subpopulations (Fig.  4A and Supplementary Fig.  5A ). We confirmed this finding by inferring the trajectory of non-blood cell populations in tumour using Partition-Based Graph Abstraction (PAGA) 38 . PAGA showed differentiation continuity between AT2 cells, cycling AT2/epithelial cells, and atypical epithelial cells on one side and ciliated epithelial cells and transitioning epithelial cells on the other (Fig.  4B ). Furthermore, blinded histological evaluation confirmed the overlap between pathologist-defined tumour sites and AT2 and cycling AT2 cells predicted by cell2location, suggesting their tumour cells status (Fig.  4C ). Less overlap was observed for atypical epithelial cells (Fig.  4C ). The differential expression analysis (DEA) of AT2 cells from tumours compared to background showed upregulation of genes involved in hypoxia, TP53 pathways, and metabolic rewiring in tumours. AT2 cells in tumour-upregulated genes involved both in glycolysis and oxidative phosphorylation (Fig.  4D and Supplementary Data  16 ). While the importance of glycolysis in tumour cells is well-established 39 , it was recently reported that human NSCLC use glucose and lactate to fuel the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle 40 . In addition, the tumour AT2 cells were noted to express more LYPD3 compared to background AT2 cells (log2FC = 2.04, P adj  = 0.039, Supplementary Data  16 ), an adhesion protein which has previously been connected to poor prognosis in NSCLC and is currently being targeted in preclinical and clinical studies 41 , 42 .

A CNA analysis. The plot shows chromosomal gains (red lines) and losses (blue lines) estimated by CopyKat in each chromosome arm for different cell types and patients in the tumour dataset. All immune cell types were grouped together for plotting purposes. B PAGA graph overlaid on the diffusion maps (force-directed layout—FLE embedding) computed for non-immune cell types in tumour. C First three panels—Representative blind annotations from a qualified pathologist, indicating the areas of tumour infiltration (left), binning of the tumour area on the Visium spots (centre) and the spots that passed QC (right). The last three panels—cell2location estimation for AT2 cells (left), Cycling AT2 cells (centre) and Atypical epithelial cells (right) on the same sections, overlaid with the pathologist’s annotation for the tumour infiltration (green contour). D Overrepresentation analysis on gene ontology—biological processes (GO:BP) and REACTOME database by clusterProfiler R package, using DEGs upregulated by AT2 cells in tumour vs background. Source data is provided as a Source Data file. E Detailed overview of CNAs in AT2 and CAMLs from the tumour of one representative patient. Bars indicate the frequency of cells harbouring chromosomal gains (red bar) or losses (blue bars) in specific chromosomal regions. F Scatterplot of the KL divergence for losses ( x axis) and gains ( y axis) between each cell type in the tumour dataset calculated using their gain and loss distribution. All immune cell types were grouped together for plotting purposes. G Spatial images depicting the cell abundance estimated by cell2location for AT2 cells and CAMLs on three representative tumour sections. H Hierarchical clustering of the correlation distance calculated on cell-type composition (as estimated by cell2location) across spots that passed QC in all tumour sections. I Non-negative matrix factorisation built on the q05 estimation of cell-type abundance across spots that passed QC (as estimated by cell2location) in all tumour sections.

Interestingly, the population of CAMLs also showed substantial CNAs that were similar to those of AT2 cells and cycling AT2 cells from the same patient (Fig.  4A, E and Supplementary Fig.  5A, B ). To measure the difference of the distribution of genomic gain and loss between cell types in a statistically robust manner, we calculated the Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence (Fig.  4F and Supplementary Fig.  5C ). CAMLs had KL divergence values comparable to CNA-harbouring tumour cells, thus confirming the similarity of their CNA profiles (Fig.  4F and Supplementary Fig.  5C ). As CAMLs co-expressed a wide array of myeloid genes as well as typical epithelial genes (Fig.  1D–F and Supplementary Fig.  1D ), had a low doublet score and shared the same CNA signature as tumour cells, we hypothesised that these cells might represent a subset of Mɸ tightly attached to a cancer cell. It is possible that these Mɸ were undergoing phagocytosis or fusion.

CAMLs have been previously isolated from peripheral blood of cancer patients and described to facilitate circulating tumour cells seeding of distant metastases 16 . Our analysis suggested that CAMLs can also be isolated from tumour tissue. To validate that CAMLs are in physical proximity to tumour cells in situ we examined our STx sections. We calculated across all sections (8 patients, n sections  = 20) the Pearson correlation between the relative abundance of the cell types that reside in the same spot and are therefore co-localised. Our analysis showed that CAMLs indeed co-localised with AT2 cells (Fig.  4G, H ). We confirmed this finding using non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) on the absolute cell-type abundances estimated by cell2location that defined factors of co-occurring cell states (Fig.  4I ).

To determine the specific Mɸ population from which CAMLs likely originate, we employed PAGA to elucidate the differentiation path of the myeloid cell population in our tumour dataset (Supplementary Fig.  5D ). The analysis revealed continuity of the differentiation transitions between diverse populations of myeloid cells 43 . Within the PAGA trajectory, alveolar Mɸ (AMɸ) and AIMɸ showed high PAGA connectivity indicating their high transcriptional similarity. Both AIMɸ and AMɸ showed the strongest connectivity on the PAGA trajectory with STAB1  + Mɸ which, in turn, were linked with CAMLs. In line with trajectory analysis, CAMLs co-expressed many of the genes specific to STAB1  + Mɸ (Supplementary Fig.  2A ), supporting the hypothesis that CAMLs are likely derived from STAB1  + Mɸ following their close interaction with tumour cells. Finally, DEA analysis between CAMLs from LUSC versus LUAD patients, showed upregulation of KRT17 , KRT5 and KRT6A in LUSC samples (Supplementary Data  17 ). These KRT genes were previously identified as markers of LUSC in multiple studies 44 , 45 , which supports hypothesis that CAMLs arise from the interaction between Mɸ and tumour cell.

TAMs promote cholesterol and iron efflux in tumour

Mɸ, traditionally categorised into distinct M1 (classically activated) and M2 (alternatively activated) phenotypes, are now understood to exist along a dynamic spectrum of functional states 46 . This concept of Mɸ plasticity underscores their ability to seamlessly transition between pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory roles in response to intricate cues from their microenvironment (Supplementary Fig.  5D ). To better understand the transcriptional changes that different Mɸ populations undergo in the TME, we performed DEA. In tumours, both AMɸ and AIMɸ upregulated genes involved in cholesterol and lipid transport and metabolism (such as ABCA1, APOC1, APOE, FABP3 and FABP5 ) compared to the background tissue (Fig.  5A, B and Supplementary Data  18 and 19 ). Cholesterol plays a vital role in tumour growth due to the high demand of newly synthesised cellular membranes during cancer cell proliferation. Hypoxia-related genes were upregulated in AT2 cells in tumour compared to the background (Fig.  4D ), which can promote cholesterol auxotrophy in tumour cells by suppressing cholesterol synthesis, thereby forcing them to rely on exogenous cholesterol uptake 47 . In our dataset, we detected higher expression of the cholesterol exporter ABCA1 and no expression of low-density lipoprotein receptor ( LDLR ) in AMɸ and AIMɸ, the latter gene being responsible for the uptake of cholesterol-carrying lipoprotein particles into cells, suggesting preferential export of cholesterol from TAMs to the TME (Fig.  5A ). Interestingly, we also noted a high expression of TREM2 in both AMɸ and AIMɸ (Fig.  5A ), which plays a prominent role in efflux of cholesterol in microglia 48 , 49 , 50 . To validate the increased levels of cholesterol in the TME, we stained matched tumour and background tissue sections with BODIPY™ 493/503, a stain targeting cholesterol and other neutral lipids. We found a significant increase in the BODIPY signal in the tumour sections, compared to background tissue (Fig.  5C, D ), confirming an increased availability of neutral lipids in the tumour, possibly as a result of an increased export by TAMs.

A Volcano plot of DEGs (red) for AIMɸ in tumour vs background, extracted using the py_DESeq2 package. B Overrepresentation analysis on gene ontology—biological processes database by clusterProfiler R package, using the DEGs upregulated by Alveolar Mɸ and AIMɸ in tumour vs background. Source data is provided as a Source Data file. C IHC for CD68 and neutral lipids (BODIPY 493/503) on tumour and background tissue sections. Maximum intensity projection of Z-stacks. Scale bar 50 µm. D Area covered by the BODIPY signal in tumour and background section. The difference in BODIPY area coverage was determined with a paired, two-sided t test, matching tumour and background sections from the same patients. N  = 5 patients. Source data is provided as a Source Data file. E IHC for CD68 and STAB1 on tumour (left) and background (right) tissue sections. Maximum intensity projection of Z-stacks. Inlets show a detailed magnification on a single cell. Scale bar 20 µm. F Quantification of STAB1+ cells within the CD68+ macrophage population. The fraction of the STAB1 + CD68+ area is shown as a percentage of the total CD68+ area. Data are presented as mean value and standard deviation ( n  = 3 biological replicates). Source data is provided as a Source Data file. G Staining for CD68, STAB1 and PanCK on tumour tissue sections. Maximum intensity projection of Z-stacks. Inlets show a detailed magnification on a single cell. Scale bar 20 µm. H Quantification of STAB1 + CD68+ cells within the CD68+ macrophage population in NSCLC. Data are presented as mean value and individual data points ( n  = 2 biological replicates). Source data is provided as a Source Data file. I Dotplot showing the expression of the “STAB1 signature genes” across all macrophage subsets and CAMLs in tumour. J Volcano plot of DEGs identified by py_DESeq2 (red) for Alveolar Mɸ vs STAB1 Mɸ in tumour. K Overrepresentation analysis on gene ontology— biological processes database by clusterProfiler R package, using the DEGs from Alveolar Mɸ vs STAB1 Mɸ (top) and AIMɸ vs STAB1 Mɸ (bottom) in tumour (left—upregulated by STAB1 Mɸ; right—upregulated by Alveolar Mɸ or AIMɸ). Source data is provided as a Source Data file.

STAB1  + Mɸ were identified in the tumour resections (Fig.  5E–H , Supplementary Fig.  2 and Supplementary Notes ), so we used DEA to identify a set of genes that were specific for STAB1  + Mɸ compared to tumour AIMɸ or AMɸ. We identified 20 genes, from here on referred to as “STAB1 signature genes” (Fig.  5I ). Interestingly, STAB1  + Mɸ uniquely expressed SLC40A1 , which encodes for the ferroportin, the only known protein that exports ferrous iron from the cytoplasm across the plasma membrane and is key for the iron-releasing activity of macrophages (Fig.  5I, J and Supplementary Data  20 and 21 ) 51 . Ferroportin-mediated release of free iron by M2 Mɸ was reported to promote the proliferation of renal carcinoma cells in vitro, possibly by supporting the high iron requirement due to increased DNA synthesis 52 . Furthermore, compared to AMɸ, STAB1  + Mɸ expressed lower levels of ferritin heavy chain 1 ( FTH1 ) and ferritin light chain ( FTL ) encoding for the iron storer ferritin (Fig.  5J and Supplementary Data  20 ). Consistent with the hypothesis of their sustained export of free iron to the extracellular milieu, STAB1 + Mɸ downregulated genes involved in iron sequestration (Fig.  5K ). Taken together, our analysis suggests that macrophages undergo “reprogramming” within the TME and adopt a transcriptional signature that facilitates cholesterol efflux and iron export, thus supporting tumour progression.

STAB1  + Mɸ in tumour tissue undergo oncofoetal reprogramming

Embryonic development shares many characteristics with tumour tissue, including rapid cell division, cellular flexibility, and a highly vascular microenvironment. It has been recently reported that during tumorigenesis, Mɸ can undergo oncofoetal reprogramming 53 and acquire a foetal-like transcriptional identity that supports tumour growth and metastasis 53 . Considering that some of the STAB1 signature genes are typically expressed by foetal Mɸ (such as STAB1 , FOLR2, SLC40A1, MERTK , GPR34 and F13A1 ) 54 , we wanted to explore if further transcriptional commonalities exist between tumour-originating STAB1  + Mɸ and Mɸ isolated from human foetal lung. To this end, we combined tumour- and background-originating myeloid cells from our dataset ( n  = 347,364 cells) with myeloid and progenitor cells from a publicly available foetal lung scRNA-seq dataset 55 ( n  = 6,947 cells) using Harmony. Next, we performed Leiden clustering on the neighbourhood graph and examined how cell types are distributed within the clusters (Supplementary Fig.  6A, B ). To examine similarity in their gene expression profile, we applied hierarchical clustering and built a dendrogram by estimating the correlation distance between cell types on the harmonised PC embedding space, under the complete linkage criterion of hierarchical clustering (Fig.  6A ).

A Hierarchical clustering of the correlation distance calculated on each cell in the harmonised (tumour myeloid + background myeloid + foetal lung myeloid) PC space. B Violin plot showing the expression level of the “STAB1 gene signature” across myeloid cell and progenitor populations identified in a publicly available human foetal lung atlas. C Dotplot of the expression of each gene in the “STAB1 gene signature” in selected foetal lung macrophage populations. The size of each dot represents the percentage of cells in the cluster expressing the gene, while the colour represents the mean expression of each gene in each cluster. D Violin plot showing the expression level of the “STAB1 gene signature” across the clusters identified in the publicly available MoMac-VERSE dataset. E Dotplot of the expression of each gene in the “STAB1 gene signature” in selected macrophage populations from the MoMac-VERSE. The size of each dot represents the percentage of cells in the cluster expressing the gene, while the colour represents the mean expression of each gene in each cluster. F Violin plot showing the expression level of the “AMɸ gene signature” across myeloid cell and progenitor populations identified in the publicly available “MoMac-VERSE” dataset. G Violin plot showing the expression level of the “AMɸ gene signature” across myeloid cell and progenitor populations identified in a publicly available human foetal lung atlas. H Dotplot of the expression of each gene in the “AMɸ gene signature” in selected macrophages populations identified in the “MoMac-VERSE” dataset. The size of each dot represents the percentage of cells in the cluster expressing the gene, while the colour represents the mean expression of each gene in each cluster. I Dotplot of the expression of each gene in the “AMɸ gene signature” in selected foetal lung macrophage populations. The size of each dot represents the percentage of cells in the cluster expressing the gene, while the colour represents the mean expression of each gene in each cluster.

We observed that tumour cDC2 exhibited the strongest correlation with background cDC2, whereas tumour mo-DC2 displayed the highest correlation with foetal DC2 and, in a broader context, with background mo-DC2. The population of pDC from tumour, background and foetal lung were closely correlated. Similarly, tumour monocytes were correlated with foetal classical monocytes and background monocytes. In contrast, macrophage populations in tumour, and in particular STAB1  + Mɸ, were correlated with foetal macrophages . STAB1  + Mɸ clustered predominantly with foetal SPP1  + Mɸ (Fig.  6A ), which accounted for over 80% of all foetal lung macrophages reported in ref. 55 . Consistent with this finding, SPP1  + Mɸ had a high expression of the “STAB1 signature genes” compared to other haematopoietic populations (Fig.  6B, C ). Our analysis substantiates the idea that monocytes within the tumour environment, as they undergo differentiation into anti-inflammatory macrophages, acquire a transcriptional signature akin to that of foetal macrophages. This distinctive transcriptional signature was not observed in the macrophages from surrounding normal tissue.

To further examine the prevalence of STAB1  + Mɸ in other pathologies, including other cancers, we examined the expression of “STAB1 signature genes” across a diverse group of myeloid cells using a published atlas of human monocytes and Mɸ collected from 12 different healthy and pathologic tissues ( n  = 140,327 cells), called MoMac-VERSE 56 . The cluster of “ HES1+ macrophages” identified in MoMac-VERSE showed the highest expression of the “STAB1 signature genes” (Fig.  6D, E ). Similar to STAB1  + Mɸ, HES1+ macrophages accumulated in tumours of lung cancer patients but also liver cancer patients 57 and were suggested to represent a cluster of “long-term resident-like” Mɸ with foetal-like transcriptional signature 56 . In contrast, “C1Q” Mɸ from MoMac-VERSE, which have been described as lung alveolar Mɸ, had a high expression of genes unique to our tumour alveolar AMɸ (from here on referred as “AMɸ signature genes”, Fig.  6F, H ). In the context of foetal lung, a rare population of APOE + Mɸ, which accounted for less than 1% of all foetal lung macrophages reported in ref. 55 , had a high AMɸ signature genes score ( Supplementary Notes and Fig.  6G, I , see “Methods”).

Taken together, our analysis suggests that tumour macrophages, especially STAB1  + Mɸ, exhibited a transcriptional signature reminiscent of Mɸ during foetal lung development, suggesting that they have undergone oncofoetal reprogramming within the NSCLC tumour environment.

Our study represents a large single-cell multiomics analysis of samples collected from treatment-naive patients with NSCLC. We integrated scRNA-seq data from nearly 900,000 cells from tumour resections and adjacent non-malignant tissue from 25 treatment- naive patients with spatial transcriptomics to build an atlas of immune and non-immune compartments in lung cancer.

LUAD and LUSC, the two most common NSCLC subtypes, exhibit markedly different prognostic outcomes and have shown potential for subtype-specific therapies 28 . Despite similar cell-type composition, we observed significant differences in the co-expression of several ICIs and inhibitory molecules between LUAD and LUSC, highlighting therapeutic opportunities. LUAD samples frequently expressed TIGIT and TIM3 (HAVCR2) , while in LUSC we found the putative ICI CD96-NECTIN1 . While different advanced clinical trials targeting TIGIT, including in patients affected by NSCLC, are ongoing 58 , progress on TIM3 and CD96 is more limited 59 . A first-in-human phase-I study evaluating the anti-CD96 monoclonal antibody GSK6097608 as monotherapy alone or in combination with anti-PD1 (dostarlimab) started recruiting patients only recently 60 . Taken together, our data suggest that LUAD and LUSC patients might benefit from specific immunotherapy targeting ICIs as TIM3, TIGIT and CD96.

The TME plays a crucial role in modulating the population and behaviour of Mɸ 4 . We found that, compared to the adjacent non-tumour tissue, tumour resections harboured a lower proportion of monocytes but a higher proportion of monocyte-derived cells, such as mo-DC2s and anti-inflammatory Mɸ, suggestive of an enhanced monocyte differentiation in the TME 7 , 9 . The prevalence of anti-inflammatory Mɸ, including STAB1  + Mɸ, exhibited an inverse relationship with the abundance of natural killer (NK) cells and T cells in the tumour environment; and the NK cells within the tumour exhibited reduced cytotoxic activity. Our results are in line with the recent findings that the removal of tumour cell debris by lung Mɸ leads to their conversion into an immunosuppressive phenotype, consequently hindering the infiltration of NK cells into the TME 27 . Mɸ with elevated levels of tumoural debris were reported to upregulate genes involved in cholesterol trafficking and lipid metabolism, a characteristic shared with anti-inflammatory Mɸ in our dataset. As a result, they downregulated co-stimulatory molecules, cytokines and chemokines 27 essential for the recruitment of CD8 + T cells, therefore becoming more immunosuppressive.

Among the Mɸ population within tumours, we also identified STAB1  + Mɸ that exhibited the highest level of immunosuppression markers. These STAB1  + Mɸ displayed a gene expression pattern akin to that of foetal lung Mɸ and demonstrated a modified iron metabolism, marked by the increased expression of genes associated with iron release in the TME. Therefore, we hypothesise that STAB1  + Mɸ might play a crucial role in supporting tumour progression by sustaining the increased iron requirement of highly-cycling tumour cells 52 , 61 . In a subcutaneous LLC1 Lewis lung adenocarcinoma model, mice lacking Stab1 expression in Mɸ, tumour growth was diminished. This outcome was attributed to a shift towards a pro-inflammatory phenotype in TAM and a robust infiltration of CD8 + T cells within the TME 62 . STAB1  + Mɸ displayed a transcriptional resemblance to CAMLs, which concurrently expressed genes associated with both Mɸ and epithelial cells, and exhibited copy number alterations (CNAs) similar to those found in tumour cells. STAB1+ plays a pivotal role in facilitating the adhesion and engulfment of apoptotic cells by engaging in a specific interaction with phosphatidylserine, supporting the hypothesis of a strong interaction of a Mɸ with a tumour cell in CAMLs 63 . In previous studies, CAMLs were identified by immunofluorescence in the peripheral blood of individuals affected by various solid tumours and were proposed to facilitate the dissemination and establishment of circulating tumour cells in distant metastatic sites 16 . Here, we report their presence in multiple tumour resections, based on a combination of a compound gene expression signature, tumour-specific copy number alterations and physical proximity to tumour cells, as evident from Visium sections. Taken together, our comprehensive dataset allowed identifying a multitude of molecular changes in the Mɸ population of the lung tumour microenvironment, which will help pave the way for the development of therapeutic strategies against NSCLC.

Ethics and tissue acquisition

Tissue used in the research study was obtained from the Papworth Hospital Research Tissue Bank. Written consent was obtained for all tissue samples using Papworth Hospital Research Tissue Bank’s ethical approval (East of England— Cambridge East Research Ethics Committee). Human tumour and adjacent background tissues, collected from the edges of the lungs, were obtained from 25 patients following tumour resection. Human healthy lung samples were obtained from two healthy deceased donors. Both healthy samples were evaluated by an expert pathologist to exclude the presence of malignancies. The human material was provided by the Royal Papworth Tissue Bank (T02229), in accordance with the HMDMC Human Tissue Act Sample Custodian Form Version 7.0 (UK NRES REC approval reference number(s): 08/H0304/56 + 5; HMDMC 16 | 094). NSCLC FFPE tumour blocks ( n  = 2) used for validation of STAB1+ macrophages with Akoya were obtained from 2 different donors and purchased from BioIVT (ex-Asterand Bioscience). Informed Consent Form (ICF) and Institutional Review Board Approval Letter (IRBA) were obtained for all tissue samples.

Sex was assigned (15 male and 12 female patients/donors). Sex-based analyses were not performed due to the limited sample size. Gender was not determined.

Tissue processing

Tissues were kept in cold complete RPMI medium (RPMI [Invitrogen] supplemented with 10% FBS [Sigma Millipore, catalogue number: F9665], 2 mM L-Glutamine [Life Technologies, catalogue number: 25030-024] and 100 U/ml Penicillin-Streptomycin [Thermofisher, catalogue number: 15140122]) until dissociation, which was performed on the same day of collection. Single-cell suspensions were generated as follows: tissues were placed into a petri dish and cut into small pieces of 2–4 mm and transferred into a 1.5-ml tube containing the digestion mix (complete RPMI media supplemented with  1 mg ml −1 collagenase IV and 0.1 mg ml −1 DNase I) and minced using surgical scissors. Minced tissues were incubated for 45 min at 37 °C and vortexed every 15 min. Digested tissues were passed through a 100-μm strainer into a falcon tube prefilled with cold PBS.

Cells were then centrifuged for 5 min at 300 ×  g , 4 °C and the pellet was resuspended into 1× RBC lysis buffer (eBioscience) for 2 min at room temperature, after which 20 ml of cold PBS were added to stop the lysis reaction. Cells were cryopreserved in 5% DMSO in KnockOut Serum Replacement (KOSR; Gibco TM , catalogue number: 10828010) until further use.

FACS sorting

On the day of FACS sorting, cells were rapidly thawed at 37 °C and transferred to complete RPMI media. Live-cell enrichment was performed using MACS Dead Cell Removal Kit (Miltenyi Biotec) following the manufacturer’s instructions. Red blood cells were further depleted by negative selection using CD235a Microbeads (Miltenyi Biotec) and MACS LS columns (Miltenyi Biotec), following the manufacturer’s instructions.

For FACS sorting, cells were stained with Zombie Aqua to exclude dead cells and the cocktail of antibodies for 30 min at 4 °C. Cells were centrifuged for 5 min at 300 ×  g , 4 °C, resuspended in 500 μl of 5% FBS in PBS and subsequently filtered into polypropylene FACS tubes.

Immune cells were sorted as live, CD45 + ; MDSC were sorted as live, CD45 + , Lineage- (Lin: CD3, CD56, CD19), CD33 + , HLA-DR-/low (Supplementary Data  22 and Supplementary Fig.  1A ). Cells were sorted into a 1.5-ml tube, counted and submitted for 10x scRNA-seq library preparation.

scRNA sequencing

Each cell suspension was submitted for 3’ single-cell RNA sequencing using Single Cell G Chip Kit, chemistry v3.1 (10x Genomics Pleasanton, CA, USA), following the manufacturer’s instructions. Libraries were sequenced on an Illumina NovaSeq 6000, and mapped to the GRCh38 human reference genome using the CellRanger toolkit (version 3.1.0).

scRNA sequencing data analysis

Integrating numerous samples, notably from diverse cancer subtypes and adjacent normal tissues, is challenging due to variations in gene programmes between samples. Consequently, these differences often hinder a coherent biological alignment when attempting simultaneous embedding. Most current integration techniques, primarily focused on batch correction, operate under the assumption of shared cell states across samples. However, while they aim to mitigate technical disparities, they might inadvertently erase genuine biological distinctions. Therefore, we applied the QC filtration and doublet removal on the merged dataset (Tumour + B/H) but we split the datasets between tumour and B/H for HVG selection, PCA, batch correction (using Harmony), clustering and annotations.

Starting from the unnormalised, uncorrected gene expression matrices produced (per sample) by the CellRanger protocol, we performed careful downstream analysis of the scRNA-seq data. For each CellRanger output (corresponding to a specific technical and biological replicate of the separate tumour, background and healthy data) we identified low-quality cells or empty droplets by applying the barcodeRanks and emptyDrops functions using the R package DropletUtils 64 . Following per-sample droplets removal, the complete set of cell expression matrices was merged (we merged tumour, background, and healthy samples), and quality control (QC) was applied to the resultant merged matrix. The remaining analysis is implemented using standard approaches in the Scanpy 65 framework. The QC is based on three parameters: the total UMI count (lower-upper threshold [400, 100,000]), the number of detected genes (lower-upper threshold [180, 6000]), and the proportion of mitochondrial gene count per cell (20% fraction upper bound). We applied Scrublet   66 to remove potential doublets with 0.06 as the expected doublet rate and then filtered the results using the parameter values (2 for minimum read count of cell, 3 for minimum detected cell of gene, 85 for minimum gene variability percentage, and 30 for the number of principal components used to embed the transcriptomes prior to k-nearest-neighbour graph construction). The resulting merged and filtered expression matrix is then normalised using the scaling factor 10,000, followed by log1p transformation.

For dimensionality reduction, we first selected sets of highly-variable genes (HVGs) from the initial gene set of 25,718. Starting from the HVG selection, the merged matrix was split into two separate matrices: tumour , and combined background/healthy which we refer to as B/H. After HVG selection, 1604 genes were selected from the tumour matrix and 1486 from B/H. From these separate HVG sets, we applied dimensionality reduction using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Next, we performed PCA separately for tumour and for B/H and retained the top 15 components, according to the Scree plot elbow rule. The resulting matrix is then batch corrected to account for additional technical variations arising between samples which are non-biological in origin. We apply batch correction by using harmonypy (a Python version of the original harmonyR 67 package), based on recommended benchmarking 68 against other procedures.

Following between-sample batch correction, we computed a neighbourhood graph and applied Leiden 69 clustering (with Leiden resolution being 1) to the 15-dimensional harmonised PCA space 69 . For visualisation purposes, we used Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) manifold embedding 70 to capture the global features of the 15-dimensional clustered manifold and represent the global structure in two and three dimensions. We identified top 100 representative genes for each cluster by performing the Wilcoxon signed-rank test 71 with the Bonferroni correction, followed by a filtering to obtain genes overexpressed in the target group (minimum log fold change as 0) and expressed in at least 30% of cells within the group. We did not control the fraction of gene expression of other clusters, by setting the maximum threshold as 100%. We then annotated each cell cluster according to the the expression profile of these marker genes and the expression of other canonical genes significant for different lung cell types based on the literature (see extended results). The annotation procedure was done iteratively. With this approach we generated two separate annotated UMAPs, together with associated marker genes, for the tumour and B/H datasets.

Contrasting cell-type abundances between different samples

To compare cell-type abundances, we calculated the proportion of each cell type within each patient and broad cell annotation in the unenriched (CD235-) samples. We contrasted cell-type proportions between groups (tumour vs. background or LUAD vs. LUSC) using a Wilcoxon rank-sum test. Finally, we corrected for multiple testing using a two-sided Bonferroni correction independently for each group analysed.

The association between the relative cell-type abundance for each immune cell type was evaluated on the Pearson’s product-moment correlation coefficients.

Label transfer

To test consistency in cell-type annotation performed separately in tumour and B/H, we performed reference-query mapping from tumour to B/H using scArches 22 . For the 828,191 immune cells (464,952 in tumour and 363,239 in B/H) identified through our separate annotations, we selected a common set of 10,000 HVGs. We first built an scVI model and trained it on the tumour dataset using broad cell types for reference, and applied scHPL method (provided in the scArches package, parameters set to use KNN classifier, 100 neighbours and with PCA dimensionality reduction) to obtain the hierarchy for the tumour cell types. We then applied the B/H dataset to the pretrained reference model for a query, and predicted B/H broad cell types based on tumour hierarchy (probability threshold set as 0.2). Finally, we compared the predicted cell types with our separate annotations in B/H using a heatmap to visualise the confusion matrix.

CellPhoneDB

We initially identified a putative long list of cell–cell interactions differentially observed in the tumour environment by inferring statistically significant ligand–receptor pairs, and their corresponding cell types, using CellPhoneDB 29 . We treated the tumour (LUAD or LUSC), background, and healthy scRNA-seq profiles as independent datasets and ran CellPhoneDB separately. To reduce the impact of randomness in the way CellPhoneDB samples from input datasets, we required that any ligand–receptor pair of interest from the CellPhoneDB database be expressed in at least 30% of cells in a particular cell-type cluster of interest. The final ligand–receptor lists were further filtered by requiring that the mean log(1 + expression) of the ligand–receptor pair be greater than 1.0, and the Bonferroni-adjusted 72 P value be less than 0.01. From these filtered long lists, ligand–receptor pairs and corresponding cell types relevant to the tumour data are identified.

When evaluating the ligand–receptor lists calculated with CellPhoneDB, we did not run on the complete datasets due to the difficulty in scaling up the CellPhoneDB statistical permutation tests to scRNA-seq with more than 10 6 cells. Instead, we separately stratified the tumour, healthy and background datasets such that the proportion of cell types, patients, and samples in the reduced 50% of the data recapitulated the proportions in the full dataset.

Differential expression analysis

Differentiation expression analysis (DEA) was performed for AT2 cells, anti-inflammatory macrophages and alveolar macrophages using a pseudo-bulk approach to compare tumour versus background. Pseudobulks were built for each patient by summing raw gene counts across all cells in each cell type investigated. The patients 1 and 4 were not included in the analysis as their cancer subtype and stage were not known at the time of analysis. Since there were differences in the cell count between datasets we downsampled the biggest cluster to the size of the smaller. The downsampling routine was repeated 100 times, such that 100 new datasets were created that match the smaller dataset. DEA was performed using sample-level pseudobulks and a Pythonic version of the DESeq2 pipeline (py_DESeq2), including the patient information as co-variate 73 . The median adjusted p value by Benjamini–Hochberg procedure and median log2FC for each differentially expressed gene (DEG) was calculated across 100 iterations. We verified the robustness of this choice of 100 iterations by visualising the variability of the median p value across iterations, in order to assess its stability (Supplementary Fig.  6C ). DEGs were filtered with median(padj)≤0.05 and |median(logFC)|≥1. Prior to performing overrepresentation analysis, the genes that were commonly upregulated in more than 50% of the contrasts were removed (DNAJB1, HSPA1A, HSPA1B, HSPB1, HSPE1, IGHA1, IGKC, IGLC2). DEGs were used to perform gene ontology (GO) overrepresentation using the clusterProfiler package 74 . To define STAB1  + Mɸ and AMɸ gene signatures, we compared DEA results and intersected the genes significantly upregulated by STAB1  + Mɸ (or AMɸ) compared to the other Mɸ populations in tumour.

Trajectory inference—PAGA

To analyse myeloid cell trajectory in tumour dataset, we recomputed a neighbourhood graph from the same 15-dimensional harmonised PCA space as above, but only within myeloid cell populations. We next applied PAGA 38 within the Scanpy 65 package to the neighbourhood graph. In parallel, we computed the diffusion map and its force-directed layout for visualisation using the Pegasus package 75 . We finally overlaid the PAGA network with the diffusion map using the scVelo package. We repeated the same analysis workflow but on non-immune cells in the tumour dataset.

Copy number analysis

We applied the CopyKAT package to the single-cell RNA-seq data to obtain copy number calls. The Copykat pipeline was extended to obtain confident copy number calls per cell, per chromosome arm, beyond the hierarchical clustering the standard pipeline produces.

Per cell copy number calls were obtained as follows: first, the regular CopyKAT (v1.0.5) pipeline was run on the unmodified UMI counts of a particular patient/environment (i.e., tumour or background) combination with default parameters, except for norm.cell.names. The norm.cell.names parameter allows for specifying which cells are used as confident diploid normals during expression normalisation. CopyKAT was set to use all cells labelled as cDC2 dendritic cells, as they are available in great numbers across all patients and an initial inspection of their expression profiles revealed no systematic copy number alterations.

After CopyKAT has completed, a calling step was applied that is aimed to call whole chromosome arm alterations in individual cells. We reasoned that, on a chromosome arm basis, the distribution of binned-and-normalised expression from CopyKAT should be significantly different (higher or lower) than the distribution of the same bins in all confidently diploid cells. For each chromosome arm, we model the distribution of all data bins from the confidently diploid cells as a normal distribution. Each bin on that same chromosome arm from a candidate aneuploid cell is then tested against that distribution. Finally, when more than 50% of bins across that chromosome arm are significant, the arm is marked as altered in that cell.

The above-described procedure yields a conservative true/false call per cell, per chromosome arm without directly distinguishing between gains and losses. To obtain a profile with gains and losses as is shown in Fig.  4A , we discretise the values for each bin in each cell: If the arm is altered and the expression value of the bin is negative: −1, if the arm is altered and the expression value is positive: +1, if the arm is unaltered: 0. The discretized values are then finally summed per bin across all cells of a particular cell type and divided by the number of cells of that cell type to obtain the fraction of cells with an alteration as shown in Fig.  4A .

Immunohistochemistry (IHC) and neutral lipid staining

Tissues were frozen in dry-ice-cooled isopentane and stored in air-tight tissue cryovials at −80 °C. The tissues were embedded in an optimal cutting temperature compound (OCT) and cryosectioned in a pre-cooled cryostat at 10 μm thickness on SuperFrost slides. On the day of the experiment, slides were thawed at room temperature for less than 5 min, then immersed in a fixation solution (4% PFA in PBS) for 20 min. After three washes with PBS, each section was permeabilized with freshly prepared 0.2% Triton-X100 (Sigma Aldrich) for 10 min at room temperatures, followed by three washes in PBS. Unspecific binding was blocked by incubating the sections in PBS + 2.5% BSA for 1 h at room temperature. Following two washes in PBS, sections were incubated with recombinant rabbit anti-CD68 (Abcam ab213363, 1:50) and mouse anti-STAB1 (Santa Cruz Biotechnology sc-293254, 10 µg/ml) in PBS + 0.5% BSA overnight at 4 °C. Primary antibodies were removed and sections washed three times with PBS, then incubated with the appropriate secondary antibodies (goat anti-rabbit AlexaFluor 594 and goat anti-mouse AlexaFluor 488 Abcam) 1:500 in PBS + 0.5% BSA for 2 h at room temperature, protected from light. Two confocal immunohistochemistry z-stacks each for tumour and background tissue from three patients were analysed. Using Fiji (ImageJ) software, the STAB1+ and CD68+ areas were segmented by automatic thresholding and quantified in each image of the z-stack.

To assess the levels of cholesterol and neutral lipids we further stained tumour and background tissue sections with BODIPY™ 493/503 (Invitrogen). After three washes in PBS, sections were incubated with a 10 µg/ml solution of BODIPY™ 493/503 in PBS (1:100 from a stock 1 mg/ml solution in DMSO) for 15 min at room temperature. Following four washes in PBS, sections were incubated for 90 s with TrueVIEW (Vector Laboratories), washed by immersing in PBS for 5 min, then tap-dried and mounted in VECTASHIELD Vibrance™ Antifade. Sections were imaged using a Zeiss LSM 710 confocal microscope at ×20 (Plan-Apochromat ×20/0.8 M27) and ×63 (Plan-Apochromat ×63/1.40 Oil DIC M27) magnification. Tile scans were set to cover an area of 3541 × 3542 microns for all sections. ImageJ was used to remove background BODIPY signals and calculate the area covered by the thresholded BODIPY on the stitched images. To compare the area covered by BODIPY in tumour and background, we used a paired t test at a patient level, after confirming the normal distribution of the data using a Shapiro–Wilk test.

Foetal lung integration

To investigate the oncofetal reprogramming of myeloid cells in NSCLC, we took advantage of a published scRNA-seq dataset of foetal lung myeloid cells 55 and the published “MoMac-VERSE” [  56 . The expression of the “STAB1 signature genes” and of the “AMɸ signature genes” across lung foetal myeloid cells was determined using the AddModuleScore function in Seurat v4.3. To combine foetal lung and adult lung tumour-infiltrating myeloid cells, we isolated the myeloid cells from our tumour and background datasets and integrated those with the aforementioned foetal lung myeloid dataset using the Pegasus package, following the following workflow: (i) remove rarely expressed genes (less than 10 cells), normalisation and log1p transformation, (ii) robust and highly-variable gene selection, (iii) PCA with optimal PC number determined by random matrix theory (resulting in 75 PCs), (iv) batch effect correction using Harmony 67 , and (v) Leiden clustering on neighbourhood graph. The dendrogram was built by estimating the correlation distance between cell types on the harmonised PC embedding space, under complete linkage criterion of hierarchical clustering. The UMAP was computed to obtain a 2D summary of the harmonised PC space.

10x Genomics Visium spatial transcriptomics

Tissues were frozen in dry-ice-cooled isopentane and stored in air-tight tissue cryovials at −80 °C. Prior to undertaking any spatial transcriptomics protocol, the tissues were embedded in OCT compound and tested for RNA quality with an Agilent BioAnalyser. Tissues with RNA integrity (RIN) values > 7 were cryosectioned in a pre-cooled cryostat at 10 μm thickness. Two consecutive sections were cryosectioned at 10 μm thickness in a pre-cooled cryostat and transferred to the four 6.5 mm × 6.5 mm capture areas of the gene expression slide. Slides were fixed in methanol for 30 min prior to staining with H&E and then imaged using the Nanozoomer slide scanner. The tissues underwent permeabilization for 24 min. Reverse transcription and second strand synthesis was performed on the slide with cDNA quantification using qRT-PCR using KAPA SYBR FAST-qPCR kit (KAPA Biosystems) and analysed on the QuantStudio (ThermoFisher). Following library construction, these were quantified and pooled at 2.25 nM concentration. Pooled libraries from each slide were sequenced on NovaSeq SP (Illumina) using 150 base pair paired-end dual-indexed set-up to obtain a sequencing depth of ~50,000 reads as per 10x Genomics recommendations. The sequencing libraries were then processed by SpaceRanger (version 1.1.0) on the reference GRCh38 human reference genome to estimate gene expression on spots.

Spatial cell typing with cell2location

We used cell2location 34 to deconvolute the cellular composition of each capture area (spot). As our scRNA-seq cells were annotated independently for tumour and the combined B/H datasets, we applied the deconvolution model separately as well, using tumour annotation to infer spatial cell composition of tumour sections, and background annotations for background datasets. Only spots with total UMI counts above 800 were used in downstream analysis.

The cell-type abundance in tumour and background sections were computed by summing up the q05 cell abundance, as estimated by cell2location, across spots that passed QC. Cell-type composition was computed by normalising each cell type’s abundance with the total abundance of all cell types. We compared cell-type composition between tumour and background with Wilcoxon signed-rank test, followed by Bonferroni correction.

On tumour sections, we estimated the correlation distance on cell-type composition across valid spots, applied hierarchical clustering with complete linkage, and visualised the results as a dendrogram. In addition, we applied non-negative matrix factorisation analysis to the q05 estimation of cell-type abundance with eight factors.

Ligand–receptor colocalization analysis

To study the expression of ligand–receptor pairs on the 10X Visium, we first binarised the expression of each gene in the LR pairs in the spots that passed QC. We considered a gene being expressed in a spot if its cell2location estimated abundance were higher than the median counts for that gene in the corresponding section. We counted spots where both genes in each LR pair were either co-expressed or not, in tumour and background sections from the same patient, and subsequently, applied the χ 2 test on the contingency table. To correct for multiple comparisons, we adjusted the P value using a conservative Bonferroni correction for all the LRs enriched in tumours in the cellphoneDB analysis (309 * 8 patients). LRs were considered significantly enriched in tumour if the Bonferroni-adjusted P value was lower than 0.05 in at least four patients.

Multiplexed Immunofluorescence

5 μm thick sections were generated from NSCLC FFPE tumour blocks. An antibody cocktail was prepared with optimal dilutions of each of the following conjugated antibodies: anti-human Stabilin-1 antibody (clone #840449, catalogue #MAB3825, R&D systems) was conjugated to a custom oligo barcode according to instructions in Akoya Biosciences’ antibody conjugation kit (Conjugation kit, #7000009; Akoya) while human CD68 (clone #KP1, catalogue #4550113, Akoya) and human PanCK (clone AE-1/AE-3, catalogue #4150020, Akoya) were obtained directly pre-conjugated to oligo barcodes from Akoya Biosciences. Complementary oligo-conjugated fluorophore reporters were obtained from Akoya Biosciences. Tissue multiplexed immunofluorescence staining and image acquisition were performed according to Akoya Phenocycler-Fusion user guide (PD-000011 Rev. A., Akoya). OME-TIFF files were generated and processed for image analysis.

Image analysis

Analysis of the multiplexed immunofluorescence images (generated from Akoya Phenocycler-Fusion platform) was performed using Visiopharm (version 2023.09.3.15043 × 64) on the entire tissue area. Briefly, cell segmentation (including both nuclear and cytoplasmic segmentation) was first performed using Visiopharm’s “Cell Detection, AI (Fluorescence)” (version 2023.09.3.15043 × 64) with its default parameters. After cell segmentation, Visiopharm’s “Phenoplex Guided Workflow” was used. DAPI (nucleus), CD68 (cell body) and STAB1 (cell body) variables were selected and manually thresholded to define positive and negative cells for each marker and generate a co-occurrence matrix. Macrophages were defined as [DAPI + , CD68 + ] while STAB1+ macrophages were defined as [DAPI + , CD68 + , STAB1 + ].

Reporting summary

Further information on research design is available in the  Nature Portfolio Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Data availability

The scRNA-seq and Visium datasets generated in this study are publicly available at BioStudies ( https://www.ebi.ac.uk/biostudies/ ) with accession numbers E-MTAB-13526 and E-MTAB-13530 , respectively. The remaining data are available within the Article, Supplementary Information or Source Data file  Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The scripts used for all the analyses and to produce all the figures in the manuscript are available at https://gitlab.com/cvejic-group/lung and https://github.com/sdentro/copykat_pipeline .

Sung, H. et al. Global cancer statistics 2020: GLOBOCAN estimates of incidence and mortality worldwide for 36 cancers in 185 countries. CA. Cancer J. Clin . 71 , 209–249 (2021).

Siegel, R. L., Miller, K. D. & Jemal, A. Cancer statistics, 2018. Ca. Cancer J. Clin. 68 , 7–30 (2018).

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Nicholson, A. G. et al. The International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer Lung Cancer Staging Project: proposals for the revision of the clinical and pathologic staging of small cell lung cancer in the forthcoming eighth edition of the TNM classification for lung cancer. J. Thorac. Oncol. 11 , 300–311 (2016).

Mantovani, A., Allavena, P., Marchesi, F. & Garlanda, C. Macrophages as tools and targets in cancer therapy. Nat. Rev. Drug Discov. 21 , 799–820 (2022).

Article   CAS   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

DeNardo, D. G. & Ruffell, B. Macrophages as regulators of tumour immunity and immunotherapy. Nat. Rev. Immunol. 19 , 369–382 (2019).

Thai, A. A., Solomon, B. J., Sequist, L. V., Gainor, J. F. & Heist, R. S. Lung cancer. Lancet 398 , 535–554 (2021).

Leader, A. M. et al. Single-cell analysis of human non-small cell lung cancer lesions refines tumor classification and patient stratification. Cancer Cell 39 , 1594–1609.e12 (2021).

Wu, F. et al. Single-cell profiling of tumor heterogeneity and the microenvironment in advanced non-small cell lung cancer. Nat. Commun. 12 , 2540 (2021).

Article   ADS   CAS   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Kim, N. et al. Single-cell RNA sequencing demonstrates the molecular and cellular reprogramming of metastatic lung adenocarcinoma. Nat. Commun. 11 , 2285 (2020).

Guo, X. et al. Global characterization of T cells in non-small-cell lung cancer by single-cell sequencing. Nat. Med. 24 , 978–985 (2018).

Article   CAS   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Chen, J. et al. Single-cell transcriptome and antigen-immunoglobin analysis reveals the diversity of B cells in non-small cell lung cancer. Genome Biol. 21 , 152 (2020).

Zilionis, R. et al. Single-cell transcriptomics of human and mouse lung cancers reveals conserved myeloid populations across individuals and species. Immunity 50 , 1317–1334.e10 (2019).

Lavin, Y. et al. Innate immune landscape in early lung adenocarcinoma by paired single-cell analyses. Cell 169 , 750–765.e17 (2017).

Salcher, S. et al. High-resolution single-cell atlas reveals diversity and plasticity of tissue-resident neutrophils in non-small cell lung cancer. Cancer Cell 40 , 1503–1520.e8 (2022).

Maynard, A. et al. Therapy-induced evolution of human lung cancer revealed by single-cell RNA sequencing. Cell 182 , 1232–1251.e22 (2020).

Adams, D. L. et al. Circulating giant macrophages as a potential biomarker of solid tumors. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 111 , 3514–3519 (2014).

Ali, A., Adams, D. L., Kasabwala, D. M., Tang, C.-M. & Ho, T. H. Cancer associated macrophage-like cells in metastatic renal cell carcinoma predicts for poor prognosis and tracks treatment response in real time. Sci. Rep. 13 , 10544 (2023).

Gironda, D. J. et al. Cancer associated macrophage-like cells and prognosis of esophageal cancer after chemoradiation therapy. J. Transl. Med. 18 , 413 (2020).

Manjunath, Y. et al. Tumor-cell–macrophage fusion cells as liquid biomarkers and tumor enhancers in cancer. Int. J. Mol. Sci. 21 , 1872 (2020).

Manjunath, Y. et al. Circulating giant tumor-macrophage fusion cells are independent prognosticators in patients with NSCLC. J. Thorac. Oncol. 15 , 1460–1471 (2020).

Sutton, T. L. et al. Circulating cells with macrophage-like characteristics in cancer: the importance of circulating neoplastic-immune hybrid cells in cancer. Cancers 14 , 3871 (2022).

Lotfollahi, M. et al. Mapping single-cell data to reference atlases by transfer learning. Nat. Biotechnol. 40 , 121–130 (2022).

Collin, M. & Bigley, V. Human dendritic cell subsets: an update. Immunology 154 , 3–20 (2018).

Li, C., Jiang, P., Wei, S., Xu, X. & Wang, J. Regulatory T cells in tumor microenvironment: new mechanisms, potential therapeutic strategies and future prospects. Mol. Cancer 19 , 116 (2020).

Article   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Wu, Y. et al. A local human Vδ1 T cell population is associated with survival in nonsmall-cell lung cancer. Nat. Cancer 3 , 696–709 (2022).

Mensurado, S., Blanco-Domínguez, R. & Silva-Santos, B. The emerging roles of γδ T cells in cancer immunotherapy. Nat. Rev. Clin. Oncol. 20 , 178–191 (2023).

Park, M. D. et al. TREM2 macrophages drive NK cell paucity and dysfunction in lung cancer. Nat. Immunol. 24 , 792–801 (2023).

Relli, V., Trerotola, M., Guerra, E. & Alberti, S. Abandoning the notion of non-small cell lung cancer. Trends Mol. Med. 25 , 585–594 (2019).

Efremova, M., Vento-Tormo, M., Teichmann, S. A. & Vento-Tormo, R. CellPhoneDB: inferring cell-cell communication from combined expression of multi-subunit ligand-receptor complexes. Nat. Protoc. 15 , 1484–1506 (2020).

Louche, C. D. D. & Roghanian, A. Human inhibitory leukocyte Ig-like receptors: from immunotolerance to immunotherapy. JCI Insight 7 , e151553 (2022).

Camidge, D. R., Doebele, R. C. & Kerr, K. M. Comparing and contrasting predictive biomarkers for immunotherapy and targeted therapy of NSCLC. Nat. Rev. Clin. Oncol. 16 , 341–355 (2019).

Chae, Y. K. et al. Current landscape and future of dual anti-CTLA4 and PD-1/PD-L1 blockade immunotherapy in cancer; lessons learned from clinical trials with melanoma and non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). J. Immunother. Cancer 6 , 39 (2018).

Fukuhara, M. et al. The clinical significance of tertiary lymphoid structure and its relationship with peripheral blood characteristics in patients with surgically resected non-small cell lung cancer: a single-center, retrospective study. Cancer Immunol. Immunother. 71 , 1129–1137 (2022).

Kleshchevnikov, V. et al. Cell2location maps fine-grained cell types in spatial transcriptomics. Nat. Biotechnol. 40 , 661–671 (2022).

Liu, J. et al. Concordance of MERFISH spatial transcriptomics with bulk and single-cell RNA sequencing. Life Sci. Alliance 6 , e202201701 (2023).

Article   ADS   CAS   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Chananchida, S., Robin, B., Ruth, S. & Yvan, S. Spotless: a reproducible pipeline for benchmarking cell type deconvolution in spatial transcriptomics. eLife 12 , RP88431 (2023).

Gao, R. et al. Delineating copy number and clonal substructure in human tumors from single-cell transcriptomes. Nat. Biotechnol. 39 , 599–608 (2021).

Wolf, F. A. et al. PAGA: graph abstraction reconciles clustering with trajectory inference through a topology preserving map of single cells. Genome Biol. 20 , 59 (2019).

DeBerardinis, R. J. & Chandel, N. S. Fundamentals of cancer metabolism. Sci. Adv. 2 , e1600200 (2016).

Article   ADS   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

American Association for Cancer Research. Lactate fuels the TCA cycle in non-small cell lung cancer. Cancer Discov . 7 , OF10 (2017).

Hansen, L. V., Skov, B. G., Ploug, M. & Pappot, H. Tumour cell expression of C4.4A, a structural homologue of the urokinase receptor, correlates with poor prognosis in non-small cell lung cancer. Lung Cancer 58 , 260–266 (2007).

Willuda, J. et al. Preclinical antitumor efficacy of BAY 1129980—a novel Auristatin-based anti-C4.4A (LYPD3) antibody–drug conjugate for the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer. Mol. Cancer Ther. 16 , 893–904 (2017).

Gibbings, S. L. et al. Transcriptome analysis highlights the conserved difference between embryonic and postnatal-derived alveolar macrophages. Blood 126 , 1357–1366 (2015).

Chen, J. W. & Dhahbi, J. Lung adenocarcinoma and lung squamous cell carcinoma cancer classification, biomarker identification, and gene expression analysis using overlapping feature selection methods. Sci. Rep. 11 , 13323 (2021).

Xiao, J. et al. Eight potential biomarkers for distinguishing between lung adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma. Oncotarget 8 , 71759–71771 (2017).

Blériot, C., Chakarov, S. & Ginhoux, F. Determinants of resident tissue macrophage identity and function. Immunity 52 , 957–970 (2020).

Huang, B., Song, B. & Xu, C. Cholesterol metabolism in cancer: mechanisms and therapeutic opportunities. Nat. Metab. 2 , 132–141 (2020).

Nugent, A. A. et al. TREM2 regulates microglial cholesterol metabolism upon chronic phagocytic challenge. Neuron 105 , 837–854.e9 (2020).

Molgora, M. et al. TREM2 modulation remodels the tumor myeloid landscape enhancing anti-PD-1 immunotherapy. Cell 182 , 886–900.e17 (2020).

Khantakova, D., Brioschi, S. & Molgora, M. Exploring the impact of TREM2 in tumor-associated macrophages. Vaccines 10 , 943 (2022).

Ward, D. M. & Kaplan, J. Ferroportin-mediated iron transport: expression and regulation. Biochim. Biophys. Acta 1823 , 1426–1433 (2012).

Recalcati, S. et al. Differential regulation of iron homeostasis during human macrophage polarized activation. Eur. J. Immunol. 40 , 824–835 (2010).

Sharma, A., Blériot, C., Currenti, J. & Ginhoux, F. Oncofetal reprogramming in tumour development and progression. Nat. Rev. Cancer 22 , 593–602 (2022).

Bian, Z. et al. Deciphering human macrophage development at single-cell resolution. Nature 582 , 571–576 (2020).

He, P. et al. A human fetal lung cell atlas uncovers proximal-distal gradients of differentiation and key regulators of epithelial fates. Cell 185 , 4841–4860.e25 (2022).

Mulder, K. et al. Cross-tissue single-cell landscape of human monocytes and macrophages in health and disease. Immunity 54 , 1883–1900.e5 (2021).

Sharma, A. et al. Onco-fetal reprogramming of endothelial cells drives immunosuppressive macrophages in hepatocellular carcinoma. Cell 183 , 377–394.e21 (2020).

Chauvin, J.-M. & Zarour, H. M. TIGIT in cancer immunotherapy. J. Immunother. Cancer 8 , e000957 (2020).

Acharya, N., Sabatos-Peyton, C. & Anderson, A. C. Tim-3 finds its place in the cancer immunotherapy landscape. J. Immunother. Cancer 8 , e000911 (2020).

GlaxoSmithKline. A Phase 1 First-Time-in-Human, Open-Label Study of GSK6097608 Administered as Monotherapy and in Combination With Anticancer Agents in Participants With Advanced Solid Tumors . https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT04446351 (2023).

Chen, Y., Fan, Z., Yang, Y. & Gu, C. Iron metabolism and its contribution to cancer (review). Int. J. Oncol. 54 , 1143–1154 (2019).

CAS   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Viitala, M. et al. Immunotherapeutic blockade of macrophage clever-1 reactivates the CD8+ T-cell response against immunosuppressive tumors. Clin. Cancer Res. 25 , 3289–3303 (2019).

Park, S.-Y. et al. Stabilin-1 mediates phosphatidylserine-dependent clearance of cell corpses in alternatively activated macrophages. J. Cell Sci. 122 , 3365–3373 (2009).

Lun, A. T. L. et al. EmptyDrops: distinguishing cells from empty droplets in droplet-based single-cell RNA sequencing data. Genome Biol. 20 , 63 (2019).

Wolf, F. A., Angerer, P. & Theis, F. J. SCANPY: large-scale single-cell gene expression data analysis. Genome Biol. 19 , 15 (2018).

Wolock, S. L., Lopez, R. & Klein, A. M. Scrublet: computational identification of cell doublets in single-cell transcriptomic data. Cell Syst. 8 , 281–291.e9 (2019).

Korsunsky, I. et al. Fast, sensitive and accurate integration of single-cell data with harmony. Nat. Methods 16 , 1289–1296 (2019).

Tran, H. T. N. et al. A benchmark of batch-effect correction methods for single-cell RNA sequencing data. Genome Biol. 21 , 12 (2020).

Traag, V. A., Waltman, L. & van Eck, N. J. From Louvain to Leiden: guaranteeing well-connected communities. Sci. Rep. 9 , 5233 (2019).

McInnes, L., Healy, J. & Melville, J. UMAP: uniform manifold approximation and projection for dimension reduction. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.03426 (2018).

Mann, H. B. & Whitney, D. R. On a test of whether one of two random variables is stochastically larger than the other. Ann. Math. Stat. 18 , 50–60 (1947).

Article   MathSciNet   Google Scholar  

Haynes, W. Bonferroni correction. In Encyclopedia of Systems Biology (eds Dubitzky, W. et al.) 154–154 (Springer New York, 2013).

Love, M. I., Huber, W. & Anders, S. Moderated estimation of fold change and dispersion for RNA-seq data with DESeq2. Genome Biol. 15 , 550 (2014).

Yu, G., Wang, L.-G., Han, Y. & He, Q.-Y. clusterProfiler: an R package for comparing biological themes among gene clusters. Omics J. Integr. Biol. 16 , 284–287 (2012).

Article   CAS   Google Scholar  

Li, B. et al. Cumulus provides cloud-based data analysis for large-scale single-cell and single-nucleus RNA-seq. Nat. Methods 17 , 793–798 (2020).

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors are greatly thankful to the Papworth Hospital Research Tissue Bank for providing samples with data, and in particular to D. Rassl. The authors would like to thank L. Campos for the annotation of tumour histologies; A.M. Ranzoni, B. Myers and E. Panada for sample collection and processing; M. Nelson for computational support with initial clustering of scRNA-Seq and application of cell2location; Alessandro Di Tullio, GSK for insightful discussions; Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute (CRUK CI) (Grant # CTRQQR-2021\100012) Genomics Core Facility for library preparation and sequencing services; Wellcome Sanger Institute (WSI) DNA pipelines for their contribution to sequencing the data; S. Leonard from New Pipeline Group (NPG) for pre-processing of sequencing data; the Cambridge NIHR BRC Cell Phenotyping Hub for support with cell sorting. We thank R. Möller, P. Rainer, and U. Tiemann for critically reading the manuscript. This study was conceived and funded by Open Targets (OTAR2060, A.C.); Core support grants from the Wellcome Trust and Wellcome Sanger Institute and both Wellcome and the MRC to the Wellcome Trust-Medical Research Council Cambridge Stem Cell Institute (203151/Z/16/Z, A.C.); European Research Council (CONTEXT 101043559, A.C.); Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Author information

These authors contributed equally: Marco De Zuani, Haoliang Xue.

Authors and Affiliations

Wellcome Sanger Institute, Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, UK

Marco De Zuani, Haoliang Xue, Jun Sung Park, Omer Bayraktar & Ana Cvejic

OpenTargets, Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, UK

Marco De Zuani, Haoliang Xue, Jun Sung Park, Emmanouil I. Athanasiadis, Moritz Gerstung, Omer Bayraktar & Ana Cvejic

Department of Haematology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Marco De Zuani, Haoliang Xue & Ana Cvejic

Wellcome Trust—Medical Research Council Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, Cambridge, UK

Marco De Zuani & Haoliang Xue

European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute EMBL-EBI, Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, UK

Jun Sung Park, Stefan C. Dentro, Zaira Seferbekova & Moritz Gerstung

Division of Artificial Intelligence in Oncology, DKFZ, Heidelberg, Germany

Stefan C. Dentro & Moritz Gerstung

Precision Medicine and Computational Biology, Sanofi, Cambridge, MA, USA

Julien Tessier & Angela Hadjipanayis

Precision Medicine and Computational Biology, Sanofi, Paris, France

Sandra Curras-Alonso

Medical Image and Signal Processing Laboratory (MEDISP), Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of West Attica, Athens, Greece

Emmanouil I. Athanasiadis

Biotech Research & Innovation Centre (BRIC), University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Contributions

A.C. conceived the study and oversaw all experiments and analysis. M.D.Z. performed experiments and analysis. H.X. led spatial transcriptomics analyses and co-analysed the scRNA-seq data. J.S.P. performed Visum experiments under O.B. supervision. Z.S. led the application of CellPhoneDB under M.G. supervision. S.C.D. led CopyCAT analysis. J.T. and S.C.A. performed Multiplexed Immunofluorescence under A.H. supervision. A.H. contributed to the interpretation of results. E.A. performed DEA. A.C. and M.D.Z. wrote the manuscript, and all authors edited and reviewed the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ana Cvejic .

Ethics declarations

Competing interests.

The authors declare no competing interests.

Peer review

Peer review information.

Nature Communications thanks Charles Powell and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. A peer review file is available.

Additional information

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary information

Supplementary information, peer review file, reporting summary, description of additional supplementary files, supplementary dataset 1, source data, source data file, rights and permissions.

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

De Zuani, M., Xue, H., Park, J.S. et al. Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics analysis of non-small cell lung cancer. Nat Commun 15 , 4388 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-48700-8

Download citation

Received : 02 November 2023

Accepted : 08 May 2024

Published : 23 May 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-48700-8

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

By submitting a comment you agree to abide by our Terms and Community Guidelines . If you find something abusive or that does not comply with our terms or guidelines please flag it as inappropriate.

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

Sign up for the Nature Briefing: Cancer newsletter — what matters in cancer research, free to your inbox weekly.