customer journey map for an app

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

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

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

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

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

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

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

1. Use customer journey map templates.

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

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

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

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

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

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

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

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

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

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

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

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

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

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

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

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

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

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

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

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

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How to create a customer journey map — a step-by-step guide with examples

Learning more about client experience is the best way to understand and improve it. As you are reading this article, you already know that 😉 

Here, you will find a detailed step-by-step guide on making a customer journey map (CJM), examples, expert tips, templates, and a PDF guide to download and save for later.

• 1 What is a customer journey map?
• 2 Benefits of client journey mapping
• 3.1 Step 1: Define your persona
• 3.2 Step 2: Set customer journey stages
• 3.3 Step 3: Define journey map sections
• 3.4 Step 4: Set customer goals
• 3.5 Step 5: Define touchpoints
• 3.6 Step 6: Processes and channels
• 3.7 Step 7: Problems and ideas
• 3.8 Step 8: Emotional graph
• 3.9 Step ?: Be Creative!
• 4 Customer journey map examples
• 5 A customer journey mapping checklist
• 6 The free guide to download

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is the final output of the collaborative visualization process called customer journey mapping. This process lets you reveal typical experiences the customers have over time when interacting with your organization, service, or product. A finished map provides insights into their actions, processes, goals, needs, channels, emotions, and many other aspects shaping the customer experience. 

Journey maps can be of different scopes. For example, a broad-scope map would include multiple customer journey stages like ‘Awareness’, ‘Decision’, ‘Purchase’, ‘Support’, and ‘Renewal’. In contrast, a map with a narrower focus would look at a few specific stages like ‘Decision’ and ‘Purchase’.

CJMs focusing on the current experience are AS-IS maps, while journey maps visualizing the future, desired, state of the experience are called TO-BE maps.

There’s also a similar technique, customer experience mapping, which is often used interchangeably with journey mapping. Experience maps are variations of CJMs, but they typically cover a wider range of interactions and contexts beyond a specific consumer-business relationship. 

Benefits of client journey mapping

Why make journey mapping your tool of choice? There are plenty of reasons, the major of which include:

• Gaining a deeper understanding of your customers 

For instance, a high-end fashion retailer may discover that its younger customers prefer online shopping, while older customers enjoy the in-store experience.

• Getting a single view of your customer within the organization

Journey mapping will help you turn a fragmented vision of the customer experience into a unified, organization-wide one. It will have a massive impact on the decision-making process, encouraging you to consider how your actions will affect your clients and become customer-focused.

• Breaking corporate and cross-department silos 

To make the way toward delivering a great customer experience, you will need to collaborate with others. Understanding why this collaboration is essential, departments and employees will be more inclined to participate in conversations and collaborate.

• Improving customer experience, retention, and loyalty

While working on a map, you will discover customer pain points at different stages of their journey with you. Fixing the most crucial one as quickly as possible will do you a good turn by eliminating the reasons for leaving you. If fixes take much time, look for quick wins first. 

For instance, adding details about your shipping policy on the website will take a developer half an hour, while it will set the right expectations among customers. They won’t be expecting the delivery the next day anymore, bombarding your customer support team with frustrated messages. Another example is a subscription-based video streaming service that can personalize content recommendations to keep subscribers engaged and less likely to cancel their subscriptions.

• Better conversion and targeting of your target customers

Sometimes, it makes sense to focus on a specific segment or, talking journey mapping terms, specific personas. Customer journey insights will help you with this endeavor by giving you a glimpse into these people’s minds and ensuring the higher effectiveness of your marketing.

How to build a customer journey map

Although there is no gold standard for creating a customer journey map, we’ll try to create a somewhat generalized map. So that you can use it as a reference when making maps of your own.

We’ll be using our CJM Online tool along the way for two reasons. Because it’s easy to use and lets you create a CJM fairly quickly without wasting time setting up the environment. Oh, and there's a Personas building tool that comes with it 😉

We’ll take a pizza restaurant as an example of business and learn how to make a customer journey map together.

Step 1: Define your persona

Creating personas is a crucial part of customer experience service and journey mapping in particular. We won’t go into details — you can find them in this post about defining personas .

Let’s just say that our persona’s name will be Eva Moline — 29, works as a journalist and loves pizza. Eva is not really tech-savvy, and she tries to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Step 2: Set customer journey stages

Stages are the steps customers take when interacting with a business. The easiest way to identify them is to think of all the actions the person has to take throughout their journey, organize them into logical groups, and name these groups. These will be your map stages. 

The number of stages varies from business to business, but we’ll take 8 for this example:

💡 Expert tips: 

• If you’re unsure about the order or names of the stages, don’t worry about that. You can change both at any time when working on the map.
• If your stages are complex, you can break them into smaller ones. Read this blog post about defining customer journey stages to learn more.

Step 3: Define journey map sections

Sections are horizontal rows with data that, together with the stages you defined, make up a customer journey map.

When picking sections for a map, your choice will depend on your journey’s type and purpose. 

As for UXPressia’s Journey Map tool, it offers a set of more or less universal sections for all kinds of maps. 

We’ll use some of the sections in the current example.

Step 4: Set customer goals

Setting customer goals at each stage is great for multiple reasons:

• It helps you understand how your business goals align with the goals of your customers.
• You can meet your customers’ needs better, gaining their loyalty by helping them achieve their goals at each stage.

Above, you can see some of the goals we set for Eva. They are self-explanatory, so there’s no need for extra details.

Step 5: Define touchpoints

Touchpoints are encounters that happen between your business and customers. In the pizza restaurant example, touchpoints happen:

• At the Awareness phase, when Eva is actively looking for a pizza place nearby. She is asking around, searching locations on Google Maps, etc.
• At the Research phase, when she is trying to find out what people say about the place by asking her friends and reading online reviews.
• At the Arrival stage, when Eva searches for a parking spot and enters the restaurant to get seated after parking the car.
• At the Order stage, when she makes an order and waits for it.
• Time to eat! At this stage, touchpoints occur when Eva is being served and when she is eating her meal.
• At the Leave stage, Eva interacts with the waiter, pays for the meal, etc.
• At the Feedback stage, she goes to the pizzeria’s website and drops a few lines on Instagram.
• At the last stage, Eva gets a promo email from the restaurant with discounts or other special offers.

Defining all the touchpoints is critical because each touchpoint leaves some impression, and your main goal is to keep it up to the mark.

You can also have a separate section to describe the actions your persona takes:

Step 6: Processes and channels

Now, you may want to add some processes and channels to the map. Just to see what channels your persona uses and what types of processes are in their journey. Luckily, our tool lets you do it in the most awesome way. Processes can be linear, non-linear & time-based, cyclic, or bi-directional. In UXPressia, you can specify up to 10 channels per process.

Step 7: Problems and ideas

It’s time to explore problems Eva might have when using our service. It could be a lack of info about the pizza house. Few reviews and ads do not show how our pizza differs from others.

Upon arriving, Eva may struggle with locating the place due to unclear information on signboards or just because of a hard-to-find location.

When making her order, Eva may look for detailed info on dish ingredients to learn whether it contains peanuts she’s allergic to. Descriptions may not be as detailed as she’d want them to be.

While waiting for the pizza, Eva may want to check out the place. Finding a restroom can turn into a nightmare if you don’t have clear signs showing what’s where in the restaurant.

Once you’re done with problems, it’s time to find solutions to these problems. Brainstorm for some ideas on how this or that problem can be solved. Here’s what we brainstormed for Eva’s case:

Step 8: Emotional graph

Never underestimate the power of visualization. And our Customer Journey tool is all about it. We added an emotional graph to see where our service example shines and where it stinks. Plus, we filled text boxes with Eva’s thoughts:

There’s also a special section ( “Think & feel” ) to put personas’ thoughts.

Step ?: Be Creative!

This is a good start, but the map is far from being complete. So, keep exploring Eva’s journey to find more insights and then add all of them to the map.

If you use our tool (which we highly recommend you to do), check out other CJM sections:

• Image section for screenshots, photos, or any other relevant imagery. You can even turn it into a storyboard , describing the journey from beginning to end with your images or those from our library.

• Charts section for communicating data in a visual and meaningful way, just like we did it in the persona:

• Video and document sections for journey-related videos and documentation (e.g., an annual marketing report).
• Personas section for visualizing different personas’ interactions within the same journey.

💡 Expert tip: The section with the persona’s questions works like a charm for marketing and content purposes. So be sure to add one 😉

Customer journey map examples

There are also a whole lot of free CJM templates for all sorts of journeys in our library. Here are three examples we picked for you.

• Example 1: a mobile user journey

This user journey map template covers the digital experience of the persona who discovers a new mobile app, installs it, and uses the app for some time before deleting it.

• Example 2: a client journey map for a corporate bank

This free template is an example of a multi-persona, B2B customer journey. The key persona is a newly opened company looking for a bank to run their business. The CJM also visualizes interactions between the personas involved. 

• Example 3: a digital customer journey

This customer journey map example shows the digital journey of three customer personas who want to buy a new pair of sneakers online. They go through the same stages, but if you look at the map, you will be able to see the differences in customer behavior, goals, and actions. It’s also a multi-persona journey map .

A customer journey mapping checklist

As a quick recap, here is a checklist with key steps to follow when creating a customer journey map:

• Do research

To represent real people, your real customers, and visualize their journeys, you must base your personas and journey maps upon actual data.

• Define your customer persona(s)

Identify your target personas. Create detailed profiles focusing on information relevant to your journey mapping initiative. Include such details as background, customer needs, motivations, channels, etc. 

• Specify journey map stages

Determine the stages you want to have on your map and come up with their names.

• Decide on the map sections

Determine which sections to include in your map (e.g., actions, touchpoints, emotions, channels).

• Set customer goals for each stage

Make sure that it is your customers’ goals, not your business goals.

• Identify touchpoints between the persona(s) and your organization, product, or service

Consider both online and offline interactions.

• Map out processes and channels

Visualize the journey-specific processes and the channels your customers use at each stage. Include both digital and physical channels.

• Highlight problems and look for opportunities

Identify any pain points and issues customers might encounter. Brainstorm potential solutions and quick wins to improve the experience.

• Add details about the emotional experience

Visualize the persona’s emotional journey. Include thoughts and feelings where it’s relevant.

• Use more sections

Include illustrations, images, and charts to make the map visually engaging and easy to understand. Enrich your journey map with more data, like KPIs related to journey stages.

Feel free to tailor this checklist to the specific context of your business and your project's needs.

The free guide to download

As a bonus, download our free customer journey mapping guide. Fill in the form below to get a PDF file as an email.

Related posts

The post was originally written in 2017.

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first of all, excellent example and I’m very happy to I could understand how to create user journey map, due to for a long time I can’t understand it and how, many thanks for your efforts 🙂 I have some question about ser journey map. I hope to open your chest for me,

1-no there are rules for user journey map? 2-I need another example ?(for example Uber)?further understand 3-have I create user journey map without customer?

Hello, Karim!

I am very glad that this article helped you understand customer journey mapping 🙂

In regards to your first question, I would say that journey maps differ from business to business. However, they tend to have the same structure give or take. So no matter what industry you make a CJM for, you will end up having several stages and a bunch of sections we mentioned in this post.

If you’re looking for CJM examples of Uber customers, here is one: https://www.mindomo.com/doc.htm?d=92be818b774d422bad7eab790957ebc0&m=7d286174ccf1450bbb77c921a609ff65 Plus we have a lot more on our template page: https://uxpressia.com/templates

As for your last question, yes. You may have a journey map without a customer (persona) and use target audience segments instead (or have a generic map without personas at all, though I don’t recommend the latter as in this case it will be hard to empathize with real people). So you will certainly have to introduce a customer down the road to gain a deeper understanding of the journey.

many thanks for your reply to me and again I have some questions

1-why you don’t use in your example? user experience, empathy maps such as use goal touch point, and how to create it 2-As for the previous example (Uber) very confuse for me not as your example

Could you please rephrase your first question? And as for the Uber map, well, that’s all I managed to find. 🙂 But again, here you can find a hundred of map examples of all stripes and colors: https://uxpressia.com/templates

welcome again, my question is? what’s different between Aware and Research

The differences come from the names.

At the aware stage your client realizes that there’s a need for a service/product. Or they find out that your company exists and offer a desired service.

While at the research stage they either do research on your business (e.g. visit your website or ask their friends if they used your service) or they research what is out there on the market that can help them.

Makes sense? 🙂

Thank you for this,

I am wondering , Have you done examples on B2B services. I work in Accreditation & Certification, this seems to be the least visited topic in marketing platforms and blog sites.

We have some B2B templates in our Template Library . Type B2B tag in the search placeholder and you will see all categories with the fitting templates. You can also explore the B2B mapping guide here .

Good luck and happy customers!

Great article, well articulated and detailed. I am starting off with service design and was wondering if I could get some advice mapping out a customer journey for a specific project. I was mapping out how do one approach to repair services?

Hi Shreya, glad you liked the article!

If you’re dealing with home repair, I might suggest our pre-filled template for an interior design agency customer journey: https://uxpressia.com/templates/real-estate . Templates can be a great starting point even if they’re not a 100% match to your use case.

Other than that, you will need to create a persona. If you don’t have any research data yet, do it based on your assumptions. Then, try to visualize what their experience across all stages and interactions with the repair service might be. Once you have the first draft, you can proceed with validating it and adding more data as it comes in.

If you have more context on the project, I can look into it and come up with specific tips 🙂

I very delighted to find this internet site on bing, just what I was searching for as well saved to fav

Thank you for sharing, it was something I researched.

Hi Rok! Happy mapping 🙂

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Product best practices

• User Onboarding

Your Guide to the Mobile App Customer Journey

31 December, 2023

Growth Manager

Making sure that users find real value in your mobile app is a complicated process. It requires careful planning, data-driven design, and a well-thought-out strategy.

Let’s get started.

What is a mobile app customer journey map?

A mobile app customer journey map (or a user journey map ) is a visual guide to the average user’s experience with your app.

Mobile customer journey maps begin with discovery and end with advocacy. Between these bookends are stages defined by what users are doing, how they interact with your app or business, and their goals.

More specifically, they include the following information for each stage:

Easy access to a visual guide to your customers’ mindsets at different key moments allows you to build experiences that resonate. 

Housing.com used this core premise (and UXCam’s session replay feature ) to understand the customer journey roadblocks that were causing users not to adopt certain features. They could then smooth these roadblocks over to improve the customer journey.

Mobile app customer journey stages

The stages vary based on the type of app and business. 

In the former case, someone might already be a loyal customer when they discover the app exists. In the latter case, discovering the app is a prerequisite to becoming a customer.

That said, if we isolate the mobile app journey, it usually looks like this:

Awareness : Potential users discover your app in the App Store or Play Store (or through an online search).

Acquisition : Users install and open the app.

Onboarding : Users sign up, create an account, and learn how to navigate the app.

Exploration : Users discover the value of the app.

Monetization : Users make in-app purchases.

Retention : Users regularly come back to the app.

Advocacy : Users recommend your app to others.

How to create a mobile app customer journey map

Here's how to create a customer journey map for mobile app products

Create user personas

Identify touchpoints

Visualize user journeys

Develop KPIs and measure success

1. Create user personas

Customer journey mapping is an exercise in data-driven generalization. 

Creating customer journey maps for every user is impossible, so you use data collected from certain users to develop maps roughly describing the journeys of other similar users. 

With that in mind, the first step of this process is identifying these groups and creating user personas—fact sheets that contain information on:

Demographics : Age, gender, location, etc.

Goals : What each segment seeks to accomplish by using the app.

Behaviors : How they interact with and move around the app.

User segmentation is the best way to kick this process off.

UXCam can analyze user data (e.g., demographics, behaviors, screens, etc.) and help you build custom segments based on similarities. These segments can be public or private, and you can easily share them with teammates for input.  From there, you can flesh out these segments with meaningful details (e.g., “tech-savvy students aged 18-25”).

Finally, create user personas for each segment you’ve identified. Incentivized surveys are a great way to supplement the data from your analytics tool.

2. Identify touchpoints

Touchpoints are the digital touchpoints a user has with your app. Identifying and mapping these touchpoints to customer journey stages can help you understand how users move throughout your product.

During the awareness and acquisitions stages (i.e., pre-install stages), your main touchpoints will probably be app listings, ads, search, website content, and marketing emails. After installation, there’s more variety:

Onboarding : Tutorials, walkthroughs, and onboarding campaigns.

Exploration : Free trials and in-app notifications.

Monetization : Upsells, discounts, and feature previews.

Retention : Push notifications, content updates, loyalty programs, and gamification.

Advocacy : Social sharing features, product ratings, and referral campaigns.

To determine which touchpoints matter at each stage, you’ll need an analytics tool to track user events (e.g., clicks, swipes, etc.) and analyze how users move from one point to the next.

UXCam uses tagless auto-capture to track every interaction within your app. You can retroactively define events and properties to track users' engagement with different touchpoints like pop-ups, tutorials, feature usage, and onboarding flows.

Once you have a master list, map each touchpoint to the behavior it’s meant to encourage.

3. Visualize user journeys

Now that you know what touchpoints matter, it’s time to determine how users interact with them. Start by creating visual user journeys—diagrams illustrating users' paths as they move from one touchpoint to the next.

Two tools that are especially useful here are:

App Flows : Visual representations of how user groups flow through different screens in your app.

Funnels : Diagrams that track the journey from one touchpoint to another and show user drop-offs.

These visualization tools are excellent for identifying and populating key user paths with touchpoints. They also help you measure how effective different touchpoints are in pushing users further along in their journeys.

Speaking of measuring effectiveness…

4. Develop KPIs and measure success

Not all your touchpoints will be equally effective, and there is always room for improvement.

Setting KPIs and measuring the success of different touchpoints is the only way to spot bottlenecks and improve the overall user experience.

You'll need dedicated analytics tools for external touchpoints like blogs and marketing emails to track KPIs. For in-app touchpoints, UXCam can provide you with a wealth of user analytics that will help you optimize the user’s experience, including:

Sessions and session length

Interactions and interaction frequency

User segmentation

Events triggered by user actions

Error reports

By applying filters for specific events or screens, you can use these metrics to benchmark touchpoint performance and experiment with how each touchpoint affects your overall mobile app customer journey.

Give your users the experience they deserve

Mobile app customer journey mapping is a powerful tool for understanding how your users navigate your product—what works, what doesn’t, and what you need to do to improve their experiences.

UXCam is an all-in-one mobile app analytics platform that gives product teams a range of tools to understand and optimize their mobile app customer journeys. From event and issue analytics to session replays and segmentation, UXCam gives you the power to measure and improve user journeys. 

Get started with a 14-day free trial .

You may also be interested in these; How to analyze session recordings

5 Best user journey mapping tools

App user journey: Mapping from download to Daily use

Customer journey optimization: 6 practical steps

UX optimization: 4 Steps to deliver a better user experience

How to increase mobile app retention Appsee analytics: History, acquisition and best alternative

Ardent technophile exploring the world of mobile app product management at UXCam.

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Customer journey mapping 101 (+ free templates)

When I was a kid, I remember watching my parents switch between different credit cards to get the best rewards for a particular purchase. They almost always pulled out the American Express first because (as they explained to me) the base reward rate was higher than even the sector-specific perks offered by other cards. Twenty years later, when I decided to get a high-end credit card, Amex was the first one that came to mind.

Customer journey mapping is the process of planning out people's awareness of and relationship to your brand, starting with their very first impression—even if, as in my case, that impression is made a full decade before they can actually use your product.

Table of contents: 

What is a customer journey map?

Think back to any recent purchase of your own, and try to trace your own customer journey:

When and where was your first contact with the product or service?

How many channels of communication with the company did you have available?

How was the contact you had, if any? Was it personal or formulaic?

Were your problems, if any, solved? If so, were they solved in a timely manner?

What do you now know about the brand besides the product or service itself?

The customer journey vs. the user journey vs. the buyer journey

What's the difference between the customer, user, and buyer journeys?

The customer journey is split up into two parts: the buyer journey and the user journey. The buyer journey covers everything up to the point of purchase. After that point, the customer becomes a user, and all of their experiences are part of the user journey. 

Benefits of customer journey mapping

Here are the main benefits of the customer journey mapping process:

Touchpoint optimization: With a clear understanding of what your touchpoints are and where they occur, you can track and adjust them based on how they perform.

Enhanced customer experience insights: Through customer profiling and a better overview of all the touchpoints that make a journey, you can acquire more precise and actionable customer experience insights.

Improved product development: Thoughtful and intentional journey planning creates more opportunities for meaningful customer feedback, which gives businesses better information to improve their product.

Customer journey map template

The customer journey map includes additional details within each phase (which I'll discuss in more detail later) to help you strategically plan your customers' touchpoints and move them closer to a purchase.

Below, we'll walk through each part of the customer journey map and how to use it. 

Parts of a journey map

If you're already familiar with journey mapping, you can start filling in the template right away. Otherwise, here's a quick walkthrough of what goes in each section.

What is the customer doing?

In this section, you'll jot down the main things that the prospect, lead, or customer is doing during this stage. For example, if you're a personal trainer, an awareness stage key step might include something like "Prospect wants to get in shape." Or if you offer an email newsletter app, an expansion and advocacy stage key step might be "Customer upgrades their plan." 

Each stage will likely have more than one key step or milestone—that's good. You should be specific enough to be able to create touchpoints, content, and marketing campaigns geared toward each milestone.

What is the customer thinking?

Next, put yourself in the customer's shoes and think about what questions they might have at each stage. In the awareness stage, it might be things like "How can I do X better?" or "What is [your product name]?" In the consideration phase, questions like "Is this worth my time/money?" or "Will this help me solve my problem?" will come to the forefront. 

Where and how could the customer encounter our brand?

After you've outlined what your customer is thinking at each stage, align each question with the relevant touchpoint that could address each concern.

What touchpoint opportunities are missing?

When you have a question or milestone that doesn't have a corresponding touchpoint, you've found a gap in your customer journey. That means customers at this stage are going to be left with unmet needs and unanswered questions, and may look more seriously at competitor products as a result. It's essential to develop touchpoints to fill this gap and prevent losing potential customers at a key milestone.

Stages of the customer journey

The customer journey map can be split into five phases: awareness, consideration, conversion, retention, and brand loyalty.

Customers can't decide whether or not they want your product if they don't know that it exists. In the earliest phase of the customer journey, a business's goal is to reach the individual and, ultimately, attract them to the brand.

Consideration

Once potential customers are aware of your brand, the next phase they enter is called "consideration" or "research." This is when the customer's perspective shifts from simple awareness of your brand's existence to an understanding of the value that you have to offer them. 

Some businesses also include a mini-stage called "Intent" or "Onboarding," when the customer has decided they're interested in the product and is testing it out. The company's goal in this stage is simply to provide an exceptional user experience—they want to make sure the product works as intended and the customer's questions and requests are handled well.

A business can identify customers that are primed for conversion based on behavior in the consideration stage. Someone who signs up for a newsletter isn't a hot sales prospect quite yet, but when they start opening more emails and spending more time on the site, that's when brands know they're ready for a conversion push.

An abandoned cart email pushing a browsing shopper to complete a purchase

A physical mail offer pushing a potential customer to open an account

A seasonal campaign highlighting why a product is perfect for a particular holiday, celebration, or event

When a conversion is successful, a potential buyer becomes an actual customer. The goal in the retention stage is to demonstrate to the customer why they were right to make their purchase, and set them up to make more purchases or renew services in the future.

The retention stage is also where the user experience or user journey begins. The company's job in this phase, then, is to provide the best possible user experience. Easy installation, frictionless customer service, and—this part should be obvious—a product or service that works well and provides the user what they need are all key components to improved customer retention.

Brand loyalty

In the final customer journey phase, users go from run-of-the-mill satisfied customers to active advocates for your business. 

Keep in mind: a customer doesn't need to be a zealot for your company to be an unintentional brand advocate. One of the biggest reasons I made the decision to apply for Amex's high-end card is because my best friend has it. She didn't specifically recommend it to me, but I became interested after experiencing a lot of the card benefits vicariously through her. 

Advanced customer journey mapping tips

Everything we've covered up to this point will only get you as far as a basic customer journey map. That doesn't mean, however, that your customer journey map will be good . Once you have the basic journey mapping structure down, you'll want to take steps to continually improve your map's effectiveness.

Survey your customers and customer teams

Talk to your customer-facing employees, too. The people who work directly with customers day-to-day will have more accurate information about how to interact with them.

Automate customer data collection

Tweak for b2b, b2c, and saas industries.

The nature of the customer journey is different for SaaS, B2B, and B2C companies. A B2B company's interactions with prospects might include in-person conferences, while a SaaS company's touchpoints will be mostly digital. Companies that sell to consumers will need to think through individual people's experiences in a way that B2B companies don't. A company whose products are designed for emergencies will need to think through crisis scenarios instead of day-to-day customer experiences.

Tweak your customer journey categories to fit your company, product, and industry. Using a generalized or poorly-fitting customer journey map will result in vague and unhelpful interactions with your brand.

Create multiple maps for different journeys

When people refer to the customer journey, they're typically talking about the overarching journey from awareness to brand loyalty that we outlined above. However, you can map any part of the customer journey and experience. 

Do you target college students? Replace the five stages with four academic quarters and map their experience over the course of a year. 

Is your product designed to be used in the car? Map the customer journey through each hour of a long road trip. 

Zooming in to create detailed maps of different aspects of the customer journey will help you create even more specifically tailored customer experiences.

Types of journey maps

The template above follows the standard stages of the customer journey, but it's not the only way to do your customer journey mapping.

Two other commonly-used journey maps are the "Day in a life" journey map and the customer support journey map. We've provided the key elements of both below, as well as customer journey map templates for each.

Day/week/month in the life map

This map includes space for you to record the buyer persona's name, occupation, and motto, but these are really just shorthand for key persona characteristics. If you're selling baby diapers, for instance, your persona's occupation would be "parent," even if the person in question is also an accountant. 

The "motto" should be a condensed version of your persona's primary mindset with regard to their wants, needs, and pain points. The motto for an expecting first-time parent might be, "I'm excited but nervous—I have to make sure I'm prepared for anything."

Use the column headers to set your time frame. If you're marketing to expecting parents, the time frame might be the nine months of a pregnancy, or you might map an expectant mother's experiences through a single day in her third trimester. At each stage, ask yourself the same questions:

Where and how could the customer encounter our brand? Alternatively: how could our brand provide value at each stage?

A day in the life customer journey map will not only help you zoom in to develop more tailored experiences, but it will also give you insights into what might be useful to add or improve in your product or service.

Support experience map

This journey map is a bit different in that it doesn't just map touchpoints; it maps functional interactions between the customer and customer service representatives as well as the behind-the-scenes activities necessary to support the customer-facing team.

This map starts when the support ticket is opened and ends when the customer's issue is resolved. The top row of the map is simple: what is the customer doing at each stage in the support process?

​​Next, you'll record the corresponding actions of your customer-facing, or "frontstage" team. This includes both employees' actions and the systems engaged in the support process. For example, if the first step of your customer support process is handled by a chatbot or automatic phone system, these will go in the technology row. If the customer moves forward to request to speak with a representative, then the second stage is where your "employee actions" row will come into play.

Finally, the bottom row is for behind-the-scenes activity performed by employees who don't interact with the customer at all. For example, if the customer representative needs to get information from another department to answer the customer's questions, the other department's involvement will be recorded in the "backstage actions" section of the map.

Customer journey mapping example

To put it all together, here's an example customer journey map for a gym. 

Researches local gyms online

Reads reviews

Compares membership options

"I can't go up a flight of stairs without getting winded; I need to get my health and fitness on track."

"I wish I knew someone who could recommend this gym." 

Encounters: 

Online reviews

Social media pages

Missing touchpoint:

Success stories on social media in a front-and-center location, like a saved Instagram Stories collection or a pinned post 

Views gym's social media

Visits gym's website

Views membership pricing page

"This gym looks clean and modern from the photos."

"I hate calling the gym, but I'd like to learn more about personal training or class options."

Contact form

Free trial request pop-up

A live chat box on the gym's website for prospective customers to ask questions about the facility or membership options before visiting 

Visits the gym to take a tour

Meets with a membership consultant

Potentially signs up for free trial

"The staff was friendly and it was easy to sign up."

"I wish I could see what classes they offer and weekly schedules without having to visit the gym."

In-person visit

Facility tour

Consultation

Free trial sign-up

Orientation session

Gym access card

A mobile app where members can track their progress, access class schedules, book personal trainer sessions, and receive personalized workout recommendations

Visits the gym regularly

Participates in classes

Engages with personal trainers

Potentially pays for membership after free trial ends

"Maybe I should compare options again." 

"I wish I knew someone who could work out with me."

Personal trainer consults

Email reminders about upcoming end to free trial

Personalized offer encouraging renewal

Follow-up call

Community-building events like workshops or challenges to foster a sense of community and support among members and staff

Refers friends and coworkers

Promotes the gym on social media

Regularly visits and attends classes 

"My coworker would love this gym since it's so close to work." 

"I love that teacher. I'm going to try some of her other classes."

Referral programs

Social media engagement

Reviews gym

Potentially provides a testimonial for gym

Missing touchpoints:

A loyalty rewards program for members' continued commitment and engagement that offers exclusive discounts, merchandise, or access to premium services 

Related reading:

This article was originally published in May 2021 by Nick Djurovic. The most recent update was in August 2023.

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Amanda Pell

Amanda is a writer and content strategist who built her career writing on campaigns for brands like Nature Valley, Disney, and the NFL. When she's not knee-deep in research, you'll likely find her hiking with her dog or with her nose in a good book.

• CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
• Sales & business development
• Small business

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How to make a customer journey map?

Why make a customer journey map

Customer journey mapping is a powerful tool for visualizing your customers' experience. It enables you to empathize with your customers and set them up for success. But for the uninitiated, customer journey mapping can seem intimidating, time-consuming, or even useless. We’re here to tell you it’s far from that. With the right guidance, you can use customer journey map tools to form a foundational part of your business.

Let’s be real: modern customers expect a guaranteed high-quality experience. According to  a study  conducted by customer strategist and researcher Esteban Kolsky, only 1 in 26 unhappy customers regularly complains – and the rest simply stop doing business with the company altogether. Ultimately, around 91% of unhappy customers will simply leave without a complaint. That means your business can be missing out on the valuable feedback you need to correct mistakes that are costing you customers. 

This finding underlines just how crucial it is for companies to map their customer journeys. Simply put, by creating a  CJM , you are likely to unearth issues you might not hear about directly from the customers themselves. That kind of information can be beneficial to your company’s bottom line. Let’s talk about how to make a customer journey map that’s valuable to your organization – and not a waste of time.

Before you get started

If you’re thinking about creating a customer journey map without a specific, measurable goal in mind ... stop. Back up and pause a minute. Consider the reason you need a CJM at all. You’re going to need to spend some time articulating the challenges your team faces, so you can more efficiently seek answers in your CJM. 

CJMs are especially useful in scenarios like these:

You have a customer churn problem you’re looking to understand and solve. 

You’re trying to understand the buying patterns of different personas.

Your company is shifting approaches (e.g. from a bottoms-up to top-down, inside-out to outside-in, etc.). 

You’re about to release a new product or service.  

You’re looking to assign team resources to specific touchpoints within the journey.

Write down the problem or reason you need a CJM first, then consider what kind of business goal you’re looking to achieve. 

Customer journey maps are great for:

Identifying ways to engage or reach customers

Unearthing and addressing internal inefficiencies

Increasing conversions and ROI

We recommend making sure you’re setting measurable goals for your map before you get started. You can always adjust as you learn new things from your map, but it’s important to have an actual objective and KPI.

Common business KPIs to consider are:

Customer satisfaction scores

Retention or churn rates

Preliminary Customer Journey Mapping Work

Before you host a customer journey mapping workshop, it’s important to understand who needs to be involved, what tools you’ll be using to make your map, and what technology you’ll need to host your workshop.  Here are a few important steps to take before making your customer journey map. 

Map out your stakeholders

Your internal stakeholders are the people who will be impacted by the results of your customer journey map the most. Be sure to identify them before you get started, so you know who should be invited to your mapping workshop. Learn more in  The Complete Stakeholder Mapping Guide .

Set up your CJM Canvas

Many teams prefer to use pen and paper to create their journey map, and remote teams need digital tools. Regardless of how you host your workshop, you’re going to need to digitize your map at some point to share it across your organization.  Miro is a perfect visual canvas to use for your map – and a great tool when you don’t have the luxury of being in the same place as your team. Get started by opening up a board, and adding the templates you’ll need for your mapping exercise. 

Now, with your digital canvas open, write down your goals and objectives on the board for the team to review during your workshop. You can even create a quick introductory presentation on a few slides to talk through at the beginning of your workshop. 

Decide which CJM angle to take

There are different ways to structure your map, depending on your goal. Here are four common ways you can map your customer journey.

Current state : When you think of a CJM, you’re probably thinking of a current state map. These maps articulate the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers experience while interacting with your brand. Use current state maps to improve the customer journey.

Day-in-the-life : These maps illustrate the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers experience during their daily activities – regardless of whether they involve your brand. Use these types of maps to gain a broader understanding of who your customers are and to expand possible applications of your product.

Future state : As the name suggests, future state maps allow you to visualize how your customers will experience future actions, thoughts, and emotions when interacting with your brand. Use these aspirational maps to illustrate your vision for your organization’s future.

Service blueprint : To create a service blueprint, start with a simplified version of one of the other types of maps. Then add in the factors that contribute to the customer’s experience of your brand—including people, technologies, processes, and policies. Use service blueprints to identify concrete steps you must take to achieve your desired customer journey in the future. For this, you may want to consider adding another template to your board.

Once you’re ready to get started, share the Miro board with your stakeholder team and get ready for your kickoff meeting.

Running your CJM workshop

Now that you’ve invited your stakeholders and shared your workshop board, it’s time to get started. When running a customer journey mapping workshop, we recommend breaking it out into a few specific chunks:

The setup. Kick the meeting off by engaging your team with ice breakers, then present the goals and objectives of the session.

The persona exercise. First, start by identifying your target customer and understanding their point of view. This is about building empathy. 

Mapping the customer journey. Now’s when you list out the touchpoints of your customer’s experience with your company. 

Testing. Once you’ve mapped out the journey, go through it yourself to better empathize with the customer and understand the hurdles they may face/

Iterate on the map. Once you start to notice gaps, or opportunities for improvement, test out ways you can iterate on and improve the map. 

After the session, make sure you gather the key insights you found during the exercise and share them with the team. This will help you form plans and align on next steps. 

Now let’s dive into each of these areas. 

Start the meeting with an icebreaker

Ice breakers are a great way to get everyone involved feeling loosened up, engaged, and ready to go. Try this  Ice Breaker Template  for a quick, fun exercise at the beginning of the meeting.

Present the CJM’s purpose & goals

Now it’s time to kick off the customer journey map exercise. Start by speaking to the purpose and goals you’ve identified for the map. It’s important to make sure your team understands what you’re trying to accomplish, or else you run the risk of the session getting off track. 

Create personas 

Now for your first official team exercise. Drawing on your objectives, start to create personas. Personas are snapshots of ideal customers. They allow you to visualize the individuals who benefit from your products or services. When you’re mapping out your customer journey, it’s important to visualize who the customer is – and that’s where personas can help.

Try to build as exhaustive a picture of your customer as you can. If you have demographic and psychographic data, include that in your personas. You might find it useful to send out a questionnaire to customers or prospects ahead of time to get their feedback on your products or services. Include questions like:

How did you hear about our company?

What comes to mind when you think of our brand?

How do you use our product?

How often do you use our product?

What goals do you want to achieve with our company?

Have you ever made a purchase with us? If so, why did you decide to purchase?

Have you ever interacted with our site intending to make a purchase but did not follow through? If so, what stopped you?

What can we do to improve your experience with our site?

How can we make it easier for you to purchase and use our products?

Remember, the goal of customer journey mapping is to center on the customer’s perspective and empathize with their experience of your product. The more complete your persona is, the more useful a tool your customer journey map will be.

List customer touchpoints

Touchpoints are all the places where your customers can interact with your brand. Think of them as signposts along a road. Drawing on your research, list all the touchpoints your customers and prospects use when visiting your site, as well as those you think they should be using.

It’s important to document the gap between touchpoints they are using and touchpoints you intend for them to use, because that helps you draw conclusions about the actions of your customers. Are they using fewer touchpoints than expected? More? This could mean your site is too complicated, or some obstacle is causing them to leave earlier than you might want.

When you’re building a list of touchpoints, be sure to include paid ads, email marketing, and third-party review sites or mentions. You can also access your Google Analytics and look at the Behavior Flow report which shows how users navigate between different pages on your site.

Test the customer journey

You’re not quite done! Next, test-drive the map yourself. Work through the CJM and see if you can start answering some questions you posed before you started mapping. How can you make it easier for customers to buy your product? How many people bounce once they click onto your site? If you’ve thoroughly built out the map, you should be able to answer these questions.

Test driving the map is important for a few reasons: For one, you want to make sure it accurately represents the customer’s journey. That ensures you’re in a good place to start making decisions based on your analysis of the map. Moreover, you want anyone from the organization to be able to use your map to perform their own analyses. Testing out the CJM transforms your map from a thought experiment into a practical tool.

Map resources you have and those you’ll need

As you’re mapping, you’ll become aware of missing pieces in the customer journey. Since your map touches on nearly every aspect of your business, you’ll quickly be able to take stock of what you’re missing. As you develop the map and get clarity on those missing parts, keep a running list of resources you have and those you’ll need to improve the customer’s journey.

Like many teams, your team might like to add those resources and tools into the map to predict how they might impact your business and drive revenue. Fleshing out the map with these added components will make it easier to get buy-in and augment parts of the customer’s journey.

Iterate on your map

After you’ve tested the map, you can start to make changes to your customer journey. And each time you do, you can also adjust the map. A customer journey map is powerful partly because it’s a living document. Review it on a monthly or quarterly basis to keep up the momentum, identify gaps as they arise, and further streamline and improve your customer journey.

Gathering and sharing insights

Now that you’ve completed your mapping exercise, make sure to list out key insights and takeaways so your team can align on what to do next. You can create a specific section on your board, or send takeaways out via email after the meeting. 

Discover more

Service blueprint vs. journey map

Benefits of customer journey mapping

Customer experience vs. customer journey map

What is consumer decision-making process?

Buyer journey vs customer journey

The 7 steps of the customer journey

What is service blueprint?

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How to Create a Mobile Customer Journey Map

• Alchemer Mobile , Customer Experience , Product Management

Customer funnels are a technique Marketing and Product teams have relied on for years, but they have one big problem: Funnels are linear, and thanks to mobile, customer journeys are no longer so. Mobile offers consumers a unique way to experience brands, skipping ahead and looping back whenever it makes sense for them personally. Using a traditional funnel to understand and predict mobile customer behavior just doesn’t cut it anymore.

What does this change in direction mean for mobile teams? Enter the mobile customer journey map, a better way to understand how mobile consumers interact with your brand. Mobile customer journey maps provide data-backed insight to help you to improve your overall customer experience and product offering by illustrating the steps customers go through in order to engage with your company. Customer journey maps serve a similar purpose as a traditional sales funnel, but are much more flexible. This flexibility allows for individual customer journeys to be robustly built, which paves the way for hyper-personalized mobile experiences .

Below, we explore the benefits of leveraging a mobile customer journey map over (or in addition to) a traditional funnel, complete with step-by-step instructions to aid with your set up.

The Mobile Customer Lifecycle

You may ask yourself, “Do I really need to use a mobile customer journey map?” Short answer: Yes!

Here’s why: Marketing and Product teams are tasked with understanding shifts in customer behavior and emotion to assess needs. Measuring customer sentiment, or CSAT, is the focus for most large brands to understand customer happiness and where to shift their product roadmaps. But CSAT is a lagging indicator that won’t help you much in dealing with current pressures around connecting with your customers, or responding in real time to shifts in emotion (which, according to Gartner , is the best metric for improving customer experience).

Mobile customers engage in unique ways due to constraints and advantages within the channel (e.g. screen size, length of engagement, etc.). Regularly taking the pulse of your mobile customers’ emotion by gathering feedback, analyzing behavior, and acting on insights will help you provide a better overall customer experience .

There is a problem with traditional funnels when it comes to the mobile customer journey. Traditional funnels are linear, and customer journeys—especially over mobile—are anything but. Funnels show a perfect example of how a person may move through the stages of your sales and retention process, but leaves very little room for interpretation and parsing true customer behavior.

Take a side-by-side example of a traditional funnel vs. a mobile customer journey. The traditional funnel looks something like this:

In reality, mobile customer journeys tend to look more like this:

As you can see, the traditional funnel does not allow for as much individual experience as the mobile customer journey map. Both exercises exist to help app publishers accomplish the same goal, but the mobile customer journey map can get you much closer to how people actually engage with and behave in your mobile product.

In addition to allowing for more flexibility in your mobile experience, mobile customer journey maps help drive three important cross-team initiatives:

• Help you build a better product. Customer journey maps exist to explore behavior within your mobile experience, which yields learnings around how you can improve. The more you know how people actually engage, the better you can understand what pieces of your experience hit the mark or need adjusting. Using your journey map insight, you can revisit your product roadmap to ensure priorities are in-line with customer feedback.
• Put the customer at the heart of your outreach. Using customer journey mapping, you can design an engagement strategy that puts your customers first. The more you know about how customers use your mobile product, the more one-to-one your messaging with them can be. Hyper-personalized messaging is the manifestation of how we incorporate everything we know about our customers’ loves, likes, and dislikes into their mobile experience.
• Ensure your Marketing team’s efforts are in the right place. Marketing’s efforts should be driven not only by the company’s product mission, but also by the customer. In order to provide the best mobile experience, it’s imperative to learn from your true customer journey—as complex or straightforward as it may be—in order to be sure you spend Marketing dollars in the right place.

Putting together a mobile customer journey map is worth the time and effort you put into it. The insight you’ll gain is priceless, and can help shape your product roadmap and marketing strategies to level-up your brand.

Learn Your Customers’ Mobile Journey

Now that we’ve covered the importance of a mobile customer journey map, it’s time to create your own. Below, we walk through each piece of the mobile customer journey map exercise so you can easily implement it with your team.

Before we start, here is what a typical customer journey map for a desktop web-based product looks like:

What makes mobile different from other digital channels is the ability to impact customer behavior early in the selling process. Our mobile devices are incredibly personal—we carry them everywhere we go, and use them to connect and share with the people we’re closest with. The personal nature of mobile also extends to brands as customers continue to expect the level of respect and personalization from brands they engage with over mobile as they would with any other interaction. Our brains are conditioned to see mobile as a personal, emotional channel , and brands who create mobile experiences with this goal in mind are primed to stand out.

In a customer journey, introducing the mobile channel affects the “Discover” and “Compare” stages by allowing for personalized communication opportunities, like in-app messages, mobile surveys, intelligent prompts, and personalized notes. No other digital channel allows brands to connect in a one-to-one way like mobile.

Let’s take the mobile customer journey and break it down piece by piece.

1. Identify Customer Behaviors

To start, you must identify general customer behaviors across your mobile experience.

These behaviors might mirror the stages you see in your traditional funnel, or they may be totally different—it all depends on your product and customers. Set time aside for your Product and Marketing teams to dig deep in order to set your mobile behaviors as they serve as the base for the rest of your customer journey map.

If time allows, consider pulling a handful of new customers who have closed within the last month and trace each of their journeys back step-by-step to understand exactly how their experience went. By looking at real, individual customer journeys, you’ll learn more than any survey or research can tell you.

2. Understand Customer Goals

Customers generally want the same thing from your product offering, and each behavior in your mobile customer journey is usually driven by a common goal.

Note that in the image above, the goals change depending on their matched behavior. In the beginning of the mobile customer journey, the goals are much broader than they are at the end.

Individual mobile customer goals may align with what you’ve used for your traditional marketing funnel, or they might be different. Neither is right nor wrong so long as you take the time to understand the real drive behind why customers take the actions they do within your mobile experience .

3. Identify Mobile Touchpoints

Touchpoints are engagement points for you to interact with your customers. Mobile apps’ longevity allows for a more personalized approach to determining which touchpoints to engage with customers at than any other channel, especially as in-person touchpoints have all but disappeared for the time being.

This stage will look very different from your traditional marketing funnel, and should take the most time in your customer journey map exercise. Start by putting together a master list of all of the marketing and sales activities your team uses to engage with mobile customers. From there, assign each activity with the customer behavior it’s meant to encourage. Your touchpoints may have more than one intended customer behavior depending on your mobile product, or they may have just one. Either way, list each touch point below the customer behavior it is intended to drive. Let your lists get as long as they need!

Pro tip: As you consider all of your touchpoints, use the time to evaluate them. You may leverage a strategy that does not align with any of your encouraged customer behaviors, which means it’s probably time to remove it from your process. Keep the concept of “cleaning house” in mind as an added bonus as you work through this phase in your map.

4. Gather Data and Make Changes

Once your mobile customer journey map is in place, it’s time to put it to work!

Start by looking at all the data you currently pull to understand how customers move through the stages of your funnel. From there, identify data gaps (there will definitely be gaps) between what you pull today and what you need to pull in order to understand movement across your new mobile customer journey map. Move as quickly as you can to set up recurring reports around the info you need in order to gather a starting point.

Remember, the data you can pull around mobile customers is endless—take advantage of it! You know what device they use, how long they’ve had your app, and you may even have demographic data if that’s associated with their login. This means you can ask your audience for the exact data you need in order to expand the customer profile data you already have. Gradually, you can ask them for more data and combine that with their behavior and actions they take in the app to create a comprehensive customer profile and improve your personalized marketing and sales strategies.

Now It’s Your Turn

You now have the tools to create your own customer journey map for your mobile product. No matter what stage in the sales process you’re at, this exercise will help you better understand your customers’ behaviors to help improve your product, personalize your marketing, and most of all, deliver customer love.

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• AI , Alchemer Pulse , Customer Experience , Customer Feedback

• AI , Alchemer Pulse , Press Release , Product News

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Learn / Guides / Customer journey mapping (CJM) guide

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The 9 best customer journey mapping tools to grow your business

Customer journey mapping (CJM) software is a digital tool that collects and presents quantitative and qualitative data about how users interact with your product or website so you can better understand your buyer personas and ensure a delightful user experience (UX).

The more complicated the journey, the more data you’ll need to map it out. The right mix of CJM tools gives you data from multiple customer touchpoints and channels so you can collect as much information as possible to map your journey in detail.

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Customers will interact differently with your site or app depending on what part of the journey they’re in. Since journey maps include everything from awareness—when a customer first sees your ad on Facebook—to onboarding and using your product, the data you rely on to guide your map will vary at each stage.

This article walks you through three types of customer journey mapping software, so you understand how each fits into your different workflow stages and can choose the tool(s) that work best for your business:

Traditional website and behavior analytics tools  

Voice-of-the-customer tools for user feedback

Tools to visualize your customer journey map

Website and behavior analytics tools for customer journey mapping

Analytics tools give you insight into who your customers are and how they behave on your website.

Traditional website analytics tools give you quantitative data , including traffic and demographic metrics like bounces and bounce rate , new and returning users , and goal conversion rates .

Behavior analytics tools give you qualitative insight into how users actually experience your website and how they behave during their customer journey. These tools help you pinpoint where users spend time on individual pages, which buttons they click (or don’t), and where they exit from the funnel, so you can improve the user experience.

While traditional analytics tools tell you about the customer’s journey to your website, behavior analytics tools show where their attention goes after they’ve arrived.

Quantitative and qualitative analytics tools work together to help you identify usability issues in your customer journey and highlight opportunities to improve the customer experience .

Here are three popular analytics tools used by marketing and UX professionals to help you kickstart your customer journey mapping process:

Hotjar (hi there! 👋) helps you gain insights into customer behavior with tools like Funnels , Heatmaps , Recordings , Surveys , and a Feedback widget , giving you invaluable data on how users experience your site throughout their journey.

Hotjar Funnels shows you the path of the journey, while Heatmaps and Recordings show you how users behave along the way—where they click and scroll, where they get stuck, and the actions they take as they navigate from page to page. Hotjar’s tools also offer built-in automations—like AI for Surveys —and team collaboration features, including Highlights , which makes insight sharing quick and painless.

Hotjar reveals what numbers don’t. Funnels helped me identify where in the customer journey people drop off. Recorded user sessions let me understand what people see when they arrive on our website—what they click and what they don’t click. Heatmaps helped me identify where they spend most of their time and assess if they should be spending time there or not.

Furthermore, Hotjar Dashboards gives you key user behavior metrics, helping you prioritize how you build and fix your website to provide a better customer journey, which ultimately helps you increase conversions and improve customer satisfaction .

Hotjar complements tools like Google Analytics , giving you a full picture of customer engagement and behavior on your website.

Discover how visitors experience your site

Use Hotjar to gather data and insights into the customer journey so you can make the right changes at the right time for your visitors.

2. Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 is a web analytics tool that tracks and measures website traffic metrics, like bounce and exit rates, goal conversions, sources of traffic, and user demographics.

GA tells you how much traffic your website gets, where it comes from, and which channels convert best. You can also see what your most popular landing pages are and where people are exiting from your website.

💡 Pro tip: traditional analytics and behavior analytics tools work best as a team. 🤜🤛 Combining Hotjar and Google Analytics helps you to paint a more complete picture of your customers’ journey through your site—check out Hotjar’s GA4 integration to unlock the full potential of both tools.

Heap is a no-code product analytics tool that gives you customer data on how people use your product, tracking every stage of the customer journey.

This tool comes in handy when you’re looking for customer pain points with your product and you need data to help you make decisions aimed at increasing customer retention and reducing churn . Heap helps you understand which customer segments your users come from, giving you more granular insight into the customer journey.

Voice of the customer tools for user feedback

Voice-of-the-customer (VoC) tools help you understand your customer needs by capturing what they really think about your business or product , in their own words. 

Learning what your customers have to say about their experience helps you get raw, authentic feedback about how they perceive your brand and product at every stage of the journey, giving you deeper insight into customer emotions and motivations that drive their decision-making.

Here are three customer feedback tools to help you understand your users:

Hotjar (hello again! 👋) gives you insights into customer behavior with feedback tools like surveys , user interviews , and a visual feedback widget.

The Hotjar Heatmaps and Recordings tools show you the what and how of user behavior; Surveys and Feedback help you understand the why . 

Embed a survey or feedback widget on any page to ask customers what they think about your product experience, giving them the opportunity to share their unique perspectives. Use Hotjar’s Microsoft Teams and Slack integrations to receive survey response notifications in real time, so you and your team members are immediately notified of issues and can react promptly.

💡 Pro tip: the way you ask a question determines what kind of answer you’ll get. Open-ended questions will give you more qualitative data (and can be answered in detail), while closed-ended questions (think ‘yes/no’ questions) can help you create charts based on quantitative user research data.

Before you set up an on-site survey, know what information you want to get from your visitors—and how you’re going to use it—so you can ask questions that’ll get you the data you need.

One of our primary goals as a UX team is to understand the customer’s journey and what they’re doing on the website. Surveys give us the ability to reach out to people in context—we can just pop a survey on a page we want insights on.

2. Clarabridge

Clarabridge is an AI-powered feedback text analytics tool that collects what people say about your brand or business from every possible source and analyzes how they feel about you.

This tool is the way to go if you want to know how people really feel about your brand and business, and what the general user sentiment is. Use Clarabridge when people are already talking about your company: either on your website (through chats and surveys) or off your site (like on social media platforms).

3. InMoment

InMoment is an experience-intelligence (IX), AI-powered feedback tool that helps you get more detailed feedback from users.

For example, if you ask your users about their experience and they say ‘Good’, InMoment prompts them further: ‘What was good?’ It also offers social monitoring that gathers meaningful feedback on what your customers are saying about you online.

Tools to visualize your customer journey

Classic customer journey mapping tools are visual flowchart builders: the digital version of sticky notes, only these can be saved in the cloud, shared with your team, and turned into a remote-friendly collaborative workspace.

Once you’ve collected data about your users from user feedback and analytics tools you’ll have enough information to map out the user journey.

When you have a flowchart mapped out, it’ll be easier to:

Identify all customer touchpoints

See which pathways can be simplified

Find opportunities to increase engagement and build customer loyalty

Visualize which touchpoints belong to each part of the funnel

Create clearer CTAs and paths so users can navigate to the next step

Make an impact map to clarify and prioritize product decisions

Here are four tools to create visual and intuitive maps using customer journey software:

Miro is an online whiteboard workspace that’s great for remote teams who want to brainstorm and put their thoughts onto a shared digital whiteboard. The software lets you create a board from scratch—so you can still use your sticky note strategy, just digitally—or use one of their pre-made templates.

U se Hotjar with Miro to bring heatmaps, survey responses, and other analytics data to life. This helps ensure you and your team make data-driven decisions while visualizing your journey. Use this tool the same way you’d use a whiteboard for prototyping, wireframing, diagramming, or roadmapping.

2. UXPressia

UXPressia’s main functionality is to create customer journey maps. If you need a little more than a whiteboard, UXPressia helps you create consistently good-looking CJMs for your customer personas. 

This tool has a beautiful and intuitive interface, perfect for those who want to build maps that impress. You can easily visualize customer touchpoints and customize the maps to your own brand.

UXPressia is great for when you need a clean design and a tool that lets multiple stakeholders map data across different departments—very useful for real-time collaboration. This tool is also a good option if you're looking for a customer journey map template to help you get started.

Smaply is a mapping tool for complex customer journeys, helping you understand channel usage and backstage processes. It lets you create a repository of customer insights, including images, PDF files, and even audio files to link all your data together and get a full overview of the customer journey. Plus, it integrates with project management tools like Jira (which in turn integrates with Hotjar ).

Use this tool when you have a complex customer journey and you want to keep everything in one, easy-to-navigate place.

Gliffy is a fast and easy-to-use collaborative tool that lets you draw out large diagrams. You can drag and drop shapes from their library and leave feedback comments, and it also integrates with Google Drive. It stores past map versions and tracks changes, so you can always go back to previous iterations.

Gliffy is a great option when you don’t need a fancy customer journey mapping tool, but something simple yet versatile to get your ideas ‘on paper’.

How to choose the right customer journey mapping tool

The right customer journey mapping tool depends on the complexity of your journey, your level of understanding of the journey, how steep the tool’s learning curve is, the structure of your team, and why you’re mapping the customer journey in the first place—that is, what you want to learn from it.

The most important part isn’t really the tool you pick, it’s how you use it and what you do with the insights you get.

In the next chapter, we’ll dig deeper into why you need customer journey mapping tools and how specific features can help you accomplish your customer experience management goals.

FAQs about customer journey mapping tools

What is a customer journey map.

A customer journey map—sometimes called a user journey map or service blueprint —is a visual representation of how customers interact with and experience your website, products, or business across multiple touchpoints.

What are customer journey mapping tools?

Customer journey mapping tools are digital tools that collect and present quantitative and qualitative data about how users interact with your product or website.

Customer journey tools—also known as user journey mapping tools—tell you where your visitors come from, how they behave on your website, and what they think about their experience.

What are the best customer journey mapping tools?

The right mix of CJM tools gives you data from multiple customer touchpoints and channels so you can collect as much information as possible to map your journey in detail. Use one or a combination of these tools to create a customer journey that delights your buyers:

Google Analytics 4

Clarabridge

CJM tips and how-tos

Previous chapter

CJM tools: features and how to choose

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How To Create A Customer Journey Map? (With Examples)

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Be it paying for a coffee through a contactless payment app, or purchasing an item online, providing a seamless user experience goes a long way in leaving a positive impression and improving metrics such as conversion and engagement rates.

Besides having a good product or strong branding, having a clear user experience strategy has become a necessity for companies looking to stay competitive in the industry and relevant to their customers. A key approach to developing a strong end-to-end user experience is to understand the needs, thoughts, and emotions of the user throughout their interactions with the company, which can be done through detailed journey mapping. So, before we jump into how to create a customer journey map, let us first discuss what is a customer journey map all about.

What is journey mapping?

A journey map is a visual representation of the user or customer’s entire UX user journey with the product or brand. It serves to help a company get a better sense of how users interact with their products throughout the different touchpoints, in order to better understand their user’s actions and feelings at each stage.

Source: innovationtraining

For example, a journey map is useful in answering deeper questions such as:

• Are users having trouble using the app? Is it due to unfamiliarity with the interface and a lack of onboarding processes?
• Are the users able to access help in a timely manner? Is our customer service team able to address their issues properly?
• Why are more users leaving the site on a certain page? Is there something on it that affects their browsing experience?

Why is journey mapping important?

Understanding a user’s journey goes beyond increasing metrics like revenue or retention rate, it also allows a company to develop a consistent and positive customer experience which in turn leads to brand loyalty and advocacy.

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.” – Steve Jobs

Another key aspect of using journey mapping is the ability to create personalised experiences across different touchpoints and channels. By delving deeper into the user’s perspective at every stage of the journey minimises any potential issues they might face. 80% of consumers also say that they are more likely to purchase from a company that provides a personalised experience.

Other key uses of journey mapping:

• Target specific user personas
• Identify and remove ineffective touchpoints
• Discover potential roadblocks early on
• Align the organisation to user-centricity
• Better communication between teams regarding the product
• Pinpointing areas to engage users in

How to create a customer journey map?

1. conduct persona research.

A user persona is a fictional representation of your customer/user. The journey map will be focused on their experience as they are the target audience. Thus, conducting user research is necessary to properly elaborate on the details of the persona, such as their age, personal motivations, habits, and personality.

Source: UserInterviews

2. Define the Scenario

The scenario serves to describe the situation portrayed by the journey map and what the customer is experiencing. It touches on the when, why, and how the customer interacts with the brand or product.

Journey maps are perfectly suited for such scenarios as it is able to detail the different processes along the timeline. Scenarios can be based on a real situation or an anticipated one depending on the product. For example, a scenario can be a user trying to purchase a smartphone from an online e-commerce retailer.

3. Identify Customer Journey Stages

Next is to identify and list out all key touchpoints between the user and product. This would form the main journey stages that serve as a structure for the rest of the journey map.

Following our previous scenario, the journey stages can be:

• Discovering the product on the website
• Browsing through alternative product models
• Purchasing the product
• Using the product
• Seeking customer support for the product

4. Look into Customer’s Actions, Thoughts & Emotions

From here on, we can start structuring the narrative based on information defined in the earlier stages, such as the target persona, scenario, and customer journey stages. Visualising the user’s journey is important to better empathise and understand what they are going through and how they feel through the process.

The journey is then complete by placing all this information together on a stage-by-stage timeline. Each stage pinpoints the user’s experience with your company or product and delves into their actions, thoughts, and emotions behind it.

Actions are what the users do at each stage. It looks into the interaction between the user and the product.

While it is important to know what actions users take at every step, looking into their emotions and how they feel is also key in connecting with them on a closer level. This allows us to design experiences and products that are more user-focused and suit their needs.

Lastly, the user’s thoughts at each stage are also considered. This helps to provide better insight into their feelings and actions. It delves into aspects such as the types of questions that they face, their motivations behind certain actions, or their reasons for feeling a certain way.

Take a look at this example for an idea of how a journey map is structured, with each category placed into different rows and columns.

Source: searchcustomerexperience

5. Refine Journey Map

Once the initial mapping is completed, a good practice would be to further refine it using information obtained from usability tests or user interviews. With the ever-changing nature of product design and customer behaviour, it is important to constantly re-evaluate and update the journey map. These practices ensure that it remains representative of the target audiences and continues to generate relevant insights.

6. Identify Key Opportunities

To make the most out of journey mapping, it should be used to derive unique insights about users and identify any opportunities that can be capitalised on or on areas that can be further improved. These insights are crucial in helping the team refine the overall experience or even come up with new and useful ideas.

Customer User Journey Examples

The following journey map portrays a scenario about a customer’s experience in trying to switch mobile plans. The journey map further talks about aspects of internal ownership pinpointing teams that should take actions according to the insights obtained.

Source: nngroup

The next example focuses more on a user’s interactions with the product itself, in this case, when trying to place a food order on a food delivery app. The map includes the category of potential touchpoints such as the app, social media, or customer service platform, as they are all relevant to the user. It also talks about the customer goal, to look into the reasons behind certain actions.

As you can see, journey mapping can be done in many different ways and for all types of situations. There is no fixed rule as to how a journey map should look as long as one takes note of the fundamental steps mentioned in the article.

Journey mapping is a useful tool used across different organisations to obtain a clear overview of their user’s perspectives and the challenges they face. It aligns the team towards a common understanding of how to better improve the user experience while zooming in on useful findings and implementing better ideas.

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Customer Journey Map: how to create one for your mobile app?

We are all brand users who know our preferences during the purchase process, but it can be challenging to predict consumers' minds from a business point of view. Every marketer has to understand users' demands, how they make decisions, and the trends they are likely to be associated with. Moreover, understanding every customer experience at each step of the customer journey map is critical for building a business strategy. 

Why do customers forget about the items in their app shopping carts? Why do they download and never use a mobile app? You've come to the right place if you're searching for answers to these questions. This post will teach you to create and understand customer journey maps for your mobile apps.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map represents a visual picture of the consumer experience with a brand. It gives insight into potential consumers' demands and pain points, which may either encourage or restrict their behavior. With that data, one can improve their customer experience, as well as increase conversion rates and client retention.  

A customer journey map enables marketers to see how customers interact with a company until they make a purchase. There are numerous steps and processes between learning about the mobile app and using it on a daily basis. The UX experience that customers receive is critical to the customer journey, and it is not something that marketers can guess based on their assumptions. It is a highly data-driven process.

The fundamentals of customer journey mapping

There is no one-size-fits-all solution for creating a customer journey mapping, but the goal is to produce a visual depiction of the customer's journey. It shows how users interact with the brand's map and gives marketers their point of view.

If you understand this relationship, you can plan specific approaches (push notifications, in-app messages, etc.) to provide your users with the most effective and efficient experience. A customer journey map shows the process of consumers from the first to the last interaction. It helps to determine if the users are on track to purchase and, if not, how they can be.

What does a customer journey map include?

Let's go through the core aspects of the customer journey mapping process:

The purchase process

The first step is to sketch out the path that the company wants a client to take in order to achieve a goal. You can list each step using the purchase process phases.  For example, you could begin with a discussion of how your mobile app can solve the pain points of your customers.

User behavior

This part of the customer journey map outlines what a customer does at each stage of the buying process. People may discuss their desires and potential solutions with others during the awareness stage. They may look at the feedback section on your mobile app or website before purchasing to understand the product's quality. 

User’s feelings

Every customer is attempting to solve a problem when looking for your product. They probably feel a range of emotions: happiness, enthusiasm, or sadness. Make sure that your process is not complicated so it won't lead a user to feel negative about your brand. Incorporating positive emotions into the journey map can assist you in mitigating undesirable emotions.   

If the users get a negative mood during their process, it might help the brand identify the stage where they get that emotion and why. 

Problem-solving 

Ready-made products are the final part of your customer journey map. This is where the company's team will explore new methods to improve the purchase process so that consumers have fewer pain spots and are happier while patronizing the brand. 

How to create a customer journey map for your mobile app?

Now that we've covered the fundamentals of the customer experience journey mapping process, we can move on to the most exciting part: creating the map.

Identify your goals 

Before you start designing your map, you should consider why you're building one in the first place. What are you aiming toward with this map? What exactly is it about? What kind of experience is this based on? 

These questions will help you start with a customer journey map for your mobile app. Moreover, it may be useful for building your user's profile. 

User persona

The next step is to undertake research. User testing is an excellent way to obtain meaningful client feedback. The most crucial thing is to contact only real customers: the feedback from individuals interested in buying products and services and those who have previously engaged with your brand or plan to do so.   

User research findings are crucial for confidence that the whole journey and direction are relevant to users. Focusing on a single point of view will assist product teams in developing a short and focused narrative for that user. 

Interaction process

This is an important stage in developing a customer journey map since it helps marketers see what activities customers engage in. Based on your data, make a list of all the features customers are currently using. It would help if you considered all possible online channels that your consumer may find your app through, including social media, websites, app shops, or third-party sites. 

One way to do so is to list all the actions your clients do during their interaction with your brand. It is critical to notice when consumers have to perform too many activities to attain their objectives. Reducing the number of steps will result in higher conversion rates.

Another option is to track the user's emotions through the customer journey map tool. A pain point or an issue is generally the emotional motivator behind your customers' activities. By understanding that, you will be able to provide the appropriate material at the right moment, smoothing the customer's emotional journey through your brand.

Optimize and make a changes

Analyzing the data may identify where customer needs are not being met. By approaching things in this manner, you can ensure that you are providing a great experience and that people will be able to overcome their problems with your support. It remains hypothetical until you put the customer route planning process to the test.

You may then make the necessary adjustments to your website to meet these objectives. Perhaps this is done to create more engaging interactions within the app or get paid ads to increase awareness. Instead of making changes blindly, the company should base its customer journey map on available data and ensure that it will improve the user experience.    

Customer journey map best practices

To create the best customer journey map, consider these factors:

• Personas: You should focus on these categories of people, simply saying your target market. Demographical and psychographic categories can define it. 
• Timeline: You have to set a specific deadline in order to achieve your objectives and follow the customer journey map plan through the timeline. 
• Actions: Carefully observe how the consumers are acting at every stage. This will help you create a map based on consumer likes and dislikes. 
• Channels : Every set of consumer actions need a particular delivery channel. You can use the default in-app interactive approaches while utilizing other tools such as social media for your mobile app.   
• Feelings: As we already know, the consumer's emotional state is significant for the consumer journey map. For this step, you aim to revert unhappy consumer feelings into happy ones. 

The key to success in bringing all of this information together is identifying any process pain point that the UX design customer journey map can address. A detailed map can assist marketers in developing a knowledge of each product placement. For example, you might be able to identify at what stage you should develop your product or test the user experience.

Another practice for your customer journey map is to test how engaged your audience is. However, you need to think a step ahead and analyze just what kind of quality tools you can use to gain maximum effect from your efforts. InAppStory provides such a toolkit that is capable of achieving your set mobile app goals. In fact, our tool consists of several components that create an immersive and interactive experience for your users. Just to name a few examples, our experts offer:

• Onboarding Screens - whether it’s about your own mobile application features or relevant educational material, the onboarding sets of screens will be able to provide short and impactful content that every user can easily digest.
• App Stories - if you want to share valuable and informative content with other people about your own organization, then mobile Stories can also provide you with such a feature. 
• Gamification - be it an interactive Candy Crush similar game or an adventure-based one, you might want to incorporate them into your mobile app. The engagement and stickiness rates will surely go up in a matter of a few months.
• Quizzes - instead of a boring survey, you can collect the necessary feedback from users through a simple and funny quiz.

As you can see, our toolkit based on SDK allows us to greatly simplify the content approach and at the same time impact your major mobile app metrics. If you want to see the full potential of the Stories feature, then try it out for FREE for an entire month. All you need to do is leave your contact details and we’ll be able to give you access within 24 hours!

Customer journey map example 

Let's look at a real-world customer journey map example and assess it. Spotify is one of the most popular audio streaming services in the world. The goal of this customer journey map was to determine where music-sharing services fit in best with the consumer experience.

The user experience on this map illustrates the stage at which users learn about the app through a shared link from a friend. At the same time, users may choose whether or not they like the music. The brand monitors what the customer is doing, thinking, and feeling at each stage. Spotify used data analysis and consumer surveys to understand better how people felt at each level of the customer experience.

Using the customer journey map, Spotify was able to identify and address consumer pain points, resulting in a pleasant and smooth music sharing experience that encourages more consumers to share music – and to do so more frequently. This journey map is great since it highlights crucial areas of customer interaction, takes consumer behavior into account, and strives to make the customer experience as pleasant as possible.

Tools for creating a customer journey map

Customer journey map tools will help you to create one. You can plan your map using a simple flowchart, but plenty of more sleek and sophisticated tools are available. They have valuable benefits such as: 

• Customer journey mapping tools and templates make the process go faster. 
• Sharing and collaboration tools.
• User persona generators and the ability to create, store, and change them. 
• Customer feedback tools to help you evolve your UX maps.  

What criteria should we look for when assessing consumer mapping tools? Here are some key measures:

• Interface: The first thing that you should consider is the neat and appealing interface. A good customer journey tool should be user-friendly and provide accurate data.
• Quality:   The technical and user assistance, as well as training, would benefit your business. To speed up the process, you may use the customer map journey template if it's available. 
• Tools: Customer journey mapping will require a lot of user feedback, so the tool should be able to connect to popular services like Google Suite.
• Price : It should have an appropriate price for the features, capabilities, and plans that it provides. Transparent and flexible pricing is a big plus.

Your goals will determine which templates and tools you may use to get consumers to your desired destination. Three standard customer journey map tools include:

• PowerPoint : It is easy to use and includes customized templates, but it does not allow real-time testing. It is the best starting point for a draft user map.
• LucidChart : This software is excellent for comprehensive maps and real-time collaborations. If you have a lot of data and need something more solid, you can choose this one.
• InDesign : If you are looking for awesome illustrations for your map, InDesign can create a complex graphical design.

You can please your customers at every point of their purchase process after thoroughly grasping their experience with your company. Customer pain spots, emotions, your company's touchpoints, and processes are all aspects that might influence this journey. 

Whether you're improving your user interface or investigating a new business opportunity to meet a client's unmet requirements, a customer journey map is the most efficient method to visualize this information.

Customer journey mapping software

Lucidchart is a visual workspace that combines diagramming, data visualization, and collaboration to accelerate understanding and drive innovation.

Grasp the customer experience with our customer journey mapping tool

Create in-depth diagrams that capture the customer experience

Understanding your customer’s expectations, objectives, and interactions with your company is essential for creating a flawless customer experience. By mapping the customer journey from your consumer’s perspective, you can gain insight into the individual interactions that make up their experience from beginning to end. With customizable templates and extensive formatting options, our customer journey software lets you easily visualize and share your findings, helping you target specific personas, increase customer engagement, and ultimately increase your organization’s revenue.

Build a streamlined site with our user story software

As a UX designer, a user journey map can help you visualize your customer’s experience as they interact with your site or app. Our intuitive user story mapping tools let you easily outline how individual personas navigate and ultimately reach your site’s point of sale, allowing you to cater to your audience’s motivations and eliminate pain points. Lucidchart’s easy-to-use interface makes it simple to build and refine your user story map as your organization and customer experience evolve.

Collaborate with other departments and stakeholders

Ensure that your customer journey map is as comprehensive as possible. Lucidchart helps you collaborate with the stakeholders and teams responsible for each touchpoint in the customer journey. Using real-time collaboration and in-editor commenting and chatting, your team can keep your map up to date without worrying about version control or wasted time. No matter where or when your team is working, your customer journey map will reflect all of your latest updates.

Share, publish, and implement your customer journey map

Our dynamic sharing options and powerful integrations make it easy to distribute your diagram amongst stakeholders and decision makers. Easily invite others to view and edit your diagram via email or embed your diagram in collaborative platforms like Jira, Salesforce, or Slack. Once the final version of your customer journey map is complete, publish and share your diagram company-wide to keep your organization on the same page as you implement action items and revise your customer journey.

How to create a customer journey map

Define clear objectives for the map.

Identify the purpose of your customer journey map, the experience it is based on, and its audience. Your map can be based on an actual, hypothetical, or future customer experience.

Conduct customer persona research to understand your customer's goals

Collect info on your customer, including variables they're likely to experience during their journey with your company. List related touchpoints, actions, channels, motivations, pain points, and ownership.

Start mapping the user journey to include touchpoints

With your customer's info collected, add elements to your customer journey map that address the touchpoints and objectives specific to your customer.

Identify gaps along the customer journey and refine

Identify potential pain points in the customer journey. Lucidchart makes it easy to visualize and refine the journey to ensure the customer has an efficient and satisfying experience.

Present and share

Share your user journey map with stakeholders to implement appropriate solutions. Keep your map accessible to easily test, update, and improve it every six months or so.

Frequently asked questions about creating a customer journey map online

You can create a customer journey map from scratch by dragging and dropping basic shapes, or you can customize a customer journey map from our template gallery.

Read the blog post linked below for tips to create and keep your customer journey map organized.

Yes! We have an assortment to choose from, depending on your customer journey map’s objective. Type "customer journey" in the template gallery search bar to browse through templates.

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“I have used [Lucidchart] extensively to map the customer journey. It's an intuitive tool, enabling the visual display and explanation of complicated workflows through easy-to-make diagrams.”

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Browse customer journey map templates

Customer Journey Map Template

Basic Customer Journey Map Template

Coffee Shop Journey Map Template

Customer Experience Map Template

Content Map Template of Customer Journey

Onboarding Customer Journey Map Template

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Customer Journey Map: A Comprehensive Guide for E-commerce Success

Justin Wiley

Welcome to our comprehensive guide on customer journey maps, an essential tool for e-commerce success. In this article, we'll explore what a customer journey map is, why it is important, its benefits, alternative approaches, historical usage, and more. Whether you're an e-commerce novice or an experienced professional, this guide will provide you with valuable insights into understanding and leveraging customer journey maps to optimize your online business.

What is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation that outlines the entire experience a customer goes through when interacting with your e-commerce store. It illustrates the various touchpoints, actions, emotions, and decision-making processes of customers from their initial discovery to post-purchase activities. By mapping out these stages, businesses gain a holistic view of their customers' interactions, allowing them to identify pain points, optimize experiences, and deliver personalized solutions.

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What are Customer Journey Examples?

Customer journey examples can vary depending on the industry and business model. Here are a few examples to provide insights into different scenarios:

• Online Retail: A customer discovers an online store through social media advertising, browses products, adds items to the cart, completes the purchase, and receives personalized post-purchase emails with recommendations and discounts.
• SaaS Product: A customer signs up for a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product, receives an onboarding email sequence, accesses a guided tutorial, explores different features, receives proactive customer support, and gets regular updates and feature announcements.
• Travel Booking: A customer plans a vacation, searches for destinations, compares prices and reviews on a travel website, books flights, and accommodations, receives booking confirmations and travel itineraries, and receives post-trip follow-ups and personalized recommendations for future trips.

Remember, these are just a few examples, and customer journeys can be unique to each business and industry. Analyzing your specific customer journey will provide the most relevant insights for optimizing your e-commerce business.

What are the 5 Main Points of a Customer Journey?

When mapping a customer journey, there are five main points to consider:

• Awareness: The stage where customers become aware of your brand, product, or service. This can happen through various channels, such as advertisements, social media, or word-of-mouth.
• Consideration: Customers begin to research and evaluate your offerings, comparing them with alternatives. They may seek reviews, visit your website, or engage with your content to gather more information.
• Decision: The point where customers make a decision to purchase from you. They may add items to their cart, request a quote, or sign up for a free trial.
• Purchase: The actual transaction takes place. Customers complete the purchase process, providing payment and necessary information.
• Post-Purchase: After the purchase, customers engage with your brand in terms of support, onboarding, product usage, and potentially leaving reviews or referrals. This stage plays a crucial role in customer retention and advocacy.

How to Make a Customer Journey?

Creating a customer journey involves a systematic approach. Here's a step-by-step guide to making a customer journey:

• Identify Your Target Audience: Define your target audience and understand their demographics, preferences, and pain points.
• Define Customer Goals: Determine the goals your customers aim to achieve at each stage of their journey, such as finding a solution, making an informed decision, or receiving excellent support.
• Map Touchpoints: Identify the various touchpoints where customers interact with your business, both online and offline.
• Gather Customer Data: Collect relevant data about customer behavior, preferences, and experiences at each touchpoint. Utilize surveys, analytics, and customer feedback.
• Create a Visual Representation: Design a visual representation of the customer journey map using a template. Include stages, touchpoints, emotions, and actions.
• Analyze and Optimize: Analyze the data collected and identify pain points, areas of improvement, and opportunities to enhance the customer experience. Optimize touchpoints and processes accordingly.
• Continuously Iterate: Customer journeys are dynamic and evolve over time. Regularly revisit and update your customer journey map based on new data, feedback, and changing customer needs.

Why is a Customer Journey Map Important?

A customer journey map holds significant importance for e-commerce businesses. Here are some key reasons why it should be an integral part of your strategy:

• Enhanced Understanding: By visualizing the customer journey, you gain a deeper understanding of your customer's needs, expectations, and pain points at each stage. This insight enables you to tailor your marketing, sales, and customer support efforts accordingly.
• Improved Customer Experience: Mapping the customer journey helps identify gaps or bottlenecks in the process. By addressing these pain points, you can optimize the overall customer experience, leading to higher satisfaction, loyalty, and repeat business.
• Strategic Decision Making: Customer journey maps provide actionable data and insights that inform strategic decisions. They help you allocate resources effectively, focus on high-impact touchpoints, and prioritize initiatives that drive conversions and revenue growth.

Benefits of a Customer Journey Map

Implementing a customer journey map offers numerous benefits for e-commerce businesses:

• Enhanced Conversion Rates: Understanding customer behavior and preferences enables you to create targeted marketing campaigns and tailored experiences that resonate with your audience, leading to higher conversion rates.
• Improved Customer Retention: By identifying pain points and addressing them proactively, you can enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty, fostering long-term relationships with your audience.
• Optimized Marketing Strategies: Customer journey maps reveal valuable insights into which marketing channels and touchpoints are most effective at each stage. This information allows you to optimize your marketing strategies for better ROI.
• Streamlined Operations: A comprehensive understanding of the customer journey helps streamline internal processes and communication across departments, resulting in improved efficiency and collaboration.

How to Create an Effective Customer Journey Map?

Crafting an effective customer journey map involves a strategic approach. Here are key steps to creating a compelling customer journey map:

• Define Your Goals: Clearly outline your objectives and what you aim to achieve through the customer journey map. Are you looking to enhance customer satisfaction, boost conversions, or improve brand loyalty?
• Conduct Research: Gather data through surveys, interviews, and analytics to understand your customers' preferences, pain points, and behaviors. This will provide valuable insights for mapping their journey.
• Identify Touchpoints: Identify the touchpoints where customers interact with your business, including website visits, social media engagement, email communications, and customer support interactions.
• Outline Customer Stages: Divide the customer journey into distinct stages, such as awareness, consideration, purchase, and post-purchase. Outline the specific actions and emotions experienced by customers at each stage.
• Visualize the Journey: Create a visual representation of the customer journey map, utilizing tools such as flowcharts or infographics. This will help you visualize the entire journey and communicate it effectively.
• Analyze and Iterate: Analyze the customer journey map and identify pain points or areas for improvement. Make necessary adjustments, iterate, and continuously refine the map based on customer feedback and evolving trends.

Best Practices for Utilizing Customer Journey Maps

To maximize the benefits of customer journey maps, consider implementing these best practices:

• Cross-Department Collaboration: Involve various teams, such as marketing, sales, and customer support, in the creation and implementation of customer journey maps. This promotes a holistic approach and ensures consistency across touchpoints.
• Regular Updates and Monitoring: Customer journey maps should be dynamic and adaptable. Regularly update and monitor them to reflect changing customer expectations, market trends, and business goals.
• Collect and Utilize Customer Feedback: Actively gather customer feedback at different stages of the journey to identify pain points and areas for improvement. Leverage this feedback to optimize touchpoints and enhance the overall customer experience.
• Align Marketing and Sales Strategies: Use the insights from customer journey maps to align marketing and sales strategies at each stage of the customer journey. Ensure consistent messaging, personalized interactions, and seamless transitions between touchpoints.
• Test and Iterate: Experiment with different approaches and variations within the customer journey map. Test and measure the impact of changes, and iterate based on the results to continually optimize the customer experience.

Key Metrics to Track for Customer Journey Optimization

To gauge the effectiveness of your customer journey map, monitor key metrics that indicate the success of your optimization efforts. Here are some important metrics to consider:

• Conversion Rate: Measure the percentage of visitors who successfully complete desired actions, such as making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter. This indicates the effectiveness of your customer journey in driving conversions.
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Obtain feedback from customers regarding their satisfaction with the overall experience. This metric provides insights into the success of your customer journey in meeting customer expectations.
• Customer Retention Rate: Track the percentage of customers who continue to engage with your brand over time. A high retention rate indicates that your customer journey effectively nurtures and retains customers.
• Average Order Value (AOV): Monitor the average amount spent by customers per transaction. A higher AOV suggests that your customer journey encourages upsells, cross-sells, or premium purchases.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV): Evaluate the total value a customer brings to your business over their entire relationship with you. A higher CLTV indicates that your customer journey fosters long-term customer loyalty and repeat purchases.

Alternatives to Customer Journey Maps

While customer journey maps are widely used and highly effective, there are alternative approaches worth considering for e-commerce businesses:

• User Personas: Creating user personas involves developing fictional characters that represent different segments of your target audience. User personas help you understand customer motivations, behaviors, and pain points, which can be used to tailor experiences and marketing campaigns.
• A/B Testing: A/B testing involves comparing two different versions of a webpage or marketing element to determine which one performs better. This method provides valuable insights into customer preferences and can be used to optimize user experiences.
• Heatmaps and Click Tracking: Heatmaps and click tracking tools allow you to visualize user behavior on your website. By analyzing where users click, how far they scroll, and which elements they interact with the most, you can identify areas of improvement and optimize your website accordingly.

Historical Usage of Customer Journey Maps

Customer journey maps have been used historically to gain a competitive edge and improve business outcomes. Here are a few examples:

• Service Industry: Service-based businesses have long utilized customer journey maps to optimize their interactions with clients. By identifying key touchpoints and pain points, businesses have successfully enhanced customer satisfaction and retention rates.
• Retail: In the retail sector, customer journey maps have been used to analyze in-store experiences, improve store layouts, and design effective displays that drive sales.
• Online Businesses: E-commerce companies leverage customer journey maps to refine their digital experiences, optimize online shopping processes, and deliver personalized marketing campaigns that resonate with their target audience.

Final Thoughts on Customer Journey Maps

Embracing the power of customer journey maps is vital for achieving e-commerce success. By mapping out your customers' interactions, pain points, and preferences, you can optimize their experiences, drive conversions, and cultivate lasting loyalty. Replo, the leading provider of Shopify apps , offers a game-changing solution for e-commerce teams with their highly optimized and customizable landing pages . With Replo's commitment to "Shopify without the dev time," businesses can prioritize crafting exceptional customer journeys that align with their target audience's needs and preferences. By harnessing the insights from customer journey maps and leveraging Replo's innovative app, e-commerce teams can thrive in a competitive landscape and deliver outstanding experiences that fuel growth and prosperity. Take charge of your customer journey and elevate your e-commerce business with Replo's transformative tools today!

Frequently Asked Questions About Customer Journey Maps

How do i create a customer journey map.

Creating a customer journey map involves researching and understanding your target audience, identifying key touchpoints, mapping out the stages, and visualizing the customer experience. Consider using customer feedback, analytics data, and user testing to inform your map.

How often should I update my customer journey map?

Customer journey maps should be regularly reviewed and updated to reflect any changes in customer behavior, market trends, or business strategies. Aim to revisit and update your map at least once a year, or more frequently if significant changes occur.

Are customer journey maps only for large e-commerce businesses?

No, customer journey maps are valuable for businesses of all sizes. Whether you're a small startup or a large enterprise, understanding your customers' journey is crucial for providing exceptional experiences and achieving business success.

Can customer journey maps be used for offline businesses?

Absolutely! While customer journey maps are commonly associated with online businesses, they are equally applicable to offline businesses. Whether you have a physical store or provide services in person, mapping out your customers' journey helps optimize their experiences and drive business growth.

Are there tools available to help create customer journey maps?

Yes, there are various tools and software available to assist in creating customer journey maps. These tools offer features such as visualization templates, collaboration capabilities, and integration with other analytics platforms, making the process more streamlined and efficient.

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