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The customer journey — definition, stages, and benefits

Businesses need to understand their customers to increase engagement, sales, and retention. But building an understanding with your customers isn’t easy.

The customer journey is the road a person takes to convert, but this journey isn’t always obvious to business owners. Understanding every step of that journey is key to business success. After reading this article, you’ll understand the customer journey better and how to use it to improve the customer experience while achieving your business goals.

This post will discuss:

• What a customer journey is

Customer journey stages

Benefits of knowing the customer journey.

• What a customer journey map is

How to create a customer journey map

Use the customer journey map to optimize the customer experience, what is a customer journey.

The customer journey is a series of steps — starting with brand awareness before a person is even a customer — that leads to a purchase and eventual customer loyalty. Businesses use the customer journey to better understand their customers’ experience, with the goal of optimizing that experience at every touchpoint.

Giving customers a positive customer experience is important for getting customers to trust a business, so optimizing the customer journey has never mattered more. By mastering the customer journey, you can design customer experiences that will lead to better customer relationships, loyalty, and long-term retention .

Customer journey vs. the buyer journey

The stages of the customer’s journey are different from the stages of the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey follows the customer experience from initial awareness of a brand to buying a product. The customer journey extends beyond the purchase and follows how customers interact with your product and how they share it with others.

Every lead goes through several stages to become a loyal customer. The better this experience is for customers at each stage, the more likely your leads are to stick around.

Ensure that your marketing, sales, and customer service teams optimize for these five stages of the customer journey:

1. Awareness

In the awareness phase, your target audience is just becoming aware of your brand and products. They need information or a solution to a problem, so they search for that information via social media and search engines.

For example, if someone searches on Google for pens for left-handed people, their customer journey begins when they’re first aware of your brand’s left-handed pen.

At this stage, potential customers learn about your business via web content, social media, influencers, and even their friends and family. However, this isn’t the time for hard sells. Customers are simply gathering information at this stage, so you should focus first on answering their questions and building trust.

2. Consideration

In the consideration phase, customers begin to consider your brand as a solution to their problem. They’re comparing your products to other businesses and alternative solutions, so you need to give these shoppers a reason to stick around.

Consideration-stage customers want to see product features that lean heavily toward solving problems and content that doesn’t necessarily push a sale. At this stage, businesses need to position their solution as a better alternative. For example, a nutrition coaching app might create content explaining the differences between using the app and working with an in-person nutritionist — while subtly promoting the benefits of choosing the app.

3. Purchase

The purchase stage is also called the decision stage because at this stage customers are ready to make a buying decision. Keep in mind that their decision might be to go with a competing solution, so purchase-stage buyers won’t always convert to your brand.

As a business, it’s your job to persuade shoppers at this stage to buy from you. Provide information on pricing, share comparison guides to showcase why you’re the superior option, and set up abandoned cart email sequences.

4. Retention

The customer journey doesn’t end once a shopper makes their first purchase. Once you’ve converted a customer, you need to focus on keeping them around and driving repeat business. Sourcing new customers is often more expensive than retaining existing clients, so this strategy can help you cut down on marketing costs and increase profits.

The key to the retention stage is to maintain positive, engaging relationships between your brand and its customers. Try strategies like regular email outreach, coupons and sales, or exclusive communities to encourage customer loyalty.

5. Advocacy

In the advocacy stage, customers are so delighted with your products and services that they spread the word to their friends and family. This goes a step beyond retention because the customer is actively encouraging other people to make purchases.

Customer journeys don’t have a distinct end because brands should always aim to please even their most loyal customers. In the advocacy stage of the customer journey, you can offer referral bonuses, loyalty programs, and special deals for your most active customers to encourage further advocacy.

Being aware of the customer journey helps shed more light on your target audience’s expectations and needs. In fact, 80% of companies compete primarily on customer experience. This means optimizing the customer journey will not only encourage your current customers to remain loyal but will also make you more competitive in acquiring new business.

More specifically, acknowledging the customer journey can help you:

• Understand customer behavior. Classifying every action your customers take will help you figure out why they do what they do. When you understand a shopper’s “why,” you’re better positioned to support their needs.
• Identify touchpoints to reach the customer. Many businesses invest in multichannel marketing, but not all of these touchpoints are valuable. By focusing on the customer journey, you’ll learn which of these channels are the most effective for generating sales. This helps businesses save time and money by focusing on only the most effective channels.
• Analyze the stumbling blocks in products or services. If leads frequently bail before buying, that could be a sign that something is wrong with your product or buying experience. Being conscious of the customer journey can help you fix issues with your products or services before they become a more expensive problem.
• Support your marketing efforts. Marketing requires a deep familiarity with your target audience. Documenting the customer journey makes it easier for your marketing team to meet shoppers’ expectations and solve their pain points.
• Increase customer engagement. Seeing the customer journey helps your business target the most relevant audience for your product or service. Plus, it improves the customer experience and increases engagement. In fact, 29.6% of customers will refuse to embrace branded digital channels if they have a poor experience, so increasing positive customer touchpoints has never been more important.
• Achieve more conversions. Mapping your customers’ journey can help you increase conversions by tailoring and personalizing your approach and messages to give your audience exactly what they want.
• Generate more ROI. You need to see a tangible return on your marketing efforts. Fortunately, investing in the customer journey improves ROI across the board. For example, brands with a good customer experience can increase revenue by 2–7% .
• Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. Today, 94% of customers say a positive experience motivates them to make future purchases. Optimizing the customer journey helps you meet shopper expectations, which increases satisfaction and loyalty.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of every step your customer takes from being a lead to eventually becoming an advocate for your brand. The goal of customer journey mapping is to simplify the complex process of how customers interact with your brand at every stage of their journey.

Businesses shouldn’t use a rigid, one-size-fits-all customer journey map. Instead, they should plan flexible, individual types of customer journeys — whether they’re based on a certain demographic or on individual customer personas. To design the most effective customer journey map, your brand needs to understand a customer’s:

• Actions. Learn which actions your customer takes at every stage. Look for common patterns. For example, you might see that consideration-stage shoppers commonly look for reviews.
• Motivations. Customer intent matters. A person’s motivations change at every stage of the customer journey, and your map needs to account for that. Include visual representation of the shopper’s motivations at each stage. At the awareness stage, their motivation might be to gather information to solve their problem. At the purchase stage, it might be to get the lowest price possible.
• Questions. Brands can take customers’ common questions at every stage of the customer journey and reverse-engineer them into useful content. For example, shoppers at the consideration stage might ask, “What’s the difference between a DIY car wash and hiring a professional detailer?” You can offer content that answers their question while subtly promoting your car detailing business.
• Pain points. Everybody has a problem that they’re trying to solve, whether by just gathering intel or by purchasing products. Recognizing your leads’ pain points will help you craft proactive, helpful marketing campaigns that solve their biggest problems.

Customer journey touchpoints

Every stage of the customer journey should also include touchpoints. Customer touchpoints are the series of interactions with your brand — such as an ad on Facebook, an email, or a website chatbot — that occur at the various stages of the customer journey across multiple channels. A customer’s actions, motivations, questions, and pain points will differ at each stage and at each touchpoint.

For example, a customer searching for a fishing rod and reading posts about how they’re made will have very different motivations and questions from when later comparing specs and trying to stay within budget. Likewise, that same customer will have different pain points when calling customer service after buying a particular rod.

It might sound like more work, but mapping the entire customer journey helps businesses create a better customer experience throughout the entire lifecycle of a customer’s interaction with your brand.

Before jumping into the steps of how to create the customer journey map, first be clear that your customer journey map needs to illustrate the following:

• Customer journey stages. Ensure that your customer journey map includes every stage of the customer journey. Don’t just focus on the stages approaching the purchase — focus on the retention and advocacy stages as well.
• Touchpoints. Log the most common touchpoints customers have at every stage. For example, awareness-stage touchpoints might include your blog, social media, or search engines. Consideration-stage touchpoints could include reviews or demo videos on YouTube. You don’t need to list all potential touchpoints. Only list the most common or relevant touchpoints at each stage.
• The full customer experience. Customers’ actions, motivations, questions, and pain points will change at every stage — and every touchpoint — during the customer journey. Ensure your customer journey map touches on the full experience for each touchpoint.
• Your brand’s solutions. Finally, the customer journey map needs to include a branded solution for each stage and touchpoint. This doesn’t necessarily mean paid products. For example, awareness-stage buyers aren’t ready to make a purchase, so your brand’s solution at this stage might be a piece of gated content. With these necessary elements in mind, creating an effective customer journey map is a simple three-step process.

1. Create buyer personas

A buyer persona is a fictitious representation of your target audience. It’s a helpful internal tool that businesses use to better understand their audience’s background, assumptions, pain points, and needs. Each persona differs in terms of actions, motivations, questions, and pain points, which is why businesses need to create buyer personas before they map the customer journey.

To create a buyer persona, you will need to:

• Gather and analyze customer data. Collect information on your customers through analytics, surveys, and market research.
• Segment customers into specific buying groups. Categorize customers into buying groups based on shared characteristics — such as demographics or location. This will give you multiple customer segments to choose from.
• Build the personas. Select the segment you want to target and build a persona for that segment. At a minimum, the buyer persona needs to define the customers’ basic traits, such as their personal background, as well as their motivations and pain points.

For example, ClearVoice created a buyer persona called “John The Marketing Manager.” The in-depth persona details the target customer’s pain points, pet peeves, and potential reactions to help ClearVoice marketers create more customer-focused experiences.

2. List the touchpoints at each customer journey stage

Now that you’ve created your buyer personas, you need to sketch out each of the five stages of the customer journey and then list all of the potential touchpoints each buyer persona has with your brand at every one of these five stages. This includes listing the most common marketing channels where customers can interact with you. Remember, touchpoints differ by stage, so it’s critical to list which touchpoints happen at every stage so you can optimize your approach for every buyer persona.

Every customer’s experience is different, but these touchpoints most commonly line up with each stage of the customer journey:

• Awareness. Advertising, social media, company blog, referrals from friends and family, how-to videos, streaming ads, and brand activation events.
• Consideration. Email, sales calls, SMS, landing pages, and reviews.
• Purchase. Live chat, chatbots, cart abandonment emails, retargeting ads, and product print inserts.
• Retention. Thank you emails, product walkthroughs, sales follow-ups, and online communities.
• Advocacy. Surveys, loyalty programs, and in-person events.

Leave no stone unturned. Logging the most relevant touchpoints at each stage eliminates blind spots and ensures your brand is there for its customers, wherever they choose to connect with you.

3. Map the customer experience at each touchpoint

Now that you’ve defined each touchpoint at every stage of the customer journey, it’s time to detail the exact experience you need to create for each touchpoint. Every touchpoint needs to consider the customer’s:

• Actions. Describe how the customer got to this touchpoint and what they’re going to do now that they’re here.
• Motivations. Specify how the customer feels at this moment. Are they frustrated, confused, curious, or excited? Explain why they feel this way.
• Questions. Every customer has questions. Anticipate the questions someone at this stage and touchpoint would have — and how your brand can answer those questions.
• Pain points. Define the problem the customer has — and how you can solve that problem at this stage. For example, imagine you sell women’s dress shoes. You’re focusing on the buyer persona of a 36-year-old Canadian woman who works in human resources. Her touchpoints might include clicking on your Facebook ad, exploring your online shop, but then abandoning her cart. After receiving a coupon from you, she finally buys. Later, she decides to exchange the shoes for a different color. After the exchange, she leaves a review. Note how she acts at each of these touchpoints and detail her likely pain points, motivations, and questions, for each scenario. Note on the map where you intend to respond to the customer’s motivations and pain points with your brand’s solutions. If you can create custom-tailored solutions for every stage of the funnel, that’s even better.

A positive customer experience is the direct result of offering customers personalized, relevant, or meaningful content and other brand interactions. By mapping your customers’ motivations and pain points with your brand’s solutions, you’ll find opportunities to improve the customer experience. When you truly address their deepest needs, you’ll increase engagement and generate more positive reviews.

Follow these strategies to improve the customer experience with your customer journey map:

• Prioritize objectives. Identify the stages of the customer journey where your brand has the strongest presence and take advantage of those points. For example, if leads at the consideration stage frequently subscribe to your YouTube channel, that gives you more opportunities to connect with loyal followers.
• Use an omnichannel approach to engage customers. Omnichannel marketing allows businesses to gather information and create a more holistic view of the customer journey. This allows you to personalize the customer experience on another level entirely. Use an omnichannel analytics solution that allows you to capture and analyze the true cross-channel experience.
• Personalize interactions at every stage. The goal of mapping the customer journey is to create more personalized, helpful experiences for your audience at every stage and touchpoint. For example, with the right data you can personalize the retail shopping experience and customer’s website experience.
• Cultivate a mutually trusting relationship. When consumer trust is low, brands have to work even harder to earn their customers’ trust. Back up your marketing promises with good customer service, personalized incentives, and loyalty programs.

Getting started with customer journeys

Customer journeys are complicated in an omnichannel environment, but mapping these journeys can help businesses better understand their customers. Customer journey maps help you deliver the exact experience your customers expect from your business while increasing engagement and sales.

When you’re ready to get started, trace the interactions your customers have at each stage of their journey with your brand. Adobe Customer Journey Analytics — a service built on Adobe Experience Platform — can break down, filter, and query years’ worth of data and combine it from every channel into a single interface. Real-time, omnichannel analysis and visualization let companies make better decisions with a holistic view of their business and the context behind every customer action.

Learn more about Customer Journey Analytics by watching the overview video .

https://business.adobe.com/blog/perspectives/introducing-adobes-customer-journey-maturity-model

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

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

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

Updated: April 17, 2024

Published: May 04, 2023

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

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

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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.

1. Set a goal for the journey map.

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

2. Survey customers to understand their buying journey.

What you think you know about the customer experience and what they actually experience can be very different. Speak to your customers directly to get an accurate snapshot of their journey.

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

Sometimes, customers need to be made aware of their specific pain points, and that’s where your customer service reps come in.

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

4. Consider customer journey mapping for each buyer persona.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customer Journey Map Design

Now that you know what goes into making a customer journey map, let’s take a little time to dive into design. How you lay out your journey map — from spacing to the colors you use — makes all of the difference. Check out some best practices below.

Create a clear layout and hierarchy.

Your customer journey map should be organized logically with a sequence that makes sense and a clear visual hierarchy.

Headings should make the sections pop. This allows you to differentiate between the stages of your customer’s journey. Bullets make the text easier to read and keep the information on your map clear.

Your goal is to design a journey map that’s easy to navigate and comprehend. A clean layout is essential to accomplishing this goal.

Make the most of icons and symbols.

We want our teammates to read documents, making the most of every word. However, the reality is that everyone skims. A text-heavy document often means that information gets lost.

Icons, symbols, and artistic elements make the reading experience more digestible. You can communicate different touch points, actions, and outcomes that are a part of your customer journey. Beyond that, symbols can communicate emotion without any words.

Leverage color coding.

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

Avoid clutter to create balance.

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

Maintain consistency.

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

Customer Journey Mapping Examples

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

1. HubSpot’s Customer Journey Map Templates

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

The offer includes the following:

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

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

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

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

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A complete guide to customer journey analytics.

13 min read Customer journey analytics can help you to nail down exactly why your customers behave the way they do and tie your customer experience efforts to financial outcomes. Learn how to use customer journey analytics for improved CX with our ultimate guide.

What is customer journey analytics?

Customer Journey Analytics is the process of understanding the impact of every interaction a customer has with your business.

Often, customer journey analytics starts with a customer journey map , which is presented as a graph, flow chart, or other visual that documents each stage of the relationship between a customer and a brand.

However, instead of just charting their customer journey on a map, customer journey analytics takes a further step to analyze what effect each interaction has on your customers’ decisions.

Further information is overlaid to help analyze how each interaction drives customers toward the end goal.

Customer journey analytics can include analysis of:

• Customer needs
• Emotional highs and lows
• Key metrics per step in the journey
• Customer satisfaction scores , customer effort scores , and other survey results

Customer journey analytics can help you to direct your customers’ attention and resolve any pain points that stop them from taking desired actions. It helps you to augment your customer experience and develop a customer journey that not only gets customers to where you want them to go, but helps them connect to the journey itself.

Learn the analytics and ROI on customer journey management in our free course. 

Customer journey analytics vs. customer journey mapping

Many brands have a broad sense of their customer journey but haven’t optimized it by creating a comprehensive customer journey map or analyzing what affects their customers’ experience.

Customer journey analytics and customer journey mapping are complementary but different processes. Here are the main ways in which they are distinct, and how they work together.

What is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping is the process of laying out the end-to-end journey in a clear way. Creating a map of every touchpoint your customer will experience means you can see what steps your customers take to reach the end goal of a purchase, signup, or other action.

Often, journey maps are documented at the process level. For example, an insurance provider would map the claims process, and a bank would document the new account process.

Some common components of customer journey maps include:

• The process being evaluated
• The stages of the journey
• Critical customer interactions and touchpoints
• Representative customer quotes
• Key customer expectations
• Metrics like satisfaction score, mention volume, NPS
• Trends in topics related to this part of the journey

Our ultimate guide to customer journey mapping can help you to draft your first customer journey map or optimize one you have already.

How do you use customer journey analytics with customer journey mapping?

As we’ve already explained, customer journey analytics is the process of gathering as much information as you can from every part of the journey and analyzing the journey for pain points and successes.

Understanding which parts of the journey function as planned and which obstacles are in the way of your customers’ progress means you can take action to ensure they complete their journey as you intend.

Benefits of customer journey analytics

There are several benefits to completing customer journey analytics. From better understanding your customers’ behavior to a better ROI for your customer experience , customer journey analytics gives you better insights and a more informed strategy for improvement.

Your brand becomes more customer-centric

Understanding the customer journey allows your company to be more customer-centric . It allows you to closely evaluate the activities, expectations, thoughts, and feelings of your customers . You learn what they like and dislike, how to move them through your buying cycle, and how to satisfy and retain them . When journey mapping is complemented with customer journey analytics it helps you understand the priority for your customer experience initiatives.

Your business becomes more unified

In addition, with the right focus, customer journey mapping and customer journey analytics break down internal silos. They empower you to streamline services across departments. Not only that, but they help to align everyone by providing a common understanding of the customer experience. Employees get greater visibility into what happens upstream and downstream of their interactions with customers, letting everybody provide a more consistent, high-quality experience.

You can find track issues as they happen

With a sophisticated customer journey analytics platform, you can pinpoint issues in real-time. You can test new approaches and see their influence on your customer experience and bottom line with analytics that update as quickly as you need them.

You see direct and indirect feedback in one place

Explicit feedback – for example, the information you gather through surveys – is easier to pinpoint to specific interactions customers have with your brand. The customer has an experience and directly after, you request input.

Implicit feedback is more complex to understand. This type of data might include operational data such as sales numbers, or it might cover social mentions, what your customers say on the phone to your care center, third-party reviews, and more.

Understanding how your audience thinks, feels, and acts in response to customer interactions without directly asking them might seem impossible, but with tools such as conversation analytics , you’re able to link your customer journey to this type of customer data.

See how Qualtrics CustomerXM enables customer journey analytics

An example of using customer journey analytics

Customer journey analytics can be used to understand the impact of sub-journeys limited to single processes – such as opening a new account – or the entire digital customer journey .

Below is an example of how you can use customer journey analytics to chart the success of each journey.

Resolving a customer satisfaction issue for a specific sub-journey

Let’s take a printer business that provides hardware to its customers. The brand has realized that the repair sub-journey is currently leading to low Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and a higher cost to serve per customer.

The journey

First, the brand needs to chart the customer journey. It looks like the below:

• A customer has an issue with their printing device
• They call the customer care center to schedule a repair
• The service agents arrive at their place of residence
• The repair is made

However, there are other ways this journey might unfold. For example:

• The service agents arrive at their place of residence but the customer is not present
• The repair cannot occur, so the customer has to call again to reschedule the repair
• The repair is made at a later date when the customer is present

The analysis

Overlaying the NPS scores on this latter journey, the company realizes that the NPS score drops when the customer has to reschedule the repair. Asking the customer to go through the same process once again to rebook their appointment is causing customers to feel less satisfied with their experience.

Using natural language processing (NLU), the team can also see that there is a more negative sentiment expressed in the open text question they have added to the NPS survey. With the additional calls to the care center, the cost to serve each customer also increases.

The resulting action  

The brand decides it’s best to provide other means to customers to book their appointments at a time to suit them. Offering customers a self-service booking system that they can access via their mobile on an app or through the website gives the customers more control over when their appointment occurs. Adding a facility to reschedule any booked appointments for a more convenient time and accentuating this with push or text notifications when the repair team is on their way can help to see if this reduces the instances of missed repairs and reduces the impact on the customer care center .

With customer journey analytics in place, the brand team can see if this improves NPS scores at the same points in the customer journey, and measure in financial terms the impact of actions taken for improved customer experience .

How to use customer journey analytics

Customer journey analytics provides the insight you need to successfully manage your customer’s journey. From lowering customer churn to helping you predict customer behavior, putting a customer journey analytics solution in place will help you to leverage your customer behavioral data for financial success.

But how do you start using customer journey analytics? Below is the outline of the actions you’ll need to take.

1. Map your customer journeys and aggregate data

First, you need to create a customer journey and aggregate the customer data that you already have. Good customer journey analytics tools will be able to do this for you, cutting down the time your team needs to spend sourcing data from third-party locations, customer service chat logs, and survey results.

Competent customer journey analytics software will also be able to track data in real-time, allowing you to build a comprehensive map that reacts to current customer behavior . It should also be able to draw data from numerous sources, helping you to break down traditional business silos and understanding customer interactions from all business angles: sales, marketing, and more.

Learn the five competencies for customer journey mapping

2. Analyze your customer behavior and data

Once you have your customer journeys mapped out and your data collected, you can link specific interactions to particular customer behavior, survey results, social media comments , and more. You’ll need a customer journey analytics solution to be able to link all of this data together in an efficient way.

3. Take action informed by data-led insights

Customer journey analytics provides you with the ability to see cause and effect, as well as providing you with concrete steps to change specific interactions or the entire customer journey. When customers react badly to specific processes or interactions, you can test how changes in your customer journeys affect their future decisions.

Not only that, but you can coordinate your teams across your business to work on customer satisfaction with their experience, based on the data you’ve analyzed. For example, if customers are led to purchase through your marketing but aren’t happy with their purchase, they will deal with your marketing , sales, and customer care teams. Understanding what specifically caused a problem for them means you can inform each team of actions they can take to improve.

How customer journey analytics can improve your customer experience

Brands often hit a wall when trying to measure customer experience . Charting your customers’ often nebulous sentiment and which actions have an impact on customer experience can be difficult without the right tools to hand.

Understanding the return on investment for specific actions taken for customer experience is difficult for a number of reasons:

• Data is siloed or overwhelming
• Business departments work separately with a lack of oversight
• Actions aren’t based on data
• There isn’t a way to track the impact of actions on customer experience

Qualtrics CustomerXM allows you to see the value of customer journeys with rich data analysis, provided through conversational analytics . With natural language understanding, Qualtrics is able to provide you unrivaled insights into customer emotions, sentiment, and more to paint a complete picture of friction points and their rationale. Powered by feedback from multiple areas of your business, you are able to create a plan of action with a tangible effect on your customer experience and business outcomes.

With a deeper understanding of customer behavior, your brand is able to not only understand the return on investment of your actions but develop a customer experience that delivers results. Extending your customer lifetime value , increasing customer satisfaction, and reducing customer churn becomes easier when you understand the triggers for the behavior.

Learn how to take action on customer journey management with our free online course

Related resources

Customer Journey

How to Create a Customer Journey Map 22 min read

B2b customer journey 13 min read, customer interactions 11 min read, consumer decision journey 14 min read, customer journey orchestration 12 min read, customer journey management 14 min read, customer journey stages 12 min read, request demo.

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Most people have a dream of traveling the world, maybe you too. You may also want to MEMORIZE & VISUALIZE your travel journey. It should have a photo & city timeline,map the the countries I've visited and the places where I've taken Photos, and include my travel stats. Memoir is Location-based travel tracker for your journey, it can auto generate your photo timeline based on the cities, mapping your Photos on the world map, and mash your photo into albums. So you can recall your past travel and moments. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO • Confirm the Camera App has Location Access while using • Allow full access to Photos at the first time you open TTW • Take Photos using your Phone Camera while traveling abroad • Use Memoir to review your travel journey and recall the moments WHAT YOU WILL GET ▸ Photo and city timeline to revisit your Travel Memoir, recalling the scenery you saw, WHEN and WHERE. ▸ Highlight the countries you have visited on a World Map, the places where you have taken Photos; ▸ Your Travel Stats, including the countries and cities you've been, as well as the national flags of the countries collected. ▸ Automatically filter out Photos taken in your city of residence, leaving you with a comprehensive Travel Memoir of your experiences. All of this is done automatically. All you need to do is walk out and travel, and when you see beautiful scenery, just Take a Photo. YOU CAN ALSO DO ▸ Edit the timeline as you wish, Re-select your favorite Photos or delete a specific date you don't want to display. ▸ Upload to the cloud to save your Travel Memoir if you want, So it can be integrated into your personal blog and share with your friends. THE MOST IMPORTANT NO need to open it when you travel outside; NO continuous background location tracking; NO worry about battery usage, use it normally. PRIVACY POLICY In Short, We do not collect any of your Data. Your Travel Memoir will be uploaded when you sync it to cloud storage, but only you have access to them. We don't. Terms of Use https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/

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Great app for travel tracker and memories.

I personally love Memoir for its ability to bring my travel experiences to life. Every time I browse through my travel timeline or my city photo collections, I can recall the excitement and joy I felt during my trips. The map feature is simply amazing, as it gives a visual representation of my journeys across different cities and countries. What impresses me the most, however, is the way Memoir utilizes everyday mobile photos - it uses these casual snapshots not just as pictures, but as gateways to the beautiful memories they hold. In this digital age where numerous photos are taken and then forgotten, Memoir truly stands out by turning those neglected images into cherished memories.

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