web customer journey

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 🙂

A comprehensive guide to effective customer journey mapping

A brand's user experience shapes its target audience's entire perception of your organization. Maximize audience engagement with customer journey mapping.

Discover key challenges today's marketing teams are facing, as well as opportunities for businesses in 2024.

Incorporating customer journey mapping into your web design process helps elevate consumer engagement to drive loyalty and sales.

Many in-house teams and web designers strive to better serve users by optimizing their customer experience (CX). Considering how your customers use your platform or service helps you see your website from a user perspective, letting you shape your design to better meet their needs. To achieve this, web designers can look to customer journey mapping.

A particularly handy tool for user experience (UX) design , this process helps teams understand who their users are and how to fulfill their expectations, guiding development decisions for improved audience engagement. Learn more about customer journey mapping and how you can implement it to enhance your CX.

User journey mapping: an overview

User journey mapping, also known as customer journey mapping (CJM), maps a website visitor's experience from their perspective. Presented through a visual diagram, the customer journey map charts the user’s path as they seek information or solutions, starting at the homepage and tracking their routes across other menus and links.

To create a customer journey map, you begin by researching who users are, what they want from your site, and how positive or negative their experiences have been. 

There are two main purposes for mapping your customers’ journey.

1. Improve customer experience

This is the ultimate goal of CJM. Site navigation can be especially tricky to assess because you’re already familiar with the layout. A fresh perspective on your site often uncovers overlooked details such as navigation issues or broken links.

By conducting research on UX trends and visually mapping your results, you’ll identify any parts of your design that confuse or frustrate visitors. This process also reveals areas that work well, which you can repurpose elsewhere in the design.

2. Maintains ease-of-use as your site grows

A customer journey map can make even a simple site more straightforward to navigate. When your website or business grows, you may need to add content and features to accommodate the expansion. Implementing customer journey mapping ensures your website's fundamental flow remains intuitive and that new material and features are easily discoverable and usable.

Primary user journey map types

There are various ways to approach customer journey mapping based on the specific insights you’re seeking. The end result of each map will look similar, but the focus of each is different — which changes the information it offers. Here are three standard types of maps to get you started.

Current state

The current state map is the most common type. It evaluates your website’s present state to better understand visitors’ current experiences, helping identify improvement opportunities for its existing design.

Future state

A future state map explores a hypothetical "ideal" website, considering the visitor’s experience if every site component were optimized. This map is helpful when planning a total redesign or a specific change. When you collect user research and translate the results into your map, you can present a visual outline to your client or company for a straightforward explanation.

Persona-based

A persona-based map lays out the journey of a single designated type of user, or persona (which we will define below). This type of diagram is useful when optimizing your website for a specific sector of your audience with particular needs.

Learn best practices for integrating the workflows between design and development in this free webinar.

The 5-step customer journey mapping process

Once you’ve set clear goals for your map’s achievements, you can select the appropriate diagram type. To begin visualizing your user journey, follow this five-step process.

1. Define the map’s scope

Your map may focus on just one customer interaction or outcome, such as finding the newsletter sign-up sheet or making a payment, or it could cover the entire website’s navigation. A focused scope helps you troubleshoot a problem area or ensure an especially critical element functions properly. Alternatively, a larger-scope map provides a big-picture perspective of how the site works as a whole. Creating a comprehensive map is more complex, but high-level mapping helps comprehend the entire user experience from beginning to end.

2. Determine your user personas

A persona describes a particular type of visitor using your site. When imagining and defining these users, you can assign a name to each and include details about who they are, what they’re looking for, and why.

Focus on users who contribute most to your business goals, consulting your marketing or sales teams for insights. To define your customer personas, explore current user behavior through surveys, online reviews, and email list responsiveness.

For example, if you’re creating a website for a store that sells artisanal coffee-making tools, your personas could be:

• The gift giver. This user only knows a little about coffee but wants to select an impressive gift for someone else. They’ll need help with purchase decisions, so they might interact with an FAQ or chat feature before visiting the products page. They may also leave your site if overwhelmed by options, so it’s important to offer helpful information proactively. This will keep them engaged and more likely convert them to paying customers.
• The coffee nerd. This person is knowledgeable and always seeks the highest-quality tools, so easily accessible product details and customer reviews are important to them. To support their user experience and encourage them to purchase, ensure these elements are easily discoverable.
• The tourist. This user is on vacation and looking for a cute brick-and-mortar shop to visit. They aren't interested in your online store, but an appealing photo of your physical store with easily accessible hours and location information may convince them to come by in person.

These three types of users have very different needs and goals when visiting your website. To capture all of their business, create a map for each of them to ensure you accommodate their specific wants and circumstances.

3. Give the personas context

User context is the “when” and “how” of each persona visiting your site. A user will have a different experience loading your site on a mobile device than on a laptop. Additionally, someone in no rush may use your website differently than someone looking more urgently with a specific purpose.

Figure out when, how, and in what mindset your personas most commonly visit your site to map their experience accurately. This context has very concrete impacts on your finished design. If visitors tend to look for one specific page whenever in a hurry (like contact or location information), placing those details on the front page or prominently linking to it will smooth the user experience for those users.

Here’s an example of how to place a persona in context.

Persona: Jo is an apartment hunter in her early 20s and is still in college. She's looking for off-campus housing for herself and some roommates. The collective group values location and cost more than apartment features.

Context : Jo is in a hurry and trying to visit as many apartments as possible. She’s looking at property rental websites that clearly state apartment addresses in each listing.

Method : Jo is browsing the sites on her iPhone.

4. List persona touchpoints

Touchpoints mark when the user makes a purchase decision or interacts with your user interface (UI) . They include visitors' actions to move toward their goals and consider each associated emotion. The first touchpoint is how they reach your website — such as tapping a social media ad, clicking on a search result, or entering your URL directly.

First, list each action the visitor took and their corresponding emotional reactions. Subsequent touchpoints include instances when they navigate a menu, click a button, scroll through a gallery, or fill out a form. When you diagram the route through your site in an A-to-Z path, you can place yourself in the persona's mind to understand their reactions and choices.

A met expectation — for example, when clicking a "shop" button takes them to a product gallery — will result in a positive emotional reaction. An unmet expectation — when the “shop" link leads to an error page — will provoke an adverse reaction.

5. Map the customer journey

Illustrate the user journey by mapping these touchpoints on a visual timeline. This creates a narrative of users’ reactions across your entire service blueprint. To represent your users’ emotional states at each touchpoint, graph their correspondences like this:

The map helps you understand the customer experience as a whole. 

For example, based on the diagram above, touchpoint 3 is the largest navigation challenge on the website. The graph also shows that the user's mood eventually rebounds after the initial setback. Improving the problem element in touchpoint 3 will have the biggest impact on elevating the overall user experience.

Customer journey mapping best practices

Now that you understand the mapping process, here are some best practices to implement when charting your customer journey. 

• Set a clear objective for your map: Define your CX map’s primary goal, such as improving the purchase experience or increasing conversions for a specific product.
• Solicit customer feedback: Engage directly with customers through surveys or interviews so you can implement data-driven changes. Ask users about their journey pain points and invite both positive and negative feedback on the overall navigation.
• Specify customer journey maps for each persona: To specifically serve each customer persona, consider charting separate paths for each based on their behaviors and interests. This approach is more customer-centric, as not all user types interact with your website the same way.
• Reevaluate your map after company or website changes: As your business scales, your website must evolve — and so will your customer’s path. Review your map when making both large and small website adjustments to ensure you don’t introduce new user challenges. Navigational disruptions can frustrate visitors, causing would-be customers to leave your site and seek competitors .

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The customer journey — definition, stages, and benefits

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

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

This post will discuss:

• What a customer journey is

Customer journey stages

Benefits of knowing the customer journey.

• What a customer journey map is

How to create a customer journey map

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

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

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

Customer journey vs. the buyer journey

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

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

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

1. Awareness

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

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

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

2. Consideration

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

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

3. Purchase

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

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

4. Retention

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

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

5. Advocacy

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

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

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

More specifically, acknowledging the customer journey can help you:

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

What is a customer journey map?

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

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

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

Customer journey touchpoints

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

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

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

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

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

1. Create buyer personas

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

To create a buyer persona, you will need to:

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

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

2. List the touchpoints at each customer journey stage

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

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

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

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

3. Map the customer experience at each touchpoint

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

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

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

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

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

Getting started with customer journeys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A complete guide to customer journey analytics.

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

What is customer journey analytics?

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

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

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

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

Customer journey analytics can include analysis of:

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

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

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

Customer journey analytics vs. customer journey mapping

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

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

What is customer journey mapping?

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

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

Some common components of customer journey maps include:

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

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

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

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

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

Benefits of customer journey analytics

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

Your brand becomes more customer-centric

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

Your business becomes more unified

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

You can find track issues as they happen

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

You see direct and indirect feedback in one place

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

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

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

See how Qualtrics CustomerXM enables customer journey analytics

An example of using customer journey analytics

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

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

Resolving a customer satisfaction issue for a specific sub-journey

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

The journey

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

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

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

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

The analysis

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

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

The resulting action  

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

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

How to use customer journey analytics

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

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

1. Map your customer journeys and aggregate data

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

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

Learn the five competencies for customer journey mapping

2. Analyze your customer behavior and data

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

3. Take action informed by data-led insights

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

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

How customer journey analytics can improve your customer experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related resources

Customer Journey

How to Create a Customer Journey Map 22 min read

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

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Once you’ve created a detailed buyer persona to help guide your website’s content, messaging, and design, what is the next step?

Think about your   buyer persona’s   relationship to your website, and how they engage with it before, during, and after they become a customer.

How do they prefer to discover, inquire, and learn about your offering?

A customer journey map outlines what your personas, leads, and customers will experience once they hit your site. How they interact with your brand from the first point of contact until the sale, and even after. Whether you sell product, software, service, or other offering, a customer journey map is an effective tool to understand how your leads interpret and interact with your website.

When creating a customer journey map, you can approach the process in two ways:

• Focus on the entire journey and experience
• Focus on a specific stage of the journey and experience 

With both, it’s important to identify the key interactions at each stage, and pinpoint what the user is feeling, what questions they may have, and what motivates them.

Many customer journey maps depict this information via an infographic or diagram for easy visualization.

There is no one way to   create a customer journey map . Choose the format that works best for your brand. Later in this post, we’ll look at more ways to create a journey map. First, let’s dive into why your company should consider using a customer journey map.

The Importance of Using a Customer Journey Map

Mapping out your customer’s journey   allows your organization to understand exactly how a person is feeling at each point of interaction with your brand; what key questions they may have (that perhaps you aren’t currently answering), and their specific needs at each stage of their journey.

Using a customer journey map, your entire organization gains a better understanding of not only your   customer,   but how your website affects their   decision making   process.

For more on the benefits of a customer journey map,   watch this video .

The Marketing Team

learns more about the customer than a buyer persona alone can tell them. Insights into the type of questions the customer   seeks   to answer, and the opportunities to improve and optimize their experience in finding those   answers,   helps align copy, CTA’s, and resources in a more effective way.

The Design Team

Gains access to the before and after: How did the customer arrive, and where are they going next? This insight helps build a stronger, more optimized design approach and helps aid the natural flow and browsing behavior of the customer.

Gains an understanding of how each customer moves through the website and sales funnel, allowing them to better understand where and how they can optimize for greater results.

Overall, your team will be able to pinpoint the exact places where your user experience falls short. Identifying:

• Channel Changes:   What exactly is happening when your lead is arriving from or going to a different channel associated with your website. How can you make this transition smoother?
• Device Changes:   How does your customer’s experience change when using different devices to browse your website.

The Stages of a Customer Journey Map

Your business’s journey map should be centered around the buyer journey stages : Awareness, consideration, decision, and after purchase.

From there, dig into each stage. Explore the following to ensure a seamless transition from one stage to the next:

What are the visitor’s motivations?

What questions are they asking, what actions are they taking, where are they blocked.

At each stage, what has motivated the lead to be there? What motivates them to keep moving forward? What are the emotional aspects attached to their motivations?

Just as their journey unfolds, so too will their questions. What questions do they need to answer before they can move to the next stage? Is industry lingo, or a technically difficult concept, holding them up?

What types of activity are you seeing from leads and customers at each stage? What actions are they taking to help move toward the next stage. What actions are they not taking?

Are there any reasons that your visitor can’t move to the next stage? What are they? Is your price structure, onboarding, service, or overall process confusing them or giving them pause?

Through customer research centered around site browsing/purchase behavior, customer interviews, and tools like website heat maps, you can gain a solid understanding of what customers may be experiencing at each stage.

While documenting a customer journey is one thing, the actual way people choose to purchase, or make buying decisions, can be very different. Some prospects will skip everything between awareness and purchase, while others will stay in the consideration phase for months. It’s important to understand that not everyone’s journey is the same. Yet, with more information, analytics, and research, you will be set up to provide a streamlined experience for most leads; anticipating their concerns and questions to move them toward a purchase decision.

HOW TO PERFORM CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP RESEARCH

If you’ve already performed your   buyer persona research ,   you should have a solid foundation to start on your customer journey map. Next, you must develop an understanding of the interactions your personas will have with your website, and learn more about their specific actions. Of course, these actions are based on what their personality dictates.

When approaching a deeper analysis, you will need to look at both analytical data and anecdotal.

BUILDING YOUR CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP

Here comes the fun part! Putting together all of your new insights, personas, hypotheses, and data and   making your customer journey map.   Design it in a way that best suites your organization. Some people choose infographic styling, while others choose a timeline view. However, your company chooses to represent your customer journey, make sure the design does not overshadow the main purpose: The website visitor’s journey and their story.

Here Are The Elements You Should Definitely Include In Your Customer Journey Map:

Phases : Make sure you clearly depict the buyer journey phases ( awareness, consideration, decision, and after purchase).

Personas : Whose journey are you mapping? Refer to your buyer personas and include them, or break them out into individual maps.

Channels : Where are these personas coming from? How did they find your site? Once they arrive what happens?

Touchpoints: What actions are your visitors taking? Where are your key opportunities for interactions? What are their clicks, downloads, signups, etc.?

Emotional Response: What emotions are they feeling at each stage? What are their questions/concerns/feelings? What moves them to the next phase, and holds them back from another?

There are many different ways to create a customer journey map, and there are many channels, personas, and scenarios you could create. Start small - you don’t need every single option. The goal is to tell a story about a customer’s needs, what they are searching for, and how and if they find it on your site.

SHARE, REFINE, AND PUT TO USE

Building a customer journey map is exciting and useful for the entire organization. Once you’ve created your first prototype - share it with your team.

Remember, every time a lead or customer has a negative interaction with your brand or website, it lowers your brand’s trustworthiness and chance to delight a customer. By outlining your customer’s interactions, emotional state, and questions/concerns in a visual way, your organization has a better chance of discovering new ways to win customer loyalty and enhance the customer relationship with the brand.

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5 steps to building a user journey map for your SEO strategy

Author: Grace Frohlich

Trust paves the way for conversion. One of the best ways to earn your target audience’s trust is to be there for them, answering their questions time and time again.

For SEOs and site owners, this means creating content. The most effective way to accomplish this task at scale is to map out the topics and potential questions that are relevant for your audience.

User journey mapping is a technique that helps businesses visualize their customers’ journey—from the moment they start searching for a solution to the point of conversion. This technique accounts for relevant topics, questions, and even user search intent to help you create a true full-funnel content marketing campaign.

In this article, I’ll cover:

What is user journey mapping for search?

How to build a user journey map.

Using your user journey map for better SEO

Tracking & reporting using user journey stages

You may have heard of the “buyer/customer journey”—a user journey map is similar. It is a model or visual representation that illustrates the stages a customer goes through, from the moment they start searching for a solution to when they actually become customers.

The main difference with user journey mapping is that the touch points exclusively relate to online search.

For example, in the SaaS customer engagement industry, a user journey may look something like this:

01. The user starts their search by typing how to improve customer retention into Google.

02. They may then click on a blog post about customer engagement strategies, leading them to a software company’s website.

03. From there, they may browse the website and eventually convert by signing up for a free trial.

User journey mapping is a crucial component of full-funnel content marketing , as it helps align website content with user search intent, which I’ll expand on in the next section.

How search intent contributes to user journey mapping

Search intent refers to the “why” that drives a user to search a given keyword , and it is not always reflected in what they type into the search bar.

For example, let's say you’re a B2B SaaS company that sells CRM (customer relationship management) solutions. Along their journey, a user searching for CRM products could make their way through the following search intents (and corresponding search terms):

Informational intent (e.g., CRM management tools ) — The user is researching possible CRM solutions on the market.

Comparative intent (e.g., best CRM tools ) — The user is comparing different tools to see which one best suits them.

Transactional/navigational intent (e.g., [company name] CRM ) — The user is ready to buy the product from your website.

By mapping search intent to each stage of your user journey, you can create a strategy so that your brand appears in the right places at the right time, meeting users where they are with relevant content. This not only benefits potential customers, it also helps search engines find and rank your content more effectively.

One of the reasons why search intent plays such an important role in this process is because many keywords can have the same intent . For example, the keywords CRM for small business and customer relationship for small business have the same search intent.

In fact, Google has claimed that 15% of search terms have never been searched before. And, Google processes trillions of searches every year , which means hundreds of billions of searches are completely new.

For SEOs, this means that it’s much more important and efficient to track search intent rather than chasing keywords. This is why understanding the real intent behind searches is essential if you want to target your audience with the right content at the right time, and ultimately, drive conversions.

The process of building a user journey map starts similarly to a UX customer journey map, except that you will predominantly use Google data. Here are the steps to build a user journey map for search:

Step 1: Define your user persona

Your audience and their pain points can serve as a clear roadmap for your user journey map to expand upon. For many brands, this means building out personas (if you haven’t already).

When defining your user personas, go beyond the demographic and behavioral characteristics associated with search (i.e., users that tend to search on mobile versus desktop) to also include user goals and motivations as they relate to search and your website or industry. Spend time to identify who your target audience is and what their search habits are. Find out what types of problems they face. User surveys, focus groups, and interviews can provide critical insights into what your potential customers want and what they’re looking to avoid.

If you don’t have this type of data (as is the case with many small businesses), I have found that there are AI tools, like ChatGPT , that can help generate user motivations and pain points to build a user persona.

For example, if you’re a B2B SaaS company looking to generate user motivations for CRM solutions, you could feed ChatGPT a prompt like “List the most common user motivations for searching CRM solutions.” The tool will generate something like this:

You can then dig into each line item to find specific pain points.

Let’s look at one of the user motivations ChatGPT gave us as an example—“Improve customer retention and loyalty.” To get more granular and identify specific ways to help your audience, you could type in the prompt:

“My company is a SaaS customer relation management company. I’m researching my customers’ problems and pain points about customer retention and loyalty. What are the most common pain points for my customers around improving customer retention?”

ChatpGPT will generate a list like this:

Repeat this for each line item until you have a comprehensive list. Then clean your list by combining similar items, removing duplicates, or simplifying some items. You will end up with a full list of all user motivations and pain points.

Step 2: Create a user journey

Next, you need to use your personas to map out the user journey into “stages” and “milestones”:

Stages are top-level steps in the user journey.

Milestones refer to more specific steps that fall under a specific stage.

I will demonstrate this process using the example for “improving customer retention and loyalty,” using the user motivations output from ChatGPT as our stages.

(Note: While I am listing out the user journey in chronological order to help us visualize it, the reality is that user search behavior is non-linear and is more like “ the messy middle. ”)

Start by arranging your list of motivations and pain points chronologically. Next, copy and paste the pain points (your own list or the ones ChatGPT provided) into a spreadsheet.

Pro tip: It helps to categorize each item with stages in the marketing funnel : awareness, consideration, and conversion.

Then split the list into two columns where the colon is. The first column will be your milestones, while the second column is a brief explanation.

Tweak the wording for milestones so that they are action phrases. Now, you have specific steps in your user journey. Repeat this process for all of your stages until you have a full user journey. Again, you can assign marketing funnel stages if that helps visually (as shown in the example below).

Step 3: Build a keyword list

Now that you have your user journey, it’s time to get to the “mapping” part.

You’ll need to compile a comprehensive keyword list to feed into the user search journey. Your list should include currently ranking keywords and aspirational keywords (terms that you would like to rank for and that make sense for your product/service). This will help you formulate business goals and uncover gaps in the user journey.

To start, export ranking keywords from Google Search Console (GSC) .

You can supplement this list with a keyword research tool, like Ahrefs or Semrush. If you don’t have a third-party tool, you can use Google Keyword Planner to find keyword ideas .

Next, pull competitor keywords and add them to the list. Again, you can use Ahrefs or other third-party tools to get competitor keywords. Otherwise, it may be a more manual process. You can either use tools that offer free trials (although many have usage limits) or you can even leverage ChatGPT to expand on your keyword list. This article shows you AI prompts for how to do this.

Step 4: Assign milestones to keywords

Once you have a full keyword list, assign each keyword to a milestone in your user journey. For example, below I have listed keywords to place into each milestone for improving customer retention.

improve customer service for retention

how to keep customers engaged through communication

customer service tips for retention

customer retention through personalization tactics

increase value for customer retention

value-based customer retention tactics

customer communication strategies for retention

personalize customer experiences for retention

improve product quality for customer retention

customer retention strategies for better products

Categorize each keyword into the most relevant milestone. I’ve formatted as above to show a visual representation, however it’s much more efficient to format your data following the example below. This will help you filter, sort, and organize your data down the line.

Pro tip: It also helps to assign milestone code numbers as a quick reference.

Step 5: Categorize keywords into search intent and topics

The last step is to categorize keywords by search intent and topic groups. This gives you a high-level view of topics per journey stage, and helps you spot content opportunities. This can be a time-consuming process, but using an AI tool like ChatGPT can significantly speed it up. I have detailed one method below:

First, enter your list of keywords into ChatGPT’s text input field and specify what type of intent or topic you want to categorize the keywords under. For search intent, you could input the prompt:

“Categorize these keywords into one of these search intents: Informational, Transactional, Comparative, Navigational”

If you want to categorize keywords by topic cluster , you could enter a prompt such as

"Categorize these keywords by topic related to customer retention."

ChatGPT will then generate a list of topic clusters and suggested search intents based on the keywords you provided. You must review the suggestions and group the keywords accordingly. Repeat this process until all of the keywords are categorized into their relevant topics and intents.

Once this is done, you’ll be able to identify common themes and topics that are important to your audience at different stages of the customer journey. This can help you create highly relevant, valuable content for your target audience, which can ultimately lead to better site performance.

How to use your user journey map for better SEO

Now that you have your user journey map, I will explain some key insights that you can get from it.

You can monitor stages and milestones to pinpoint areas that need improvement. The example below shows average monthly ranking by user journey milestone. This helps you identify specific milestones that consistently underperform and create a plan to further optimize them.

Another key benefit is better site content alignment: In the previous section, you mapped your user journey according to journey stages, search intents, and topics. Take it one step further and map specific pages on your site to each keyword and intent.

Let’s say you notice certain pages have been underperforming over the past few months. Look at which user journey milestones those pages are mapped to, as well as target keywords. Check if the pages satisfy the search intent. If the intent is informational but it’s mapped to a transactional page, you will have to either map to a different page or create a new page.

If your pages rank well for each of the mapped keywords and stages, it means that you’re on the right track. This insight can help you determine if your targeted content resonates with customers at each stage of the journey and help you identify pages that need retargeting or optimizing.

What if you don’t have a page that ranks for keywords you want to target? That’s an opportunity to investigate more or even create new content. You can then create targeted content to fill these gaps, ensuring that your brand is relevant and valuable no matter what pain points the user might currently be trying to resolve.

User journey mapping also provides an easier way to track content. By mapping specific pages on the website to stages, you can see performance by site sections or groups. In the next section, I’ll explain tracking and reporting in more detail.

Tracking and reporting with user journey stages

You’ll need to track and report on your website’s performance to evaluate how well your user journey map is working. But, tracking keywords to measure performance is (or will soon be) outdated. Google’s MUM update aims to reduce the number of searches needed to satisfy user intent, which means we need to change the way we track and measure traffic to our websites. Instead of focusing on individual keywords, monitor user journey stages and topic groups to better understand the performance of your content in relation to user intent.

Instead of tracking keywords individually, monitor user journey stages and topic groups to better understand the performance of your content in relation to user intent.

I highly recommend using a keyword tracking tool for this (I use STAT Search Analytics ). When you upload your keyword list into the platform, you can tag each keyword with the user journey stage, milestone, and code. This way, you can track performance by sections.

You can filter your data by user journey stage, milestone, or topic group and drill down on the data. For example, the ranking data in the image below was filtered by one specific milestone. We can then investigate keyword performance within that milestone. If you spot certain keywords that have not been ranking well, reevaluate the search intent for these terms. Check the keywords in the SERP to see if you can switch them out for other terms that better satisfy intent.

The screenshot below is an example of a user journey in STAT. You can see keyword performance by milestone, which makes it easier to make optimizations in batches, which in turn helps you work more efficiently.

As your content grows, so too will your user journey map

User journey mapping is an ongoing process that requires continuous monitoring and refinement. As you update and add new content to your website, it’s important to regularly review and adjust your user journey map to ensure that it remains aligned with user intent and behavior. I recommend doing this user journey mapping exercise annually to keep your data up-to-date.

The initial research and set up will take time, but the reward is an invaluable resource that you will continue to use and adapt. Plus, you will find deeper insights about your current and potential customers. So, start mapping out your user journey today and take your SEO strategy to the next level!

Grace Frohlich - SEO Consultant at Brainlabs

Grace is a consultant at Brainlabs SEO (formerly Distilled), and has extensive knowledge and experience in SEO fundamentals. She enjoys sharing strategic processes and insights, and has spoken at BrightonSEO and SearchLove. Linkedin

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Websites: have you mapped your customer journey?

Have you mapped your customer journey.

Understand your customers better, and personalize communication and actions based on where they are.

Creating customer journey maps: a guide

“Take a walk in your customers' shoes” isn't just a phrase; it's a necessary process that positively impacts your business if done the right way. If you're wondering how to get into your customers’ minds, the most effective way to do so is through customer journey mapping. Get started with creating your customer journey maps.

What is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping creates a visual representation of what your customers go through with your brand or product. It helps to understand how your customers see your brand, how they interact with your products and gain insight into the pain points they're facing that keep them from purchasing. Customer journey mapping ensures that you address customer issues for a smooth experience.

Benefits of customer journey maps

Customer journey mapping is a powerful tool that helps brands establish effective communication channels and helps customers make decisions. Some of the benefits of this process include:

      Understand how customers interact with the brand

Having a standardized framework to document the customer journey is a great way to ensure all the teams have access to the same information. The structure helps visualize the process and understand how your customers interact with your brand.

      Document the different stages of the customers’ journey

By meticulously making notes of how your customers interact with you, you can understand the different phases a customer goes through before making the final purchase. You can use this data to reinforce your communication with the customers, thereby giving them the nudge they need to buy from you.

      Find the motivation behind the purchase

One of the main benefits of creating a customer journey map is to uncover your customers’ motivation to buy from you. Understanding this will give you access to problems they need to solve and tailor products to reach a wider audience.

      Address pain points to convert potential customers

During the mapping process, you might find customers turning away from you due to difficulty in getting more information about your product, or they find reaching you a cumbersome process. Either way, the customer journey mapping process will document several pain points that you can resolve to attract and convert potential customers.

Creating a customer journey map

Customer Journey Mapping has two main aspects - storytelling and visualization. To create this powerful tool, follow the steps listed below:

• Gather qualitative and quantitative data on audience
• Use the data to build an audience persona and set clear objectives
• Identify all the touchpoints
• Analyze the different phases of the customer journey
• Take the customer journey yourself
• Optimize your customer journey map

1. Gather qualitative and quantitative data on your audience

The first step of the customer journey mapping process is collecting customer data. You'll need the right combination of qualitative and quantitative data on your audience to create an authentic journey map. Here are some sources to gather your data from:

Websites are a great tool that will provide you with accurate information on what segment of customers are interested in your brand, where they come from, their age, gender, interests, etc. Analyzing your website's user flow or user experience is a critical step in data collection. This provides you with crucial information on the pages and sections your customers access when they arrive at your website. It determines whether they continue to stay or exit, thereby providing you with a pain point to fix.

Customer demographic data is more accessible through social media. It's essential to compare this data with your website data to check for similarities. Some of the information you can collect are your customers' age, gender, location, interests, and language preference.

Speaking to customer-facing teams and getting their input on how your target audience feels about your brand is crucial for customer journey mapping. You can also talk to your customers or ask them to participate in surveys to learn more. After collecting a wealth of data, there will still be questions you need to address, and these customer interviews and surveys are a great way to get the answers you need.

2. Use collected data to build an audience persona and set clear objectives

You have all the data to segment your customers based on common themes/traits/characteristics. Analyze the data for commonalities -

• Challenges and pain points your customers have in common

These commonalities will help build an audience persona and set clear objectives on the issues that need to be addressed. The customer is king, and now that you understand them better, you can keep them at the center of your offering.

3. Identify all the touchpoints

Customer journey maps visually represent all the experiences and interactions customers have with your brand, and every journey is unique to business processes with different touchpoints. It's important to note the touchpoints that your customers use to reach/interact with you. Analyzing the initial touchpoints of your website isn't sufficient; you need to collect data from various sources (social media channels, targeted ads, marketing content), and track how customers navigate through your website. By collecting this information, you gain insight into how accessible you are, and whether there is scope for improvement. Providing your customer with the right information at the right time is a critical component of converting them.

4. Analyze the different phases of the customer journey

The customer journey is generally divided into four important phases, and analyzing each of these is crucial to map the journey your customer has with your brand. You should create a template that covers all these phases and questions asked, to understand all major challenges and touchpoints any potential customer goes through, and keep refining it to map your customer journey. Here is a repository of questions you should ask during each phase:

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View a customer’s journey details

Prerequisites

The following permissions:

• Journey > Event > View  (core permission to view the Customer journey gadget and see the detailed view of conversation sessions)
• Journey > Event Type > View  (to view the conversation event details)
• Journey > Session > View  (to retrieve the list of conversation sessions
• Journey > Session Type > View  (to retrieve only the conversation sessions)
• External contacts > Session > View  (to allow admins to enable the journey tab
• Routing > Wrap up code > View (to view the wrap-up codes related with the interaction)
• Routing > Queue > Search (to view the queue the interaction is part of)

To view the in-progress and complete interactions, see Interactions view . 

From an   interaction’s detail page , a gents can use the  Customer Journey tab to view customer journey information during a phone call or web message interaction with a customer.

"> Note : Single customer view is division -unaware. However, customer journey data is division aware. To view the customer conversation data of divisions, assign the required divisions to the user role.

Customer journey information is available for conversations from the following channels:

• Inbound calls
• Agent-initiated outbound calls
• Web Messaging
• Agentless notifications (WhatsApp and SMS)
• Facebook messenger
• Web Events (Genesys Predictive Engagement only)
• Content Offers (Genesys Predictive Engagement only)

Customer journey information is not yet available for conversations from the following channels:

• Knowledge – Support center
• Agentless email notifications 
• Campaigns, including callbacks
• Instagram DM
• Open and authenticated web messaging

• Conversations panel : Displays your current interactions, such as inbound calls, outbound calls, and message interactions. 
• Customer Journey icon : Opens the Customer Journey tab, which displays a customer’s contextual journey history.
• Interactions : List of the current and historical activity in interaction journey cards . To view an interaction’s agent and queue details, click the interaction. The journey card displays the information at the bottom. If an interaction was transferred between different queues and agents, details of the last queue and agent are displayed.  For active web messaging interactions , “Live” appears in the first column with a green status icon. After 45 seconds of inactivity, the icon changes to yellow. After 1 minute of inactivity, the interaction shows as inactive. It remains inactive unless the customer triggers another web event (for example, a page view), at which point the interaction shows as “live” again. If your organization has Predictive Engagement, see View a Predictive Engagement customer’s journey details . For active inbound and outbound call interactions , “Live” appears in the first column with a green status icon. When you wrap up the call, the interaction shows as inactive. For past interactions , the date the interaction occurred appears in the first column. 

For more API-related information, see Single Customer View on Developer Center. 

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21 customer journey KPIs to track to improve PX

You want to improve your customers’ journey through your site or product page—and you know that what’s measured can also be managed and improved. But with so many customer data points available, what should you measure? It’s hard to know where to start—or what to track.

Last updated

Reading time.

We’ve put together a guide on the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) to help you measure the success of your customer journey and connect the dots between your users and your business objectives to understand how to improve your customer's experience at every stage.

Improve your customer journey with product experience insights

Use Hotjar to understand how real users are experiencing your website—then optimize their journey!

21 customer journey KPIs to track user success 

KPIs measure how well your business or team is achieving your most important user and company goals. KPI metrics act as progress milestones that show whether you’re meeting your targets, helping you make data-informed decisions.  

Tracking quantifiable, user-centric KPIs across the customer journey helps you understand whether you’re converting and retaining users, and how you can improve the customer experience . 

We’ve created a ‘KPI starter pack’ for your business: learn which metrics to track—and how —at every point in the buyer’s journey, from the awareness, consideration, decision, and retention stages right through to post-purchase advocacy. 

Let’s get started!

7 KPIs for measuring the awareness stage 

At this stage, your potential customers are aware that they have a specific need or problem they need solving and have usually started researching answers to their questions when they come across your company or website.

Use the following KPIs to track how well you’re engaging awareness-stage users to find your site and consider your brand as a possible solution to their pain points. 

1. Impressions

Impressions are metrics that quantify the number of times your content is displayed to users, regardless of whether they click on it or not. Every time a piece of content is shown to a user, it counts as an impression—so one user can have multiple impressions of one ad, page, post, or media element. 

Measuring impressions gives you insight into your findability, search ranking, web traffic, and content shareability . 

Use tools like Google Analytics to track impressions on your website, content, product pages, and ads.

How to optimize impressions:

Emphasize quality: great, shareable content is shown to more users—use targeted copy, keywords, and segmenting to make sure your content helps users achieve their goals.

Focus on keyword match types: you don’t just want impressions: you want to get your content in front of hyper-relevant, qualified users. Use a mix of keyword match types (like broad, phrase, and exact types) to discover new search queries and get a good impression share. 

Geo-targeting: market your content to target a certain region that’s relevant to your ideal customer profile to reach more users within that area.

Create engaging headlines: use emotional words, numbers, questions, or how-to and listicle headlines to attract customers.   

2. Cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM) 

CPM refers to the price of 1,000 impressions on a web page: it helps you understand how many users are seeing your content, relative to its cost, to help you decide what to invest in for maximum visibility and impact. 

You can use free CPM calculators like WebFX or ClickZ —or this formula to calculate CPM:

CPM = Total cost of campaign / (Total number of impressions/1000)

How to optimize CPM: 

Use A/B testing tools : test out different content, banner, and website visuals and copy on your users to see what’s working and what you could improve to save money on pages or campaigns that don’t grab your users' attention.

Add a CTA: make sure you’re adding attractive calls to action (CTAs) on your product pages so users know what action to take when they see them, helping your business drive conversions. Use Hotjar's Observe tools—like Heatmaps —to understand where to place your CTAs so they get more user attention and traction.   

Reach describes the number of potential users who could possibly see your content, helping you figure out if the cost of the content or campaign is worth the number of new users it might attract . Reach can be measured over various channels or campaigns: for example, you can measure reach for your social media, your blog, your landing pages, and specific marketing or ad campaigns.

Understanding your reach helps you increase brand awareness, minimize campaign risk, fine-tune your messaging, and maximize your resources. 

Use tools like Google Adwords to quantify your reach for specific campaigns or calculate it yourself: 

Reach = impressions/frequency 

How to optimize your reach:

Make your website relatable: create strong content and web pages relevant to your users so they'll want to share it on their channels.

Master referral marketing: delighted users help you spread the word about your brand or website, and grow your reach. According to HubSpot , 90% of people trust suggestions from family and friends, which means that referrals help you sustainably grow your product awareness and increase conversion rates .

Partner with other brands: increase your network by working with other businesses that target a similar audience. 

4. SEO ranking

Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ranking shows how visible your content is to users who are ‘organically’ searching for relevant terms. A strong SEO ranking also gets you prime positioning on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). 

If your content or website doesn’t appear on the first few pages of search engines like Google when users look for potential answers to their problems, they’ll be less likely to turn to your solution.  

Many factors influence your SEO ranking: having a secure and accessible website, page speed, mobile-friendliness, optimized content and keywords, domain authority, user experience (UX), and backlinks. 

Use tools like Google Analytics , SEMrush , and Moz to measure your SEO ranking, taking all these factors into account to help identify areas of improvement. 

How to optimize your SEO ranking: 

Optimize your URLs and content: make sure your ‘slug’ (the part of the URL that identifies a particular page) includes important keywords and shows users what your page is about. Optimize your content with tools like Google Search Console .  

Focus on content quality: high-quality content ranks better on search engines. Make sure your content is well-researched, educational, and useful to users.  

Use relevant keywords: keep your keywords focused and relevant to your content. 

Improve your page loading times: test and optimize your page speed to 2 seconds or less to prevent users from bouncing. 

Make your website mobile-friendly: a responsive website will help you reach mobile users. Use the Google Mobile-Friendly Test to make sure you’re optimized for cell phone devices.  

5. Bounce rate

A website’s bounce rate tells you the number of users who leave a web page without performing an action. Seeing a high bounce rate indicates you’re not attracting the right customers to your website, or that you’re failing to keep them engaged. An increasing bounce rate could mean there are problem areas on your website: users may be leaving due to poor website usability, slow page speed, unnecessary pop-ups, or low-quality content. 

Calculate bounce rate by dividing the number of single-page sessions by the number of total sessions on your site. For example, if 1,000 users land on your site (total sessions) and 60 of them leave without performing an action (single-page sessions), your bounce rate is 6%. 

How to optimize your bounce rate: 

Improve UX: make website elements findable, create a responsive design, build intuitive navigation, and remove unnecessary pop-ups or plugins to make the user experience more enjoyable. 

Include strong CTAs: if you’ve enticed users to click on your website, don’t lose them with a weak call to action that doesn’t encourage them to keep browsing. Make your CTAs relevant to your content so they hit home with your audience and help them make the crucial next step to converting.  

Make your content consistent and high value: update your content regularly and make sure it’s high-quality to provide users with real value before they’ve even made a purchase.

Improve your brand storytelling: ensure your brand story is relatable and your product experience (PX) is interesting and emotionally compelling to establish a real connection between users and your brand and mission.

Pro tip : use Hotjar's Observe tools—like Session Recordings —to dig deeper into understanding why users bounce.

Bounce rates are good indicators that something might be wrong: but considered alone, they tell you very little about what’s really happening on your site. Recordings help you put bounce rate metrics into context by showing you playbacks of how users are navigating individual web pages and what’s blocking them.

Once you’ve learned what’s making users click or ‘bounce’ away, use your targeted insights to optimize key pages and site elements and remove blockers .

6. Time on page 

Time on page KPIs measure how much time users spend on each web page, helping you determine your business's best-performing or most engaging pages, and which ones you need to improve. It also tells you if you’re attracting the right users to your site, or whether they're just false leads.

Use tools like Google Analytics to determine your time on page metric. 

7. Pages per visit 

The pages per visit on a website indicate the average number of web pages a user visits during their session. When the average user is interested in exploring your site beyond the homepage or landing page they arrive at, it’s a good sign you’re engaging visitors.

Calculate pages per visit by taking the total number of page views and dividing it by the total number of sessions. 

How to optimize time on page and pages per visit:

Make your web pages more engaging: ensure you’re giving users a consistent, engaging product experience. Do this by focusing on intuitive and pleasing design, easy navigation, and interactive elements on your site. 

Session recordings: watch as users navigate your site with Hotjar Recordings to know which pages to optimize to improve user delight. 

4 KPIs for measuring the customer journey's consideration stage

At the consideration stage, potential buyers start comparing and analyzing existing options: they’re probably aware of some of the options they can choose from but haven’t yet made up their mind. 

Because the consideration stage involves several different customer journey touchpoints , your business needs to offer a strong product offering and great content marketing and messaging.

So, what are some of the KPIs you need to use to measure your website’s success when users are considering buying your product? 

Clicks show visitors engaging with website elements, media content, links, and CTAs: a click means a user is looking to trigger an action. 

Analyze clicks with tools like Hotjar Heatmaps and Recordings , which give you deep insights into exactly how users click, move, and scroll through your site. 

How to optimize clicks: 

Session Recordings: Hotjar Recordings let you watch full user sessions to determine what’s driving clicks. For example, if you see users ’rage-clicking’, on a non-responsive site element, but failing to click on your CTA, it’s a good indicator there’s navigation confusion or a broken link.

Heatmaps: Hotjar Heatmaps give you context into which key elements, features, and CTAs users are clicking on and which they’re ignoring to help you make effective changes that drive conversions.

2. Click-through rate (CTR) 

Click-through rate measures the number of clicks on a specific link to the number of times users were exposed to the link (the number of impressions). Here’s a simple formula for calculating CTR:

CTR = (click-throughs / impressions) x 100

Use CTR to measure the success of CTAs on your landing pages , pay-per-click search results, or hyperlinks in email campaigns or blog posts.   

Measuring click-through rate helps you better understand whether users are taking key actions or not, so you know what works (and what doesn’t) on your website or product pages. 

How to optimize CTR: 

Optimize headlines and copy: use a maximum of two focus keywords in your headline and copy. Make sure your content is designed to appeal to users , not just to search engines, by addressing and solving their problems. 

Use images: break up text with attractive images or visuals to engage users. 

Include clear, attractive CTAs so users know exactly where to click: write targeted CTAs that compel visitors to click, and position them clearly above the fold. 

3. Cost-per-click (CPC)

CPC measures the amount of money you pay for each click in pay-per-click (PPC) marketing campaigns to help you target the right users and get a return on your investment. 

You can calculate CPC by dividing the total cost of an ad, post, or campaign element by the number of clicks it gets.

How to optimize CPC: 

Improve your Quality Score: your Quality Score is an estimate of the quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages. Improving the quality of each directly impacts your cost-per-click. 

Bid on long-tail keywords: use ‘long-tail’ keywords—like questions or longer search queries—to reduce your cost-per-click. Since ad placement is ‘auctioned’, this means bidding on long-tail search queries relevant to your business.

Schedule your ads: make sure your ads are displayed at times when your users are active and converting.

4. Engagement rate 

Tracking engagement rates shows you how involved users are with your content—you know users are engaged when they comment, ‘like’, or share your content. 

This shows you how effective your website and brand campaigns are since users who show high interest by spending time interacting with blogs, videos, and product pages are more likely to convert. 

Measuring engagement on social media is calculated by dividing the total engagement by total followers, multiplied by 100.

Measuring interaction on your website can be tricky, as there are many metrics that fall under the category. Use tools like Google Analytics to help you measure engagement by aggregating other metrics such as time spent on page, clicks, open rate, and click-through rate.

How to optimize engagement rate: 

Use web analytics: Google Analytics will give you insights into which page and website elements you need to optimize.  

Use Session Recordings: Hotjar Recordings give you an in-depth window into how users interact with your website across an entire session. This helps you spot problem areas on your site, such as pages that load incorrectly on certain browsers or devices, broken or missing page elements, and unclear or confusing functionality—like a login timeout that’s causing user frustration. Then, you can make improvements that keep your users engaged.

3 KPIs for measuring the customer journey's decision stage

At this stage, your prospect is ready to make the final decision about their purchase. 

Customer testimonials, case studies, reviews, and a great checkout experience all play a critical role in winning your user over so they convert into paying customers.  

Let’s explore the KPIs you can use to measure your success at the conversion decision stage:

1. Conversion rate

Your conversion rate is the percentage of users that complete a desired conversion action out of your total number of website visitors.

A good conversion rate indicates that you’re successfully targeting the right people with the right solution and giving them a compelling, friction-free customer experience . 

How to optimize your conversion rate: 

1. Find out why users aren’t converting: use Hotjar's Survey tools to place an exit-intent survey on your website that asks visitors why they’re leaving a page or abandoning their cart. Understanding why users aren’t converting gives you valuable insight into what to fix to remove blockers, improve their product experience, and promote future conversions.

2. A/B tests: test your site’s CTAs, landing pages, buttons, and key elements to see which variations drive the most conversions. 

3. Use high-quality product images: users won’t be tempted to convert if they’re looking at poor-quality images. Invest in professional product images to improve conversions. 

4. Optimize your headline: make sure your headline clearly communicates your product's value proposition . 

Making a high number of sales transactions in a specific time period is a good sign you’re succeeding at converting users into customers at the decision stage.

Here’s a simple formula to calculate your sales total: 

Sales = Number of units sold x average selling price per unit

How to optimize sales: 

Track and analyze sales data: use sales analytics software to track and analyze your sales data and make data-driven user decisions that drive more revenue.

Add testimonials, reviews, and logos: use social proof to build confidence in your users—if your product has helped others, it could also help them. 

Listen to your users: get to know your audience and what they experience with Hotjar's Ask tools to tailor your solution and marketing to user needs.

3. Cost per conversion (CPC)

Cost per conversion refers to the total cost of a website element or advertisement in relation to the conversions it drives. 

You can calculate the CPC with this easy formula: 

Cost per conversion = Total cost of ads, content, or media/number of conversions

Calculating CPC helps you understand how well your ads, posts, and other media are performing. A high CPC means you’re spending more than you’re converting, while a low CPC means your ads and content are optimized for your target buyers.

How to optimize your CPC: 

Focus on your best-performing pages: use web analytics to determine which pages convert the most. Refocus your budget to spend more promoting those pages. 

Figure out the best time to display ads and conversion content: use analytics to tell you when users are most active, and show key promotional content during those specific times. 

5 KPIs for measuring customer retention 

This is arguably the most important stage in the buyer’s journey—by simply retaining your existing customers, you can support sustainable business growth. 

According to research done by Frederick Reichheld at Bain & Company (the inventor of the Net Promoter Score®), increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.

Use the following KPIs to track and measure your customer retention rates to understand what keeps customers satisfied and improve the customer experience: 

Pro tip: use Hotjar churn Surveys to get feedback from product users who decide to cancel their subscriptions or memberships to pinpoint what’s not working for them and make changes to prevent cancellations. 

1. Customer loyalty 

Customer loyalty measures a customer’s likelihood to do repeat business with your company . It’s a significant metric that speaks to your ability to provide value and positive experiences to your users. 

You can measure customer loyalty by calculating the number of customers who have purchased more than four times in a year and dividing it by the number of unique customers in the same time period. 

How to optimize customer loyalty: 

Provide value: always look for ways to add value to your users’ experience and better solve their pain points.

Increase responsiveness: support your customers with excellent customer service. 

Reward your customers: let your customers know you value their loyalty and create a loyalty rewards program that provides users with exclusive gifts, discounts, and offers. 

2. Customer satisfaction 

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is a short-term measure of whether your product, service, and user experience meets user needs. 

You can measure CSAT scores by asking users to rate their experience on scales of one to 10, poor to excellent, or whatever metric you choose. 

Use Hotjar CSAT surveys to easily gauge satisfaction levels and customize surveys to fit your unique business and user needs. 

How to optimize customer satisfaction: 

Experience the journey yourself: go through all the touchpoints your users experience on their customer journey to get a closer look at what you could enhance. Use Hotjar Recordings to follow your users through their journey and get firsthand insights into journey-specific improvements. 

Offer multi-channel help: make sure you’re equipping your users with educational videos, documents, information hubs, and other supporting elements to guide them through product adoption. 

3. Net Promoter Score® (NPS) 

Net Promoter Score ® is a metric used to gauge customer loyalty, satisfaction, and excitement with a company that’s calculated by asking customers one question: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company/product to a friend or colleague?”

Use tools like Hotjar's on-page NPS Surveys to track and measure NPS scores and visualize how your NPS is trending over time.

How to optimize NPS scores: 

Use NPS feedback: implement the feedback you receive from your NPS surveys to drive improvements and meet user needs. With Hotjar Survey tools, you can ask users why they’ve given you a specific score to understand what you’re doing well and what you could do better.

Conduct root cause analysis: identify the main causes of problems your users face to prevent them from happening in the future. 

4. Customer lifetime value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value measures the revenue generated over the lifecycle of a customer’s relationship with your company: tracking your CLV tells you how profitable your business is. 

Measure CLV by calculating the average purchase value and multiplying it by the average number of purchases. 

How to optimize customer lifetime value: 

Improve onboarding experience: a poor onboarding experience leads to customer churn—continually test onboarding experiences to streamline product adoption. 

Improve UX: constantly look for ways to improve the user's experience for them to seamlessly navigate your site and product pages. 

Live chat support: respond to your customers swiftly, every time, to ease user frustration fast. 

Keep communication relevant: don’t send customers emails just to fill their inboxes. Keep your marketing emails value-based and to the point. 

5. Feedback 

Tracking customer feedback is important to understand the quality of your users' product experience. 

Use surveys, interviews, and feedback forms to gauge how well you’re meeting user needs and what you could do to improve the user experience. 

Hotjar Surveys and Feedback tools let you access user feedback ‘in the wild’, as users navigate your website and product pages, giving you actionable insights while their experience is still fresh to help you make customer-centric changes with major impact.

How to optimize user feedback: 

Ask a mix of open- and closed-ended questions: ask your users a range of survey questions to get a granular understanding of their experience and possible enhancements. 

Make surveys short: don’t bombard users with long surveys that deter them from participating. 

Use feedback tools: use integrated, non-intrusive feedback tools—like Hotjar's Feedback widgets—where users can quickly and easily provide their inputs.

2 KPIs for measuring customer advocacy 

Advocacy is an important customer journey stage: it means your customer is so delighted with their experience that they become an active cheerleader for your product and brand with their contacts. 

Below, we look at KPIs you can use to measure customer advocacy to turn users into promoters for your product . 

1. Referrals 

Customer referrals build user trust in your brand and compel visitors to convert. The number of referrals your brand gets tells you you’re delighting users—while generating high-quality leads for your business. 

To calculate the referral rate, find out the number of referred purchases divided by the total number of purchases . Ask users if they were referred to your product or brand, or how they heard about you with Hotjar Survey and Feedback forms. 

How to optimize referrals: 

Gamify your referral program: make it easy for users to refer your brand with rewards, or points that count toward a discount per referral. 

NPS surveys: use Hotjar NPS Surveys to get insight into how likely users are to refer or recommend your product or brand. 

As mentioned above, measure your net promoter score with NPS surveys that ask customers if they’d recommend your product or brand for direct insight into how well you’re retaining customers and meeting their needs. 

Tips on identifying KPIs for your business 

KPIs should be tailored to your specific business objectives and user needs. So how can you identify the best KPIs for you? 

Use web analytics tools to look into the behavior patterns of users who converted

Use product experience insights tools like Hotjar to ask your customers about their decision-making process: which factors were they paying attention to at each stage?

Use this combined data to see which metrics are most likely to predict a successful customer journey, and use these as your KPI

Determine business and user objectives by setting Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART) goals and aligning them to your KPIs

Use qualitative (feedback & surveys) and quantitative (analytics) data to inform your KPIs 

Pitfalls to avoid when identifying and tracking KPIs

Avoid these common mistakes for successful KPI tracking: 

Don’t try to track everything ; be specific about choosing the KPIs that matter to your customer and business and stick to them

Don’t map your customer’s journey on assumptions—talk to your customers first

Don’t just measure KPIs then forget about them—use them to prioritize updates and remove blockers along the customer journey

Don’t rely on generic industry KPIs or targets alone—use them to inform your KPIs, but make sure they’re realistic and relevant to your customers and company

Use KPIs to delight customers on their journeys 

KPIs are important signals of whether you’re on the right track to achieve your business and user goals—or whether you need to make adjustments to better meet customer needs . 

Use our guide to help you find the right KPIs to measure and optimize the user journey for delighted customers and brilliant business results.

Use Hotjar to understand how real users are experiencing your website—then optimize their product experience!

FAQs about customer journey KPIs

What are customer journey kpis.

Customer journey key performance indicators (KPIs) are metrics that show businesses whether they’re meeting their goals during all stages of the customer journey: awareness, consideration, decision, retention, and advocacy. 

What are the most important KPIs to track for the customer journey?

The most important KPIs to track at each stage of the customer journey include: 

Awareness stage: impressions, reach, time on page, etc. 

Consideration stage: clicks, click-through rate, engagement rate. 

Decision stage: conversion rate, sales. 

Retention stage: customer loyalty, NPS scores. 

Advocacy stage: referrals, NPS scores.

How do KPIs help?

KPIs measure how well your business or team is achieving its goals. By understanding which goals you’re meeting, and which goals you’re not, you can make better decisions and improve the customer experience to achieve your most important objectives. KPI metrics act as milestones to measure progress and provide insights that help businesses prioritize brilliantly. 

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The state of AI in early 2024: Gen AI adoption spikes and starts to generate value

If 2023 was the year the world discovered generative AI (gen AI) , 2024 is the year organizations truly began using—and deriving business value from—this new technology. In the latest McKinsey Global Survey  on AI, 65 percent of respondents report that their organizations are regularly using gen AI, nearly double the percentage from our previous survey just ten months ago. Respondents’ expectations for gen AI’s impact remain as high as they were last year , with three-quarters predicting that gen AI will lead to significant or disruptive change in their industries in the years ahead.

About the authors

This article is a collaborative effort by Alex Singla , Alexander Sukharevsky , Lareina Yee , and Michael Chui , with Bryce Hall , representing views from QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, and McKinsey Digital.

Organizations are already seeing material benefits from gen AI use, reporting both cost decreases and revenue jumps in the business units deploying the technology. The survey also provides insights into the kinds of risks presented by gen AI—most notably, inaccuracy—as well as the emerging practices of top performers to mitigate those challenges and capture value.

AI adoption surges

Interest in generative AI has also brightened the spotlight on a broader set of AI capabilities. For the past six years, AI adoption by respondents’ organizations has hovered at about 50 percent. This year, the survey finds that adoption has jumped to 72 percent (Exhibit 1). And the interest is truly global in scope. Our 2023 survey found that AI adoption did not reach 66 percent in any region; however, this year more than two-thirds of respondents in nearly every region say their organizations are using AI. 1 Organizations based in Central and South America are the exception, with 58 percent of respondents working for organizations based in Central and South America reporting AI adoption. Looking by industry, the biggest increase in adoption can be found in professional services. 2 Includes respondents working for organizations focused on human resources, legal services, management consulting, market research, R&D, tax preparation, and training.

Also, responses suggest that companies are now using AI in more parts of the business. Half of respondents say their organizations have adopted AI in two or more business functions, up from less than a third of respondents in 2023 (Exhibit 2).

Gen AI adoption is most common in the functions where it can create the most value

Most respondents now report that their organizations—and they as individuals—are using gen AI. Sixty-five percent of respondents say their organizations are regularly using gen AI in at least one business function, up from one-third last year. The average organization using gen AI is doing so in two functions, most often in marketing and sales and in product and service development—two functions in which previous research  determined that gen AI adoption could generate the most value 3 “ The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier ,” McKinsey, June 14, 2023. —as well as in IT (Exhibit 3). The biggest increase from 2023 is found in marketing and sales, where reported adoption has more than doubled. Yet across functions, only two use cases, both within marketing and sales, are reported by 15 percent or more of respondents.

Gen AI also is weaving its way into respondents’ personal lives. Compared with 2023, respondents are much more likely to be using gen AI at work and even more likely to be using gen AI both at work and in their personal lives (Exhibit 4). The survey finds upticks in gen AI use across all regions, with the largest increases in Asia–Pacific and Greater China. Respondents at the highest seniority levels, meanwhile, show larger jumps in the use of gen Al tools for work and outside of work compared with their midlevel-management peers. Looking at specific industries, respondents working in energy and materials and in professional services report the largest increase in gen AI use.

Investments in gen AI and analytical AI are beginning to create value

The latest survey also shows how different industries are budgeting for gen AI. Responses suggest that, in many industries, organizations are about equally as likely to be investing more than 5 percent of their digital budgets in gen AI as they are in nongenerative, analytical-AI solutions (Exhibit 5). Yet in most industries, larger shares of respondents report that their organizations spend more than 20 percent on analytical AI than on gen AI. Looking ahead, most respondents—67 percent—expect their organizations to invest more in AI over the next three years.

Where are those investments paying off? For the first time, our latest survey explored the value created by gen AI use by business function. The function in which the largest share of respondents report seeing cost decreases is human resources. Respondents most commonly report meaningful revenue increases (of more than 5 percent) in supply chain and inventory management (Exhibit 6). For analytical AI, respondents most often report seeing cost benefits in service operations—in line with what we found last year —as well as meaningful revenue increases from AI use in marketing and sales.

Inaccuracy: The most recognized and experienced risk of gen AI use

As businesses begin to see the benefits of gen AI, they’re also recognizing the diverse risks associated with the technology. These can range from data management risks such as data privacy, bias, or intellectual property (IP) infringement to model management risks, which tend to focus on inaccurate output or lack of explainability. A third big risk category is security and incorrect use.

Respondents to the latest survey are more likely than they were last year to say their organizations consider inaccuracy and IP infringement to be relevant to their use of gen AI, and about half continue to view cybersecurity as a risk (Exhibit 7).

Conversely, respondents are less likely than they were last year to say their organizations consider workforce and labor displacement to be relevant risks and are not increasing efforts to mitigate them.

In fact, inaccuracy— which can affect use cases across the gen AI value chain , ranging from customer journeys and summarization to coding and creative content—is the only risk that respondents are significantly more likely than last year to say their organizations are actively working to mitigate.

Some organizations have already experienced negative consequences from the use of gen AI, with 44 percent of respondents saying their organizations have experienced at least one consequence (Exhibit 8). Respondents most often report inaccuracy as a risk that has affected their organizations, followed by cybersecurity and explainability.

Our previous research has found that there are several elements of governance that can help in scaling gen AI use responsibly, yet few respondents report having these risk-related practices in place. 4 “ Implementing generative AI with speed and safety ,” McKinsey Quarterly , March 13, 2024. For example, just 18 percent say their organizations have an enterprise-wide council or board with the authority to make decisions involving responsible AI governance, and only one-third say gen AI risk awareness and risk mitigation controls are required skill sets for technical talent.

Bringing gen AI capabilities to bear

The latest survey also sought to understand how, and how quickly, organizations are deploying these new gen AI tools. We have found three archetypes for implementing gen AI solutions : takers use off-the-shelf, publicly available solutions; shapers customize those tools with proprietary data and systems; and makers develop their own foundation models from scratch. 5 “ Technology’s generational moment with generative AI: A CIO and CTO guide ,” McKinsey, July 11, 2023. Across most industries, the survey results suggest that organizations are finding off-the-shelf offerings applicable to their business needs—though many are pursuing opportunities to customize models or even develop their own (Exhibit 9). About half of reported gen AI uses within respondents’ business functions are utilizing off-the-shelf, publicly available models or tools, with little or no customization. Respondents in energy and materials, technology, and media and telecommunications are more likely to report significant customization or tuning of publicly available models or developing their own proprietary models to address specific business needs.

Respondents most often report that their organizations required one to four months from the start of a project to put gen AI into production, though the time it takes varies by business function (Exhibit 10). It also depends upon the approach for acquiring those capabilities. Not surprisingly, reported uses of highly customized or proprietary models are 1.5 times more likely than off-the-shelf, publicly available models to take five months or more to implement.

Gen AI high performers are excelling despite facing challenges

Gen AI is a new technology, and organizations are still early in the journey of pursuing its opportunities and scaling it across functions. So it’s little surprise that only a small subset of respondents (46 out of 876) report that a meaningful share of their organizations’ EBIT can be attributed to their deployment of gen AI. Still, these gen AI leaders are worth examining closely. These, after all, are the early movers, who already attribute more than 10 percent of their organizations’ EBIT to their use of gen AI. Forty-two percent of these high performers say more than 20 percent of their EBIT is attributable to their use of nongenerative, analytical AI, and they span industries and regions—though most are at organizations with less than $1 billion in annual revenue. The AI-related practices at these organizations can offer guidance to those looking to create value from gen AI adoption at their own organizations.

To start, gen AI high performers are using gen AI in more business functions—an average of three functions, while others average two. They, like other organizations, are most likely to use gen AI in marketing and sales and product or service development, but they’re much more likely than others to use gen AI solutions in risk, legal, and compliance; in strategy and corporate finance; and in supply chain and inventory management. They’re more than three times as likely as others to be using gen AI in activities ranging from processing of accounting documents and risk assessment to R&D testing and pricing and promotions. While, overall, about half of reported gen AI applications within business functions are utilizing publicly available models or tools, gen AI high performers are less likely to use those off-the-shelf options than to either implement significantly customized versions of those tools or to develop their own proprietary foundation models.

What else are these high performers doing differently? For one thing, they are paying more attention to gen-AI-related risks. Perhaps because they are further along on their journeys, they are more likely than others to say their organizations have experienced every negative consequence from gen AI we asked about, from cybersecurity and personal privacy to explainability and IP infringement. Given that, they are more likely than others to report that their organizations consider those risks, as well as regulatory compliance, environmental impacts, and political stability, to be relevant to their gen AI use, and they say they take steps to mitigate more risks than others do.

Gen AI high performers are also much more likely to say their organizations follow a set of risk-related best practices (Exhibit 11). For example, they are nearly twice as likely as others to involve the legal function and embed risk reviews early on in the development of gen AI solutions—that is, to “ shift left .” They’re also much more likely than others to employ a wide range of other best practices, from strategy-related practices to those related to scaling.

In addition to experiencing the risks of gen AI adoption, high performers have encountered other challenges that can serve as warnings to others (Exhibit 12). Seventy percent say they have experienced difficulties with data, including defining processes for data governance, developing the ability to quickly integrate data into AI models, and an insufficient amount of training data, highlighting the essential role that data play in capturing value. High performers are also more likely than others to report experiencing challenges with their operating models, such as implementing agile ways of working and effective sprint performance management.

About the research

The online survey was in the field from February 22 to March 5, 2024, and garnered responses from 1,363 participants representing the full range of regions, industries, company sizes, functional specialties, and tenures. Of those respondents, 981 said their organizations had adopted AI in at least one business function, and 878 said their organizations were regularly using gen AI in at least one function. To adjust for differences in response rates, the data are weighted by the contribution of each respondent’s nation to global GDP.

Alex Singla and Alexander Sukharevsky  are global coleaders of QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, and senior partners in McKinsey’s Chicago and London offices, respectively; Lareina Yee  is a senior partner in the Bay Area office, where Michael Chui , a McKinsey Global Institute partner, is a partner; and Bryce Hall  is an associate partner in the Washington, DC, office.

They wish to thank Kaitlin Noe, Larry Kanter, Mallika Jhamb, and Shinjini Srivastava for their contributions to this work.

This article was edited by Heather Hanselman, a senior editor in McKinsey’s Atlanta office.

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