journey mapping service design

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

Updated: April 17, 2024

Published: May 04, 2023

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

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

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

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

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

• What’s included in a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Steps for creating a customer journey map.

• Types of Customer Journey Maps

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Customer Journey Design
• Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Free Customer Journey Template

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

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

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

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

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

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

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

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

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

1. Use customer journey map templates.

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

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

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

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

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

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

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

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

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

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

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

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

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

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

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

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

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

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

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

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

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't forget to share this post!

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

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

Journey Map

Describe how the user interact with the service, throughout its touchpoints, applied for.

Stakeholders

also called

User Journey, Customer Journey, Experience Journey, Employee Journey

related content

Emotional Journey

User Scenarios

Service Blueprint

The journey map is a synthetic representation that describes step-by-step how a user interacts with a service. The process is mapped from the user perspective, describing what happens at each stage of the interaction, what touchpoints are involved, what obstacles and barriers they may encounter. The journey map is often integrated an additional layers representing the level of positive/negative emotions experienced throughout the interaction.

Depict the whole user experience, representing the process as well as pain points and emotional flows.

remember to

Cover what happens before and after the core experience, even when it includes the interaction with other services and providers.

case studies

Example by Smaply

Journey mapping in a global japanese electronics corporation

Improve business operations with external partners

description

This case shares how a global Japanese electronics company used journey mapping to improve its business to business operations, specifically with external partners. Through a number of service design workshops internal staff gained awareness of the problem of poor service delivery and became part of the solution.

what is interesting

Here’s some relevant learnings derived from the activity and tool

- at first senior management was reluctant to release resources and people’s time to workshops, but after the first progresses were visible it became easier

- workshop participants became engaged and motivated and adopted service design techniques. Using service design methods, but not labelling them with “service design” proved to get people involved.

Journey mapping in healthcare

Designing a model to care for preterm infants in rural India

This case shows how the Community Empowerment Lab, a global health research and innovation organization, used Smaply to help design a model for scaling Kangaroo Mother Care in rural India. The project team succeeded in involving all necessary parties to work together and better understand each other’s motivations and needs by analyzing their stakeholders’ and their patients’ journey. The project was selected as a national best practice in July 2017.

Here’s some relevant learnings derived from the activity and tool used:

- emotional level and empathy is a key success factor

- insights from SKM, Personas and JM resulted in ideas to improve the problems identified

- through journey mapping the team realized that nurses play a crucial role in ensuring the success or failure of KMC: a team of nurse mentors was created, that is trained by Dr. Barbara Morission, one of the world’s leading experts on KMC

Grow with us! Share your case studies

The collection is always evolving, following the development of our practice. If you have any interesting tools or example of application to share, please get in touch.

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Customer Journey Mapping

Journey mapping helps you visualize how customers experience your product or service, and how they feel along the way. Scroll to step 6 for a real-life example from one of our product teams!

USE THIS PLAY TO...

Understand the customer journey from a specific persona's perspective so that you can design a better experience.

Running the play

Depending on how many touchpoints along the customer journey you're mapping, you might break the journey into stages and tackle each stage in pairs.

Sticky notes

Whiteboards.io Template

Define the map's scope (15 min)

Ideally, customer journey mapping focuses on the experience of a single persona  in a single scenario with a single goal. Else, the journey map will be too generic, and you'll miss out on opportunities for new insights and questions. You may need to pause creating a customer journey map until you have defined your customer personas . Your personas should be informed by  customer interviews , as well as data wherever possible.

Saying that, don't let perfect be the enemy of good! Sometimes a team just needs to get started, and you can agree to revisit with more rigor in  a few months' time. Once scope is agreed on, check your invite list to make sure you've got people who know the details of what customers experience when using your product or service.

Set the stage (5 min)

It's really important that your group understands the user  persona  and the goal driving their journey. Decide on or recap with your group the target persona and the scope of the journey being explored in your session. Make sure to pre-share required reading with the team at least a week ahead of your session to make sure everyone understands the persona, scope of the journey, and has a chance to delve deeper into research and data where needed. Even better- invite the team to run or attend the customer interviews to hear from customers first hand!

E.g. "We're going to focus on the Alana persona. Alana's role is project manager, and her goal is to find a scalable way for her team to share their knowledge so they spend less time explaining things over email. We're going to map out what it's like for Alana to evaluate Confluence for this purpose, from the point where she clicks that TRY button, to the point where she decides to buy it – or not."

Build a customer back-story (10 min)

Have the group use sticky notes to post up reasons why your target persona would be on this journey in the first place. Odds are, you'll get a range of responses: everything from high-level goals, to pain points, to requested features or services. Group similar ideas and groom the stickies so you can design a story from them.

These narratives should be inspired by actual customer interviews. But each team member will also bring a different perspective to the table that helps to broaden the lens.

Take a look at the example provided in the call out of this section. This back story starts with the pain points – the reasons why Alana would be wanting something like Confluence in the first place.

• E.g., "Her team's knowledge is in silos"

Then it basically has a list of requirements – what Alana is looking for in a product to solve the bottom pain points. This is essentially a mental shopping list for the group to refer to when mapping out the customer journey.

• E.g., "Provide structure"

Then it has the outcomes – goals that Alana wants to achieve by using the product

• E.g., "To keep my team focused on their work instead of distracted by unnecessary emails and shoulder-taps"

And finally the highest-level goal for her and her team.

• E.g., "Improve team efficiency"

Round off the back story by getting someone to say out loud what they think the overall story so far is, highlighting the main goals the customer has. This ensures a shared understanding that will inform the journey mapping, and improve the chances that your team will map it from the persona's point of view (not their own).

• E.g., "Alana and her team are frustrated by having to spend so much time explaining their work to each other, and to stakeholders. They want a way to share their knowledge, and organize it so it's easy for people outside their team to find, so they can focus more energy on the tasks at hand."

For example...

Here's a backstory the Confluence team created. 

Map what the customer thinks and feels (30-60 min)

With the target persona, back story, and destination in place, it's time to walk a mile in their shoes. Show participants how to get going by writing the first thing that the persona does on a sticky note. The whole group can then grab stickies and markers and continue plotting the journey one action at a time.

This can also include questions and decisions! If the journey branches based on the answers or choices, have one participant map out each path. Keep in mind that the purpose of this Play is to build empathy for, and a shared understanding of the customer for the team. In order to do this, we focus on mapping the  current state of one discrete end to end journey, and looking for opportunities for improvement.

To do a more comprehensive discovery and inform strategy, you will need to go deeper on researching and designing these journey maps, which will need to split up over multiple sessions. Take a look at the variation below for tipes on how to design a completely new customer journey.

Use different color sticky notes for actions, questions, decisions, etc. so it's easier to see each element when you look at the whole map.

For each action on the customer journey, capture which channels are used for the interactions. Depending on your context, channels might include a website, phone, email, postal mail, face-to-face, and/or social media.

It might also help to visually split the mapping area in zones, such as "frontstage" (what the customer experiences) versus "backstage" (what systems and processes are active in the background).

Journey mapping can open up rich discussion, but try to avoid delving into the wrong sort of detail. The idea is to explore the journey and mine it for opportunities to improve the experience instead of coming up with solutions on the spot. It's important not only to keep the conversation on track, but also to create an artefact that can be easily referenced in the future. Use expands or footnotes in the Confluence template to capture any additional context while keeping the overview stable.

Try to be the commentator, not the critic. And remember: you're there to call out what’s going on for the persona, not explain what’s going on with internal systems and processes.

To get more granular on the 'backstage' processes required to provide the 'frontstage' customer value, consider using Confluence Whiteboard's Service Blueprint template as a next step to follow up on this Play.

ANTI-PATTERN

Your map has heaps of branches and loops.

Your scope is probably too high-level. Map a specific journey that focuses on a specific task, rather than mapping how a customer might explore for the first time.

Map the pain points (10-30 min)

"Ok, show me where it hurts." Go back over the map and jot down pain points on sticky notes. Place them underneath the corresponding touchpoints on the journey. Where is there frustration? Errors? Bottlenecks? Things not working as expected?

For added value, talk about the impact of each pain point. Is it trivial, or is it likely to necessitate some kind of hack or work-around. Even worse: does it cause the persona to abandon their journey entirely?

Chart a sentiment line (15 min)

(Optional, but totally worth it.) Plot the persona's sentiment in an area under your journey map, so that you can see how their emotional experience changes with each touchpoint. Look for things like:

• Areas of sawtooth sentiment – going up and down a lot is pretty common, but that doesn't mean it's not exhausting for the persona.
• Rapid drops – this indicates large gaps in expectations, and frustration.
• Troughs – these indicate opportunities for lifting overall sentiments.
• Positive peaks – can you design an experience that lifts them even higher? Can you delight the persona and inspire them to recommend you?

Remember that pain points don't always cause immediate drops in customer sentiment. Sometimes some friction may even buold trust (consider requiring verification for example). A pain point early in the journey might also result in negative feelings later on, as experiences accumulate. 

Having customers in the session to help validate and challenge the journey map means you'll be more confident what comes out of this session. 

Analyse the big picture (15 min)

As a group, stand back from the journey map and discuss trends and patterns in the experience.

• Where are the areas of greatest confusion/frustration?
• Where is the journey falling short of expectations?
• Are there any new un-met needs that have come up for the user type?
• Are there areas in the process being needlessly complicated or duplicated? Are there lots of emails being sent that aren’t actually useful? 

Then, discuss areas of opportunity to improve the experience. E.g., are there areas in the process where seven steps could be reduced to three? Is that verification email actually needed?

You can use quantitative data to validate the impact of the various opportunity areas identified. A particular step may well be a customer experience that falls short, but how many of your customers are actually effected by that step? Might you be better off as a team focused on another higher impact opportunity?

Here's a user onboarding jouney map our Engaging First Impressions team created.

Be sure to run a full Health Monitor session or checkpoint with your team to see if you're improving.

MAP A FUTURE STATE

Instead of mapping the current experience, map out an experience you haven't delivered yet. You can map one that simply improves on existing pain points, or design an absolutely visionary amazeballs awesome experience!

Just make sure to always base your ideas on real customer interviews and data. When designing a totally new customer journey, it can also be interesting to map competitor or peer customer journeys to find inspiration. Working on a personalised service? How do they do it in grocery? What about fashion? Finance?

After the mapping session, create a stakeholder summary. What pain points have the highest impact to customers' evaluation, adoption and usage of our products? What opportunities are there, and which teams should know about them? What is your action plan to resolve these pain points? Keep it at a summary level for a fast share out of key takeaways.

For a broader audience, or to allow stakeholders to go deeper, you could also create a write-up of your analysis and recommendations you came up with, notes captured, photos of the group and the artefacts created on a Confluence page. A great way of sharing this information is in a video walk through of the journey map. Loom is a great tool for this as viewers can comment on specific stages of the journey. This can be a great way to inspire change in your organization and provide a model for customer-centric design practices.

KEEP IT REAL

Now that you have interviewed your customers and created your customer journey map, circle back to your customers and validate! And yes: you might learn that your entire map is invalid and have to start again from scratch. (Better to find that out now, versus after you've delivered the journey!) Major initiatives typically make multiple journey maps to capture the needs of multiple personas, and often iterate on each map. Remember not to set and forget. Journeys are rapidly disrupted, and keeping your finger on the pulse of your customer's reality will enable your team to pivot (and get results!) faster when needed.

Related Plays

     Customer Interview

     Project Poster

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Shared understanding

Different types of teams need to share an understanding of different things.

LEADERSHIP TEAMS

The team has a  shared vision  and collective  purpose  which they support, and  confidence  they have made the right strategic bets to achieve success.

Proof of concept

Project teams.

Some sort of demonstration has been created and tested, that demonstrates why this problem needs to be solved, and demonstrates its value.

Customer centricity

Service teams.

Team members are skilled at  understanding , empathizing and  resolving  requests with an effective customer feedback loop in place that drives improvements and builds trust to improve service offerings.

Learn / Guides / Customer journey mapping (CJM) guide

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Customer journey mapping in 2 and 1/2 days

How to create a customer journey map that improves customer success.

Last updated

Reading time.

There’s a common saying that you can’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes—and that’s exactly what customer journey maps do: they help you put yourself in different customers’ shoes and understand your business from their point of view.

Why should you do it? How should you do it? Find the answers in this guide, which we wrote after interviewing 10+ customer journey experts who shared methodologies, dos and don’ts, and pro tips with us. 

On this page:

What is a customer journey map?

How to create a customer journey map in 2 and ½ working days

4 benefits of customer journey mapping for your business

In later chapters, we dive deeper into customer journey analytics, workshops, and real-life examples.

Start mapping your customer journey

Hotjar lets you experience the customer journey through their eyes, so you can visualize what’s working and what needs improvement.

A customer journey map (CJM) is a visual representation of how customers interact with and experience your website, products, or business across multiple touchpoints.

By visualizing the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers experience, a customer journey map helps you better understand them and identify the pain points they encounter. This is essential if you want to implement informed, customer-focused optimizations on your site.

Mapping the customer journey: narrow vs. wide focus

A customer journey map can have a very narrow focus and only look at a few, specific steps of the customer experience or buyer’s journey (for example, a product-to-purchase flow on a website), or it can take into account all the touchpoints, online and offline, someone goes through before and after doing business with you. 

Each type of customer journey map has its advantages:

A CJM with a narrow focus allows you to zero in on an issue and effectively problem-solve 

A CJM with a wide focus gives you a broader, holistic understanding of how customers experience your business

Regardless of their focus, the best customer journey maps have one thing in common: they are created with real customer data that you collect and analyze . The insights are usually organized into a map (hence the name), diagram, or flowchart during a group workshop, which is later shared across the entire business so everyone gets a clear and comprehensive overview of a customer’s journey.

How to create your first customer journey map in 2 and ½ working days

The process of creating a customer journey map can be as long or short as you need. Depending on how many people and stakeholders you involve, how much data you collect and analyze, and how many touchpoints there are across the business, you could be looking at days or even weeks and months of work.

If you’re new to customer journey mapping, start from a narrower scope before moving on to mapping every single customer touchpoint . 

Here’s our beginner customer journey mapping framework to help you create your first complete map in 2 and ½ working days:

Day 1: preliminary customer journey mapping work

Day 2: prep and run your customer journey mapping workshop.

Final ½ day: wrap up and share your results

Download your free customer journey map checklist  (as seen below), to mark off your tasks as you complete them.

On your first day, you have three essential tasks:

Define the goal and scope of your CJM

Collect customer data and insights

Invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

Step 1: define the goal and scope of your CJM

Clarifying what part(s) of the journey you're looking at, and why, helps you stay focused throughout the mapping process.

If this is your first map,  start from a known issue or problematic area of your website. Keep the scope small, and focus on anything you can break down into four or five steps. For example:

If you have a high drop-off on a pricing page with five calls-to-action, each of which takes users to a different page, that’s enough for a mappable journey

If your purchase flow is made of five self-contained pages, each of which loses you potential customers, that’s a good candidate for mapping

✅ The output: a one- or two-sentence description of what your map will cover, and why, you can use whenever you need to explain what the process is about. For example: this map looks at the purchase flow on our website, and helps us understand how customers go through each step and the issues or obstacles they encounter. The map starts after users click ‘proceed to checkout’ and ends when they reach the 'Thank You' page .

Step 2: collect customer data and insights

Once you identify your goal and scope, the bulk of your first day should be spent collecting data and insights you’ll analyze as part of your mapping process. Because your map is narrow in focus, don’t get distracted by wide-scale demographics or data points that are interesting and nice to know, but ultimately irrelevant. 

Get your hands on as much of the following information as you can:

Metrics from traditional analytics tools (such as Google Analytics) that give you insight into what’s happening, across the pages and stages your customer journey map covers

Data from analyzing your conversion ‘funnels’ , which record how many visitors end up at each stage of the user journey, so you can optimize those steps for potential customers and increase conversions

Behavior analytics data (from platforms like Hotjar) that show you how people interact with your site. For example, heatmaps give you an aggregate view of how users click, move and scroll on specific pages, and session recordings capture a user’s entire journey as they navigate your site

Quantitative and qualitative answers to on-site surveys relevant to the pages you’re going to investigate, as customer feedback will ultimately guide your roadmap of changes to make to improve the journey

Any demographic information about existing user and customer personas that helps you map the journey from the perspective of a real type of customer, rather than that of any hypothetical visitor, ensuring the journey makes sense for your target audience

Any relevant data from customer service chat logs, emails, or even anecdotal information from support, success, and sales teams about the issues customers usually experience

✅ The output: quantitative and qualitative data about your customers' interactions and their experiences across various touchpoints. For example, you’ll know how many people drop off at each individual stage, which page elements they interact with or ignore, and what stops them from converting.

💡Pro tip: as you read this guide, you may not yet have most of this data, particularly when it comes to heatmaps, recordings, and survey results. That’s ok. 

Unless you’re running your CJM workshop in the next 12 hours, you have enough time to set up Hotjar on your website and start collecting insights right now. The platform helps you:

Learn where and why users drop off with Funnels

Visualize interactions on key pages with Heatmaps

Capture visitor sessions across your website with Recordings

Run on-site polls with Surveys

When the time comes for you to start your customer journey mapping process, this data will be invaluable.

Step 3: invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

In our experience, the most effective way to get buy-in is not to try and convince people after things are done—include them in the process from the start. So while you can easily create a customer journey map on your own, it won’t be nearly as powerful as one you create with team members from different areas of expertise .

For example, if you’re looking at the purchase flow, you need to work with:

Someone from the UX team, who knows about the usability of the flow and can advocate for design changes

Someone from dev or engineering, who knows how things work in the back end, and will be able to push forward any changes that result from the map

Someone from success or support, who has first-hand experience talking to customers and resolving any issues they experience

✅ The output: you’ve set a date, booked a meeting space, and invited a group of four to six participants to your customer journey mapping workshop.

💡Pro tip: for your first map, stay small. Keep it limited to four to six people, and no main stakeholders . This may be unpopular advice, especially since many guides out there mention the importance of having stakeholders present from the start.

However, when you’re not yet very familiar with the process, including too many people early on can discourage them from re-investing their time into future CJM tasks. At this stage, it’s more helpful to brainstorm with a small team, get feedback on how to improve, and iterate a few times. Once you have a firm handle on the process, then start looping in your stakeholders.

On workshop day, you’ll spend half your time prepping and the other half running the actual session.

Step 1: prepare all your materials 

To run a smooth workshop, ensure you do the following:

Bring stationery: for an interactive workshop, you’ll need basic materials such as pens, different colored Post-its, masking tape, and large sheets of paper to hang on the wall

Collect and print out the data: use the data you collected on Day 1. It’s good to have digital copies on a laptop or tablet for everybody to access, but print-outs could be the better alternative as people can take notes and scribble on them.

Print out an empathy map canvas for each participant: start the workshop with an empathy mapping exercise (more on this in Step 2). For this, hand each participant an empty empathy map canvas you can recreate from the template below.

Set up a customer journey map template on the wall: use a large sheet of paper to create a grid you'll stick to the wall and fill in as part of the workshop. On the horizontal axis, write the customer journey steps you identified during your Day 1 prep work; on the vertical axis, list the themes you want to analyze for each step. For example:

Actions your customers take

Questions they might have

Happy moments they experience

Pain points they experience

Tech limits they might encounter

Opportunities that arise

Step 2: run the workshop

This is the most interactive (and fun) part of the process. Follow the framework below to go from zero to a completed draft of a map in just under 2 hours .

Introduction [🕒 5–10 min]

Introduce yourself and your participants to one another

Using the one-two sentence description you defined on Day 1, explain the goal and scope of the workshop and the activities it will involve

Offer a quick summary of the customer persona you’ll be referring to throughout the session

Empathy mapping exercise [🕒 30 min]

Using the personas and data available, have each team member map their observations onto sticky notes and paste them on the relevant section of the empathy mapping canvas

Have all participants take turns presenting their empathy map

Facilitate group discussions where interesting points of agreement or disagreement appear

Customer journey mapping [🕒 60 min]

Using Post-its, ask each participant to fill in parts of the map grid with available information. Start by filling in the first row together, so everybody understands the process, then do each row individually (15–20 min). At the end of the process, you should have something like this:

Looking at the completed map, encourage your team to discuss and align on core observations (and take notes: they’ll come in handy on your final half day). At this point, customer pain points and opportunities should become evident for everybody involved. Having a cross-functional team means people will naturally start discussing what can, or cannot, immediately be done to address them (35–40 min).

Wrap up [🕒 5 min]

Congratulations! Your first customer journey map is complete. Finish the session by thanking your participants and letting them know the next steps.

Final half-day: wrap up and share

Once you’ve gone through the entire customer journey mapping workshop, the number one thing you want to avoid is for all this effort to go to waste. Instead of leaving the map hanging on the wall (or worse: taking it down, folding it, and forgetting about it), the final step is to wrap the process up and communicate the results to the larger team.

Digitize the map so you can easily update and share it with team members: it may be tempting to use dedicated software or invest time into a beautiful design, but for the first few iterations, it’s enough to add the map to your team’s existing workflows (for example, our team digitized our map and added it straight into Jira, where it’s easily accessible)

Offer a quick write-up or a 5-minute video introduction of the activity: re-use the description you came up with on Day 1, including who was involved and the top three outcomes

Clearly state the follow-up actions: if you’ve found obvious issues that need fixing, that’s a likely next step. If you’ve identified opportunities for change and improvement, you may want to validate these findings via customer interviews and usability testing.

4 benefits of customer journey mapping

In 2023, it’s almost a given that great customer experience (CX) provides any business or ecommerce site with a competitive advantage. But just how you’re supposed to deliver on the concept and create wow-worthy experiences is often left unsaid, implied, or glossed over.

Customer journey maps help you find answers to this ‘How?’ question, enabling you to:

Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

Create cross-team alignment around the business

Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

We’ve done a lot of customer journey work here at Hotjar, so we know that the above is true—but don’t just take our word for it: all the people we interviewed for this guide confirmed the benefits of journey mapping. Let’s take a look at what they shared.

1. Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

It’s one thing to present your entire team with charts, graphs, and trends about your customers, and quite another to put the same team in front of ONE map that highlights what customers think, want, and do at each step of their journey.

I did my first customer journey map at MADE.COM within the first three months of joining the company. I was trying to map the journey to understand where the pain points were.

For example, people who want to buy a sofa from us will be coming back to the site 8+ times over several weeks before making a purchase. In that time, they may also visit a showroom. So now I look at that journey, at a customer’s motivation for going to the website versus a physical store, and I need to make sure that the experience in the showroom complements what they're doing on-site, and vice-versa, and that it all kind of comes together.

The map helps in seeing that journey progress right up to the time someone becomes a customer. And it also continues after: we see the next touchpoints and how we're looking to retain them as a customer, so that they come back and purchase again.

A customer journey map is particularly powerful when you incorporate empathy into it, bringing to light specific emotions that customers experience throughout the journey.

2. Create cross-team alignment around the business

The best, most effective customer journey maps are not the solo project of the user experience (UX) or marketing team (though they may originate there).

Customer journey maps are a quick, easy, and powerful way to help everybody in your business get a clearer understanding of how things work from a customers’ perspective and what the customers’ needs are—which is the first step in your quest towards creating a better experience for them.

Our first goal for preparing a customer journey map was to improve understanding customers across the company, so that every employee could understand the entire process our clients go through.

For example, people from the shipping department didn't know how the process works online; people from marketing didn't know how customers behave after filing a complaint. Everything seems obvious, but when we shared these details, we saw that a lot of people didn't know how the company itself works—this map made us realize that there were still gaps we needed to fill.

If we discover that customers have a pain point in a specific section of the map, different teams can look at the same section from several angles; customer support can communicate why something is not possible, and engineering can explain why it’s going to take X amount of effort to get it done. Especially in cross-functional teams where we all come from really different disciplines, I find these maps to be an incredible way for us all to speak the same language.

3. Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

As a company grows in size and complexity, the lines of ownership occasionally become blurry. Without clarity, a customer might get bounced like a ping pong ball across Sales, Success, and Support departments—not great for the seamless and frictionless customer experience we all want to offer.

A central source of ‘truth’ in the form of a customer journey map that everybody can refer to helps clarify areas of ownership and handover points.

We were growing as a team, and we realized we needed to operationalize a lot of the processes that, before then, had just been manually communicated. We did it through a customer journey map. Our goal was to better understand where these hand-off points were and how to create a more seamless experience for our customers, because they were kind of being punted from team to team, from person to person—and often, it was really hard to keep tabs on exactly where the customer was in that entire journey.

4. Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

A customer journey map will take your team from 'It appears that 30% of people leave the website at this stage' to 'Wow, people are leaving because the info is incomplete and the links are broken.' Once everyone is aligned on the roadblocks that need to be addressed, changes that have a positive impact on the customer experience and customer satisfaction will happen faster.

The customer journey map brings it all together: it doesn't matter who you've got in the room. If you’re doing a proper journey map, they always get enlightened in terms of ‘Oh, my word. I did not know the customer's actually experiencing this.’ And when I walk out of the session, we have often solved issues in the business. Accountability and responsibilities have been assigned, and I find that it just works well.

Shaheema (right) working on a customer journey map

Collect the right data to create an effective customer journey map

The secret of getting value from customer journey mapping is not just building the map itself: it's taking action on your findings. Having a list of changes to prioritize means you can also measure their effect once implemented, and keep improving your customers' experience. 

This all starts with collecting customer-centric data—the sooner you begin, the more information you’ll have when the time comes to make a decision.

Start mapping your customer journey today

Hotjar lets you experience your customer’s journey through their eyes, so you can visualize what’s working and what needs improvement.

FAQs about customer journey mapping

How do i create a customer journey map.

To create a useful customer journey map, you first need to define your objectives, buyer personas, and the goals of your customers (direct customer feedback and  market research will help you here). Then, identify all the distinct touchpoints the customer has with your product or service in chronological order, and visualize the completion of these steps in a map format.

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping provides different teams in your company with a simple, easily understandable visualization that captures your customers’ perspective and needs, and the steps they’ll  take to successfully use your  product or service. 

Consider customer journey mapping if you want to accomplish a specific objective (like testing a new product’s purchase flow) or work towards a much broader goal (like increasing overall customer retention or customer loyalty).

What is the difference between a customer journey map and an experience map?

The main difference between an experience map and a customer journey map is that customer journey maps are geared specifically toward business goals and the successful use of a product or service, while experience maps visualize an individual’s journey and experience through the completion of any task or goal that may not be related to business.

Customer Journey Maps: What They Are and How to Build One

Customer journey maps are a visual storytelling tool used to help designers empathize with users and identify actionable opportunities for providing a better user experience.

By Bree Chapin

Bree’s a passionate designer and problem-solver with 10+ years experience in product and UXUI design for web and native mobile applications.

PREVIOUSLY AT

When a customer uses a company’s products and services to achieve a goal or need, they are going on a journey from point A to point Z. A customer journey map charts the path a user takes from the beginning of this journey to the satisfaction of that need.

Mapping out the customer journey is an effective way to understand what turns a viewer into a long-term, loyal customer. – Kofi Senaya, Director of Product at Clearbridge Mobile

Understanding a user’s needs is the bedrock of great design. User experience and product designers draw upon a range of tools and methods for uncovering the needs of their users and designing a product that meets those needs.

The customer journey map is one such tool to deploy in the early stages of the design process to help empathize with users and identify opportunities for providing a better experience.

What Is a Journey Map?

“Journey mapping combines two powerful instruments: storytelling and visualization,” according to Kat Kaplan in When and How to Create Customer Journey Maps . A customer journey map can take a variety of forms, but essentially, it is a visual representation of a customer’s experience with a product or company at various touchpoints over time.

A Customer Journey map is a visual or graphic interpretation of the overall story from an individual’s perspective of their relationship with an organization, service, product or brand, over time and across channels. […] The story is told from the customer’s perspective, but also emphasizes the important intersections between user expectations and business requirements – Megan Grocki at UX Mastery

A customer journey maps help designers and other stakeholders empathize with the needs of their customers, triangulate pain points that their users experience, and identify opportunities for improvement and innovation. Most customer journey maps attempt to track the customer’s potential emotions during the experience: curiosity, confusion, anxiety, frustration, relief, etc.

The quest to understand the target user or customer is not new or specific to the digital landscape. Disney, arguably the masters of great customer experience, began mapping out their customers’ multi-channel engagement—from movies to toys to theme parks—decades ago.

The terms “journey map” and “experience map” are often used interchangeably in the design community, although some designers draw a line between the two terms. As the debate rolls on, it is perhaps less important to debate the distinctions than to focus on the essential goal of mapping out and better understanding the customer journey.

A customer journey map can focus on a single task or experience, such as mapping out a payment flow, or can cover the full life cycle of a customer’s initial engagement and continued retention. A product journey map lays out a customer’s interactions with a particular product.

The journey map design may center on a specific feature or app, or it may follow the customer’s experience at each touchpoint across a company’s service ecosystem. If a company relies on multiple channels and various touchpoints for customer service, for example, a map can help identify when best to escalate a customer email to phone support.

User journey maps help designers and stakeholders empathize with a user’s motivations and experiences from point A to Z and beyond. Like any other maps, a customer journey map helps one understand where the customer is and how to help get them where they want to go.

A customer journey map helps designers and stakeholders figure out what questions to ask but does not immediately answer them. One should approach the customer journey mapping process as an act of discovery, where the exercise itself illuminates the path to take.

Since the map is meant to be a catalyst, not a conclusion, the takeaways drive the next phase of the design or strategy by illuminating the journey, and helping to identify the opportunities, pain points, and calls to action. This will depend on what your next steps are, driving strategy or tactical design. – Adam Ramshaw at Genroe

Mapping is an exercise of connecting concepts and data to each other. In the case of customer journey maps, designers should be looking at how the customer’s intent maps to the flow of interaction provided at various touchpoints and seeing more clearly how they are connected or disjointed.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map

Start with user research.

All great design begins with research, whether analytical or anecdotal. The more one knows about a customer and their needs, the more accurate a map will be.

Conducting proper research will help designers avoid basing assumptions about their users on false consensus. “The false-consensus effect refers to people’s tendency to assume that others share their beliefs and will behave similarly in a given context,” according to Raluca Bidiu in You Are Not the User: The False Consensus Effect .

Feedback surveys are direct ways of asking users about their needs and what they’re already doing to meet those needs. User interviews open up the opportunity, not just in order to ask a lot of questions but to also observe what the users are not saying about their needs.

Customers will respond to a product within the framework of completing a particular task. This means the customer journey starts before users even engage with a single product and continues after they leave. Capturing a customer’s perception of their experience relative to their goals and needs informs how a designer can improve upon it.

Customer journey maps then use storytelling and visualization to map out the customer’s experience over time with the product, which aids the design team in identifying actionable opportunities for improving the experience.

Looking at more quantitative analytical data can provide valuable insights into the product’s users as well. For example, is there a significant drop off in user engagement at a particular screen in the subscriber sign-up experience? A clear user journey map might help designers understand what’s happening and if there are any gaps in the overall experience.

There is also great value in conducting competitive and comparative research. Observe how users engage with existing products and solutions. Mapping out a competitor’s customer experience as a story can be far more revealing than looking at a flat feature table.

One should also leverage others in their organization. Anyone who interacts with customers or their feedback should be interviewed: point-of-service providers, customer support specialists, error message report handlers, etc. Getting the other side of the story is a surprisingly effective way of understanding where customers are experiencing confusion or frustration.

Identify the Lens of the Experience

Before one begins mapping out a customer experience , one must define what the question to be examined is. After synthesizing the research, one should be able to understand the scope or timeline of the experience.

Remember that customers are not considering the experience of a company from just one microinteraction; every touchpoint at which they come into contact with someone’s products and services is part of a larger, comprehensive experience.

Does research reveal that customers show high initial satisfaction with a company’s eCommerce site that tapers off after the first transaction? Are customers enjoying a responsive website, but deleting the native app after first launch? How does a company foster loyalty in its publication readers and keep them coming back?

Mapping out the customer journey across each channel helps designers survey and optimize the overall experience. This may even mean looking at how the overall experience involves other platforms and services. For example, an eCommerce experience may begin with a search engine such as Google before the customer even gets to a company’s own website.

To solve for a specific problem or pain point for the customer, it may make sense to focus an experience mapping exercise on that flow. This does not mean, however, that the map can’t be complex—a payment experience for a company that offers both online and in-store shopping can cross multiple channels of service.

Building a map out for each touchpoint segment allows the team to research the component parts that make up the whole story more deeply. Focus the lens on specific segments or points in time of the customer journey while keeping the holistic experience in mind. By mapping out the experience across these channels, one can begin to suss out if the snag is isolated to an online payment processor or is something more systemic.

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Now that the prep work surveying the landscape has been completed, it is time to draw out the customer journey map. It is advisable to begin by scribbling the basics out on paper before moving into user journey mapping tools like Sketch or Omnigraffle.

Specify the timeline lens and plot out the user’s main goal at the beginning of the customer journey map, and whatever constitutes a success at the end. This does not have to be linear; for example, points in a repeatable experience can be plotted along a circle. Begin to fill in what the high-level steps are that the user is meant to take to get from point A to point Z.

Once the outline is laid out, try to group steps into stages. For example, if a user is trying to book a hotel room, one might group searching activities with browsing activities as the “research” stages of the journey. This will help you further contextualize and link the user’s motivations and actions.

If you’re looking at a multi-channel journey, for instance, you may also want to plot what happens at each of these stages within each channel. How does customer service escalate a service request? How does an online purchase system connect with an in-store return? What are the best ways to guide the user who must initiate a rideshare service with an app, and then later perform further actions to complete their task?

Most journey maps will also try to track a customer’s emotions during each stage of the journey. Refer to research, especially insights from user interviews and customer support calls, to empathize with points of frustration as well as moments of delight in the experience.

Make sure the information included is clear and concise—easily digestible for the team and stakeholders. Refine the map down to the essential so that the insights it highlights are actionable.

Think of the customer journey map as a poster pinned to the office wall. At a glance, people should be able to see the key touchpoints that a user passes through. It should remind them that the customer’s needs must always be at the forefront of their thinking – Paul Boag of Smashing Magazine

The Importance of Customer Journey Maps

The success of a customer journey map can be measured by how well it helps the team identify pain points, as well as opportunities for improvement as it traces the customer’s path from start to finish. A successful map provides an honest assessment of a company’s existing products and services, then helps spark ideas on how the customer’s needs can be better met.

Present the map to the design and development team as well as stakeholders. Look at the map with an honest, analytical eye. Connect customers’ emotions, such as frustration, with the motivations and expectations guiding the user’s actions. Look for gaps between various channels of your business where the experience falls through. Refer back to the customer journey map repeatedly throughout the design process to validate potential solutions.

A journey map is meant to empathize with customers and identify problems and opportunities; not solve them. The customer journey map is a living, ever-evolving map of a customer’s interactions with the products and services a company has to offer. New touchpoints may be created and customer journey designs re-routed as the team iterates, tests, and validates new solutions.

Use a customer journey map to develop better empathy with customers, leverage user research to identify potential pitfalls in the product journey, and guide the team to craft a more cohesive, seamless user experience, whether this experience is focused on one interaction or occurs across multiple channels.

Further Reading on the Toptal Blog:

• E-commerce UX: An Overview of Best Practices (with Infographic)
• The Best UX Designer Portfolios: Inspiring Case Studies and Examples
• Heuristic Principles for Mobile Interfaces
• The Importance of Human-centered Design in Product Design
• Anticipatory Design: How to Create Magical User Experiences
• Voice of the Customer: How to Leverage User Insights for Better UX
• Product Design

Bree Chapin

New York, NY, United States

Member since May 15, 2016

About the author

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How to design a customer journey map (A step-by-step guide)

A customer journey map is a visual representation of how a user interacts with your product. Learn how to create a customer journey map in this practical step-by-step guide.

The State of UX Hiring Report 2024

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Successful UX design is rooted in empathy. The best designers are able to step into their users’ shoes and imagine what they think, feel, and experience as they interact with a product or service. 

One of the most effective ways to foster user empathy and consider different perspectives is to create customer journey maps—otherwise known as customer journey maps.

If you’re new to journey mapping, look no further than this guide. We’ll explain:

• What is a customer journey map?

Why create customer journey maps?

When to create customer journey maps, what are the elements of a customer journey map, how to create a customer journey map (step-by-step).

If you want to skip straight to the how-to guide, just use the clickable menu to jump ahead. Otherwise, let’s begin with a definition. 

[GET CERTIFIED IN UX]

What is a customer journey map? 

A customer journey map (otherwise known as a user journey map) is a visual representation of how a user or customer interacts with your product. It maps out the steps they go through to complete a specific task or to achieve a particular goal—for example, purchasing a product from an e-commerce website or creating a profile on a dating app. 

Where does their journey begin? What’s their first point of interaction with the product? What actions and steps do they take to reach their end goal? How do they feel at each stage? 

You can answer all of those questions with a user journey map.

A user journey map template from Miro . 

Creating customer journey maps helps to:

• Centre the end user and foster empathy. Creating a user/customer journey map requires you to step into the end user’s shoes and experience the product from their perspective. This reminds you to consider the user at all times and fosters empathy.
• Expose pain-points in the user experience. By viewing the product from the user’s perspective, you quickly become aware of pain-points or stumbling blocks within the user experience. Based on this insight, you can improve the product accordingly.
• Uncover design opportunities. User journey maps don’t just highlight pain-points; they can also inspire new ideas and opportunities. As you walk in your end user’s shoes, you might think “Ah! An [X] feature would be great here!”
• Get all key stakeholders aligned. User journey maps are both visual and concise, making them an effective communication tool. Anybody can look at a user journey map and instantly understand how the user interacts with the product. This helps to create a shared understanding of the user experience, building alignment among multiple stakeholders. 

Ultimately, user journey maps are a great way to focus on the end user and understand how they experience your product. This helps you to create better user experiences that meet your users’ needs. 

User journey maps can be useful at different stages of the product design process. 

Perhaps you’ve got a fully-fledged product that you want to review and optimise, or completely redesign. You can create journey maps to visualise how your users currently interact with the product, helping you to identify pain-points and inform the next iteration of the product. 

You can also create user journey maps at the ideation stage. Before developing new ideas, you might want to visualise them in action, mapping out potential user journeys to test their validity. 

And, once you’ve created user journey maps, you can use them to guide you in the creation of wireframes and prototypes . Based on the steps mapped out in the user journey, you can see what touchpoints need to be included in the product and where. 

No two user journey maps are the same—you can adapt the structure and content of your maps to suit your needs. But, as a rule, user journey maps should include the following: 

• A user persona. Each user journey map represents the perspective of just one user persona. Ideally, you’ll base your journey maps on UX personas that have been created using real user research data.
• A specific scenario. This describes the goal or task the journey map is conveying—in other words, the scenario in which the user finds themselves. For example, finding a language exchange partner on an app or returning a pair of shoes to an e-commerce company.
• User expectations. The goal of a user journey map is to see things from your end user’s perspective, so it’s useful to define what their expectations are as they complete the task you’re depicting.
• High-level stages or phases. You’ll divide the user journey into all the broad, high-level stages a user goes through. Imagine you’re creating a user journey map for the task of booking a hotel via your website. The stages in the user’s journey might be: Discover (the user discovers your website), Research (the user browses different hotel options), Compare (the user weighs up different options), Purchase (the user books a hotel).
• Touchpoints. Within each high-level phase, you’ll note down all the touchpoints the user comes across and interacts with. For example: the website homepage, a customer service agent, the checkout page.
• Actions. For each stage, you’ll also map out the individual actions the user takes. This includes things like applying filters, filling out user details, and submitting payment information.
• Thoughts. What is the user thinking at each stage? What questions do they have? For example: “I wonder if I can get a student discount” or “Why can’t I filter by location?”
• Emotions. How does the user feel at each stage? What emotions do they go through? This includes things like frustration, confusion, uncertainty, excitement, and joy.
• Pain-points. A brief note on any hurdles and points of friction the user encounters at each stage.
• Opportunities. Based on everything you’ve captured in your user journey map so far, what opportunities for improvement have you uncovered? How can you act upon your insights and who is responsible for leading those changes? The “opportunities” section turns your user journey map into something actionable. 

Here’s how to create a user journey map in 6 steps:

• Choose a user journey map template (or create your own)
• Define your persona and scenario
• Outline key stages, touchpoints, and actions 
• Fill in the user’s thoughts, emotions, and pain-points
• Identify opportunities 
• Define action points and next steps

Let’s take a closer look.

[GET CERTIFIED IN UI DESIGN]

1. Choose a user journey map template (or create your own)

The easiest way to create a user journey map is to fill in a ready-made template. Tools like Miro , Lucidchart , and Canva all offer user/customer journey map templates that you can fill in directly or customise to make your own. 

Here’s an example of a user journey map template from Canva:

2. Define your persona and scenario

Each user journey map you create should represent a specific user journey from the perspective of a specific user persona. So: determine which UX persona will feature in your journey map, and what scenario they’re in. In other words, what goal or task are they trying to complete?

Add details of your persona and scenario at the top of your user journey map. 

3. Outline key stages, actions, and touchpoints

Now it’s time to flesh out the user journey itself. First, consider the user scenario you’re conveying and think about how you can divide it into high-level phases. 

Within each phase, identify the actions the user takes and the touchpoints they interact with. 

Take, for example, the scenario of signing up for a dating app. You might divide the process into the following key phases: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Service, and Advocacy . 

Within the Awareness phase, possible user actions might be: Hears about the dating app from friends, Sees an Instagram advert for the app, Looks for blog articles and reviews online. 

4. Fill in the user’s thoughts, emotions, and pain-points

Next, step even further into your user’s shoes to imagine what they may be thinking and feeling at each stage, as well as what pain-points might get in their way. 

To continue with our dating app example, the user’s thoughts during the Awareness phase might be: “ I’ve never used online dating before but maybe I should give this app a try…”

As they’re new to online dating, they may be feeling both interested and hesitant. 

While looking for blog articles and reviews, the user struggles to find anything helpful or credible. This can be added to your user journey map under “pain-points”. 

5. Identify opportunities

Now it’s time to turn your user pain-points into opportunities. In our dating app example, we identified that the user wanted to learn more about the app before signing up but couldn’t find any useful articles or reviews online.

How could you turn this into an opportunity? You might start to feature more dating app success stories on the company blog. 

Frame your opportunities as action points and state who will be responsible for implementing them.  

Here we’ve started to fill out the user journey map template for our dating app scenario:

Repeat the process for each phase in the user journey until your map is complete.

6. Define action points and next steps 

User journey maps are great for building empathy and getting you to see things from your user’s perspective. They’re also an excellent tool for communicating with stakeholders and creating a shared understanding around how different users experience your product. 

Once your user journey map is complete, be sure to share it with all key stakeholders and talk them through the most relevant insights. 

And, most importantly, turn those insights into clear action points. Which opportunities will you tap into and who will be involved? How will your user journey maps inform the evolution of your product? What are your next steps? 

Customer journey maps in UX: the takeaway

That’s a wrap for user journey maps! With a user journey map template and our step-by-step guide, you can easily create your own maps and use them to inspire and inform your product design process. 

For more how-to guides, check out:

• The Ultimate Guide to Storyboarding in UX
• How to Design Effective User Surveys for UX Research
• How to Conduct User Interviews

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What is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey map template, the customer journey mapping process, data inputs for your customer journey map, why should you use customer journey maps, the uses of customer journey mapping, how to improve a customer journey, tools to help you with your journey mapping, see how xm for customer frontlines works, customer journey mapping 101: definition, template & tips.

22 min read Find out about how to start customer journey mapping, and how to improve it for the benefit of your customers and the business.

If you want to improve your customer experience you need to be able to understand and adapt the customer journey you offer when someone interacts with your organization. Whether their journey is entirely online , offline, or a blend of both, there are multiple journeys a customer might undergo.

Understanding the customer journey in depth helps you identify and take action on customer pain points and repeat what’s working. By doing this, you will improve the overall experience that your customers have, which will have better outcomes for your business.

Outlining the potential customer journeys your audience might go through requires a process called customer journey mapping.

Free Course: Customer journey management & improvement

Creating a customer journey map is the process of forming a visual representation of customers’ processes, needs , and perceptions throughout their interactions and relationship with an organization. It helps you understand the steps customers take – the ones you see, and don’t – when they interact with your business.

It enables you to assess:

• Insights – from your existing customer journey, how to understand it better
• Impact – how to optimize budgets and effort for changes we want to make to the customer experiences
• Issues/opportunities – Diagnose the existing customer journey
• Innovation – where you might want to completely change the existing customer experience

A customer journey map gives you deeper insight into the customer, so you can go beyond what you already know. Many brands see the customer journey as something that is visible – where the customer interacts with the brand. But in reality, this is not true, and only accounts for a percentage of the entire customer journey. Creating a customer journey map gets you thinking about the aspects of the journey you don’t see, but have equal weight and importance to the entire experience.

When mapping out the customer journey, you are looking for the moments that matter – where there is the greatest emotional load.

If you’re buying a car, then the greatest moment of emotional load is when you go to pick the car up because it’s yours , after picking the color, choosing the model, and waiting for it to be ready.

Ensuring these moments match your customers’ expectations of your product, brand and service teams are key to helping you reach your business goals. But you can only do that by understanding the journey your customers go on in order to get there, what they’re thinking and needing from you at that time. Developing a customer journey map puts you in their shoes so you can understand them better than ever before.

Getting started when creating a customer journey map template doesn’t have to be difficult. However, your customer journey map template will need to cover several elements in order to be effective.

There are several ingredients that make up the anatomy of a customer journey, all of which should be looked at carefully so that you can find out where the customer journey runs smoothly and meets customer needs at that moment in time – and where the experience does not, and needs some improvement.

Understanding their behaviors and attitudes also means you can fix bad experiences more effectively too because you know why you haven’t met your customers’ expectations and what you need to do to make amends. There may be times when things go wrong, but it’s how you adapt and what you do to fix these experiences that separates the best. Knowing how the customer will be feeling makes taking that decisive action much easier.

When exploring and visualizing the customer journey we are assessing:

• Customer behavior What is your customer trying to do?
• Customer attitudes What is your customer feeling/saying?
• The on-stage experience Who/what is your customer directly interacting with? (This includes various channels, such as TV ads or social media)
• The off-stage experience Who/what needs to be in place but which your customer is NOT directly aware of?

So what could the customer journey map examples look like when starting the process of buying a car?

Customer journey vs process flow

Understanding customer perspective, behavior, attitudes, and the on-stage and off-stage is essential to successfully create a customer journey map – otherwise, all you have is a process flow. If you just write down the touchpoints where the customer is interacting with your brand, you’re typically missing up to 40% of the entire customer journey.

There is no single customer journey. In fact, there are multiple. The best experiences combine multiple journeys in a seamless way to create a continuous customer lifecycle as outlined below.

Getting started with customer journey map templates

To begin, start by choosing a journey that you would like to create a customer journey map for and outline the first step that customers will take.

You can use this customer journey map template below to work out the customer behaviors, attitudes, the on-stage and off-stage processes – and the KPIs attached to measuring the success of this experience.

Download our free journey mapping template here

The step-by-step process of mapping the customer journey begins with the buyer persona .

Step 1 – Create a customer persona to test

In order to effectively understand the customer journey, you need to understand the customer – and this is where creating a persona really helps. You may base this around the most common or regular customers, big spend, or new customers you haven’t worked with before. This persona is beyond a marketing segment , but that can be a great place to begin if you’re just starting out on the mapping process for your organization.

What do you include? Start with these characteristics.

• Family status
• Professional goals
• Personal goals

These personas help you gain a deeper understanding of your customers and can be derived from insights and demographic data , or even customer interviews . This works for both B2B and B2C business models, but in B2B especially you’ll have multiple customers for each opportunity so it’s recommended you build out multiple personas.

To begin, start with no more than three personas to keep things simple.

Create a diverse team

When creating a customer journey map, you also need to build out a diverse mapping team to represent the whole business. Include frontline staff , day-to-day management, corporate teams, HR, and business support functions. They will give you vital feedback, advice, and perspectives you hadn’t thought of.

Step 2 – Choose a customer journey for mapping

Select a customer journey map to construct, then build a behavior line. This might be a new customer journey, renewal, or fixing a product issue. You might also choose this based on the most frequent customer journeys taken, or the most profitable.

Step 3 – Work through the mapping process

Ask yourself the following:

• Who are the people involved in this journey? E.g. if you’re in a car dealership, that might be the customer, the sales rep, and front-of-house staff.
• What are the processes or the things that happen during this journey?
• What are the customer attitudes ? What are they feeling at this time? Go beyond excitement or frustration. Bring these feelings to life. This car is my dream come true!
• What is the moment that matters? Identify the greatest moment of emotional load. The make or break where everything could be good up until that point, but if you get that moment of maximum impact wrong, then all that’s good is forgotten. The best experience brands get this moment right and identifying it is an important first step to achieving that. In that moment, ask yourself what are the things/people/processes involved? Think about this for the whole business – across your product , brand , and service teams.
• But beyond identifying this moment, you need to establish what your customers’ needs are. What are they getting out of this moment? How do their needs change if this experience goes badly? Knowing the answer to these questions can help you deliver experiences that will resonate , and respond quickly to unforeseen circumstances or issues.
• And finally, how do you measure how effectively you are meeting customer needs throughout the journey? Set KPIs to put benchmarks in place for your customer journey map and customer experience and track your progress.

Step 4 – Innovate

When you are mapping out your customer journey, brainstorm ideas for how to improve that moment that really matters . These ideas don’t need to be practical, but by putting together a diverse mapping team from around the business you can begin to filter through these ideas.

Then, test it.

Ask yourself: Is it feasible? Is it viable? Is it desirable? Don’t ask can we do it, ask should we do it? Then you can start to differentiate yourself from your competitors.

Step 5 – Measure

Use the customer journey map to decide on your measurement framework.

Who are you measuring? What are you measuring? When on the journey are you measuring it? And why? And finally, what metrics and KPI’s are in place to measure this?

Your customer journey map process will require you to use several different data inputs to get an accurate picture of how your customers behave and where you can improve their experience.

A customer journey map is often developed using data gleaned from customer feedback you’ve requested . While this type of market research is useful, your research process needs to be deeper to gain a richer, more accurate understanding of your customer’s behavior.

To create a customer journey map that accurately reflects the truth of customer actions and intentions, you need to take into account both solicited and unsolicited data.

Use solicited data to understand the voice of the customer

Solicited data includes the customer feedback you gain when you conduct research through surveys such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) or ask customers for feedback on social media. This approach can be very useful for understanding your customer’s point of view , rather than just making assumptions about how they think and behave.

However, your target audiences won’t tell you everything about what they plan to do when undergoing their customer journey. Though they might tell you that they’ve had a great experience in a particular part of their customer journey, this type of feedback presents a few issues:

• You have to know when to ask for feedback : You might already have a customer journey in mind when asking for feedback – but do you know all the routes a customer might take in your customer journey map?
• It’s a snapshot: When you survey customers, you’ll likely only get insights into their experience at that particular moment about a specific touchpoint
• It’s what customers say they think/will do, not what they actually think/will do: You’re relying on your customers to accurately reflect their sentiment and intentions in their responses, which isn’t always the case. For your customer journey map to be effective, you need to find the truth
• Your sample size might be too small : If you’re trying to understand how a relatively niche customer journey is doing, you might find that the number of customers who have not only taken the customer journey but are willing to respond with feedback is very limited. You can’t risk survey fatigue by polling the same audience several times, so your insights are limited
• You’re only getting part of the picture : You will likely have several types of useful customer data on file, but these are often not considered as part of the process when creating a customer journey design because solicited data takes precedence

You’ll need to infer how customers feel to be able to accurately predict the actions a customer takes. To do so, you’ll need to look at unsolicited data.

Unsolicited data

Unsolicited data covers everything your customers aren’t telling you directly when you ask them and contextual data that you likely already collect on them, such as purchase history. It can be taken from various sources, such as your website and social channels, third-party sites, customer calls, chat transcripts, frontline employee feedback , operational sources, and more.

This type of data is nuanced, but it allows you to establish the truth of your customers’ experience. The ability to gather unsolicited customer feedback from every channel enables you to see more than just what a customer tells you directly. Using real-time feedback gathering and natural language understanding (NLU) models that can detect emotion, intent, and effort, you’ll be able to understand your customers’ actions in a more profound way. Unsolicited data offers you a 100% response rate that better indicates what your customers actually think of each step in their customer journey.

Rather than be limited to a small sample size of customers who respond to surveys, you’ll be able to build an accurate picture of the average customer on each step of the customer journey map by using this richer insight data with your own operational data.

Why using solicited and unsolicited data is important data

With solicited data, you don’t always see why a customer behaves or thinks as they do. For example, a customer might tell you that they would recommend you to a friend or family – but they don’t renew their subscription with you. A customer might be an ideal candidate for a particular journey, but they abandon their basket when prompted to give their personal details. Understanding the why behind customer actions is key for designing a great customer journey, and that’s why both solicited and unsolicited data collection and evaluation are necessary for creating great customer journey maps.

Of course, knowing how customers will actually respond to your customer touchpoints is only part of the process. You may need to develop more than one customer journey map and create sub-audiences for your customer personas to accurately see where you can rectify pain points and improve outcomes. You will need to collect and analyze contextual data across all customer journey touchpoints and develop a highly detailed journey map that can unveil routes your customers might be taking without your knowledge.

Qualtrics’ Experience ID platform can overlay solicited and unsolicited data to provide an all-encompassing picture of your customer journey map, no matter how complex. Creating an effective customer journey map is easier with all your data collated and analyzed together, with actionable insights created automatically.

A customer journey map creates a common understanding for the organization of how a customer interacts during different stages of the customer lifecycle, and the roles and responsibilities of the different teams in charge of fulfilling that experience.

It will also bring an organization together, and foster empathy and collaboration between teams because people will know what is required from everyone in the business to deliver the experiences that customers expect. This will help you to develop a shared sense of ownership of the customer relationship, which ultimately drives a customer-centric culture . With everyone working towards a common goal, communication of what you learn about the customer and the journey they go through is vital in order to drive best practices throughout the organization.

Creating an accurate customer journey map will help your customer service team to focus on more specific issues, rather than handling problems generated by a less-tailored customer journey. Your customer experience will be improved with a customer journey that’s personalized to the specific personas you have generated. You’ll have put yourself in your customer’s shoes and adapted your strategy to reflect your customer’s perspective – which in turn will create more memorable experiences.

Creating a customer journey map will influence your journey analytics across the business. So for example, it will determine what you ask, who you ask, when you ask, why you ask it and how you ask questions in your Voice of the Customer Program .

So when should you use customer journey mapping?

There are four main uses:

• Assess the current state of your customer journey Understand and diagnose the specific issues in current experiences
• Understand what the future state of your customer journey should look like Design, redesign and create new experiences
• Blueprints For implementing change
• Communication Bringing teams together to train and scale up best practices.

Take stock and take action

To improve the customer journey you need a clear vision of what you want to achieve and you need to make a distinction between the present and the future.

• What is your customer journey right now?
• What does the future state of your customer journey look like?

This is why organizations blueprint their customer journey because they can see what works and act accordingly. By understanding your customers’ attitudes and needs at critical times in the journey, you can make amends to better meet them – and develop contingencies to cope when these needs aren’t or can’t be met. For example, during a sudden, unexpected surge in demand.

Orchestrate your customer journey

To offer your customers truly optimized experiences, you’ll need to go further than just creating a customer journey map. You’ll also need to orchestrate journeys using real-time customer behavior to adapt your strategy as your customers make choices. Orchestrating a journey means taking dynamic action towards optimizing your customer’s experience, using real-time customer behavior as informative data.

Improve your employee experience

Use your diverse mapping team to come up with ideas that incorporate experience from all aspects of the business to improve the customer journey – and remember that this has a significant payoff for your employees too. Improving the employee journey – by giving teams the tools to make a difference – can have a positive knock-on effect for the customer and improve their experience in those key moments. This is because employees have the autonomy and motivation in their roles to help their customers, and realize their own potential.

Your customer journey map isn’t just designed to improve the customer experience. Creating an accurate customer journey map can help you to improve your business outcomes.

Being able to link operational data to key touchpoints in a customer journey is transformative for organizations. This is because improving segments of the customer journey will see a direct impact on your business. The Qualtrics Journey Optimizer helps you do just that. By analyzing areas for improvement as outlined by your customer journey map, organizations can take actions that will have maximum benefit for their customers, and the business too.

With Qualtrics CustomerXM , you’ll:

• Create a common understanding throughout your workforce of how a customer interacts with your organization, and you’ll know the roles and responsibilities of your different teams
• Develop empathy and collaboration between teams, working together to achieve the same outcome
• Develop a shared sense of ownership of the customer relationship which ultimately drives a customer-centric culture

Free course: Customer journey management & improvement

Related resources

Customer Journey

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, buyer's journey 16 min read, request demo.

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Service blueprint vs. journey map

Table of Contents

Understanding journey maps.

A journey map is a visual representation of a customer's experience with a product or service over time. Creating a customer journey map is pivotal in business because it enables a comprehensive understanding of the customer's perspective, encompassing interactions, emotions, and pain points. A journey map consists of stages, touchpoints, and channels, and may be used in real-world scenarios like understanding the user experience on an e-commerce platform.

Understanding Service Blueprints

A service blueprint, on the other hand, is a tool used to visualize the service delivery process from the customer's and service provider's perspectives. It is essential in a business context as it aids in identifying potential problem areas in service delivery. Components of a service blueprint include customer actions, frontstage and backstage interactions, and support processes.

For example, a restaurant may use a service blueprint to streamline its order and delivery process. You can refer to the service blueprint template as an illustrative example that demonstrates how the service delivery process can be effectively visualized.

Service blueprint vs. journey maps and their importance

Journey maps and service blueprints are important tools for any profession that requires a deep understanding of customer experiences and the intricacies of service delivery.

They are especially valuable for those in roles related to customer experience management, product or service development, and process optimization. For instance, UX/UI Designers, Customer Experience Managers, Service Designers, and Product Managers frequently use these tools to understand and enhance user interactions with their products or services. Additionally, Business Analysts and Process Improvement Specialists use service blueprints to visualize and improve service delivery processes.

Service blueprints vs. journey maps: similarities

While journey maps and service blueprints each have their unique attributes, they share key similarities that reinforce their value in enhancing customer experience and service delivery.

Customer-centricity: Both tools center around optimizing the customer's experience with a product or service.

Visual representation: They use graphical elements to simplify complex interactions and processes.

Holistic approach: Each offers a comprehensive view of the customer journey or service process.

Basis for improvement: They highlight gaps and inefficiencies to guide service improvement initiatives.

Cross-functional collaboration: Both tools promote teamwork across departments within an organization.

Customer journey maps vs. service blueprint: differences

In understanding the nuances of a customer journey map vs. service blueprint, their key differences highlight their unique applications:

Perspective: A journey map zeroes in on the customer's perspective, while a service blueprint covers both the customer's viewpoint and backstage service delivery processes.

Focus: Journey maps trace the customer's experience over time, whereas service blueprints offer a comprehensive snapshot of the entire service process.

Service blueprints vs journey map: when to use them

Use a journey map when you need to understand the customer's emotional journey, needs, and pain points. When you want to optimize the whole service delivery process, considering both customer interactions and the behind-the-scenes activities, use a service blueprint.

Miro has both a customer journey mapping template and a service blueprint template that can help you get started.

Service blueprints vs journey map: benefits and limitations

Journey maps excel in providing insights into customers' emotions and experiences, while service blueprints provide a comprehensive view of the service process. However, journey maps might lack the details of the delivery process, and service blueprints might not capture the emotional aspect of the customer experience.

Questions to consider

When should my business use a journey map over a service blueprint? A business should use a journey map when the goal is to understand the customers' experiences, emotions, and interactions at each touchpoint.

Can journey maps and service blueprints be used together? Yes, journey maps and service blueprints can be used together to provide a comprehensive view of the customer experience and the service process.

What are some common mistakes to avoid when creating a journey map or a service blueprint? Common mistakes include not involving all stakeholders, not considering the customer's perspective, and overlooking important steps in the service process.

How often should my business update its journey map and service blueprint? The frequency of updates depends on changes in the business environment, customer behavior, or service process. However, regular reviews are recommended for continued relevancy.

Discover more

What is consumer decision-making process?

Buyer journey vs customer journey

Benefits of customer journey mapping

The 7 steps of the customer journey

Customer experience vs. customer journey map

How to make a customer journey map?

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Customer Journey Maps — Walking a Mile in Your Customer’s Shoes

Perhaps the biggest buzzword in customer relationship management is “engagement.” Engagement is a funny thing, in that it is not measured in likes, clicks, or even purchases. It’s a measure of how much customers feel they are in a relationship with a product, business or brand. It focuses on harmony and how your business, product or brand becomes part of a customer’s life. As such, it is pivotal in UX design . One of the best tools for examining engagement is the customer journey map.  

As the old saying in the Cherokee tribe goes, “Don’t judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes” (although the saying was actually promoted by Harper Lee of To Kill a Mockingbird fame). The customer journey map lets you walk that mile. 

“Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” — Damon Richards, Marketing & Strategy expert

What Is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a research-based tool. It examines the story of how a customer relates to the business, brand or product over time. As you might expect — no two customer journeys are identical. However, they can be generalized to give an insight into the “typical journey” for a customer as well as providing insight into current interactions and the potential for future interactions with customers. 

Customer journey maps can be useful beyond the UX design and marketing teams. They can help facilitate a common business understanding of how every customer should be treated across all sales, logistics, distribution, care, etc. channels. This in turn can help break down “organizational silos” and start a process of wider customer-focused communication in a business. 

They may also be employed to educate stakeholders as to what customers perceive when they interact with the business. They help them explore what customers think, feel, see, hear and do and also raise some interesting “what ifs” and the possible answers to them. 

Adam Richardson of Frog Design, writing in Harvard Business Review says: “A customer journey map is a very simple idea: a diagram that illustrates the steps your customer(s) go through in engaging with your company, whether it be a product, an online experience, retail experience, or a service, or any combination. The more touchpoints you have, the more complicated — but necessary — such a map becomes. Sometimes customer journey maps are “cradle to grave,” looking at the entire arc of engagement.”

A fictitious customer journey for the persona Samantha Bonham through the Rhythm Road learning service.

What Do You Need to Do to Create a Customer Journey Map? 

Firstly, you will need to do some preparation prior to beginning your journey maps; ideally you should have: 

User personas . If you can’t tell a typical user’s story, how will you know if you’ve captured their journey?

A timescale. Customer journeys can take place in a week, a year, a lifetime, etc., and knowing what length of journey you will measure before you begin is very useful indeed.

A clear understanding of customer touchpoints . What are your customers doing and how are they doing it?

A clear understanding of the channels in which actions occur. Channels are the places where customers interact with the business — from Facebook pages to retail stores. This helps you understand what your customers are actually doing.

An understanding of any other actors who might alter the customer experience. For example, friends, family, colleagues, etc. may influence the way a customer feels about any given interaction.

A plan for “moments of truth” — these are the positive interactions that create good feelings in customers and which you can use at touchpoints where frustrations exist.

User personas are incredibly useful tools when it comes to putting together any kind of user research . If you haven’t developed them already, they should be a priority for you, given that they will play such a pivotal role in the work that you, and any UX teams you join in the future, will produce.

Once you’ve done your preparation, you can follow a simple 8-point process to develop your customer journey maps: 

Review Organization Objectives — what are your goals for this mapping exercise? What organizational needs do you intend to meet?

Review Current User Research — the more user research you have at your fingertips, the easier this exercise will be. Be creative, and if you don’t have the right research to define the journey, then consider how you can carry that research out.

Review Touchpoints and Channels — the next step is to ensure that you effectively map touchpoints and channels. A touchpoint is a step in the journey where the user interacts with a company or product, and a channel is the means by which the user does this. So, for example, a touchpoint could be “pay this invoice” and channels could be “online,” “retail,” “over the phone,” “mail,” etc. It can also help to brainstorm at this stage and see if there are any touchpoints or channels you’ve missed in your original data collection exercise.

Create an Empathy Map. An empathy map examines how the customer feels during each interaction — you want to concentrate on how the customer feels and thinks as well as what they will say, do, hear, etc. in any given situation.

Build an affinity diagram . The idea here is first to brainstorm around each concept you’ve touched on and then to create a diagram which relates all these concepts, feelings, etc. together . This is best achieved by grouping ideas in categories and labeling them. You can eliminate concepts and the like which don’t seem to have any impact on customer experience at this stage, too.

Sketch the customer journey. How you do this is up to you; you can build a nice timeline map that brings together the journey over the course of time. You could also turn the idea into a video or an audio clip or use a completely different style of diagram. The idea is simply to show the motion of a customer through touchpoints and channels across your time frame and how that customer feels about each interaction on that journey. The map should include the outputs of your empathy map and affinity diagram.

Iterate and produce. Then, take your sketches and make them into something useful; keep refining the content and then produce something that is visually appealing and useful to stakeholders, team members, etc. Don’t be afraid to rope in a graphic designer at this stage if you’re not good at making things look awesome.

Distribute and utilize. The journey map serves no purpose sitting on your hard drive or in your desk drawer — you need to get it out there to people and explain why it’s important. Then, it needs to be put to use; you should be able to define KPIs around the ideal journey, for example, and then measure future success as you improve the journey.

When creating the Journey Mapping course , the IxDF used a modified customer journey map to better understand the end-to-end experience for aspiring and junior UX designers .

Anatomy of a Customer Journey Map

A customer journey map can take any form or shape you like, but let’s take a look at how you can use the Interaction Design Foundation’s template (link below).

A very basic customer journey map template.

The map here is split into several sections: In the top zone, we show which persona this journey refers to and the scenario which is described by the map. 

The middle zone has to capture the thoughts, actions and emotional experiences for the user, at each step during the journey. These are based on our qualitative user research data and can include quotes, images or videos of our users during that step. Some of these steps are “touchpoints” — i.e., situations where the customer interacts with our company or product. It’s important to describe the “channels” in each touchpoint — i.e., how that interaction takes place (e.g., in person, via email, by using our website, etc.). 

You can download our Customer Journey Map Template here:

The Take Away

Creating customer journeys (including those exploring current and future states) doesn’t have to be a massively time-consuming process — most journeys can be mapped in less than a day. The effort put in is worthwhile because it enables a shared understanding of the customer experience and offers each stakeholder and team member the chance to contribute to improving that experience. Taking this “day in the life of a customer” approach will yield powerful insights into and intimate knowledge of what “it’s like” from the user’s angle. Seeing the details in sharp relief will give you the chance to translate your empathy into a design that better accommodates your users’ needs and removes (or alleviates) as many pain points as possible. 

References and Where to Learn More

Learn how to create different types of journey maps, including service blueprints and experience maps in the course “Journey Mapping” .

User experience strategist, Paul Boag gives an overview of customer journey mapping in this article .

Here is a checklist of everything you need to get started with customer journey mapping.

Journey maps come in different formats. Here is one created by Kate Kaplan, Insights Architect at Nielsen Norman Group.

Adam Richardson, a Creative Director at global innovation firm frog design shares another format for journey mapping, in this article .

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0

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How to create a Customer Journey Map in 30 minutes or less

Journey Mapping for Busy People

Published in: Journey Mapping / Last update: July 2020

I get it. You need a customer journey map, and you need one now .

Whether you're new to customer journey mapping and just want to get a quick taste for what this is all about...

Or you're a veteran with a team meeting tomorrow, and you don't want to show up empty handed...

Sometimes, you just don't have the time to go through every stage of the journey mapping process. And frankly, sometimes you don't need to.

This article will help you create a journey map in 30 minutes or less and make sure you don't skip the key steps.

Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication.

Ready? Let's do this!

A Journey Mapping bootcamp

Here is a bit of context to put the journey map you're going to create into perspective.

If you're really in a hurry and want to start mapping right now, just scroll down to the next section and come back here later.

To get a journey map out in half an hour, you're going to skip a lot of steps in the process. It's just going to be the bare essentials.

You're going to skip important questions like: Why am I creating this journey map ( here are 5 smart reasons )? For whom am I creating it? What are we going to do with it once it's there?

Usually, my strong advice is to not skip these questions. Go slow to go fast is the best approach in most journey mapping scenarios. But hey, sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures.

So, can you even realistically create a valuable customer journey map in 30 minutes?

Or will it just be a waste of your time in the end?

To answer this, you must keep in mind that customer journey mapping should always be an ongoing activity as explained in the Practical Guide .

But there's always a starting point in this ongoing activity. Let this starting point be the map that you're going to create now.

This journey map is going to be your Shitty First Draft (SFD). And SFDs are super useful as long as you know that they're SFDs. 🙂

This SFD is going to primarily purge what's in your head already. It’s a brain dump.

We do this because it's much easier to talk about your customer journey when it's in front of you rather than hidden in your head.

Pro tip: Add the letters SFD to the title of your map, e.g., "Going through the checkout journey map (SFD)." It sparks curiosity. When people start asking questions about it, you'll get the chance to explain what it is.

Which journey mapping tool should I use?

The other question we need to answer before we start mapping is: Which tool should we use?

This question is critical because if we pick the wrong tool, we'll never be able to create a journey map in 30 minutes.

So here is my take:

If you're already using a professional journey mapping tool like Custellence, UXPressia or Smaply, go ahead and use that.

Otherwise, just stick with the trusted sticky notes. For an SFD, these are more than adequate.

Just don't go with tools like PowerPoint, InDesign or Visio, even if you have secret ninja skills.

What about using a premade journey map template ?

Yes, templates can be really helpful if you're short on time.

We've discussed quite a few journey map templates in this overview.

There's just a big caveat to using templates: The template has to be really simple and contain just a few elements. If not, you'll lose yourself in the details while the clock is ticking.

So, your template will most likely be so simple that you can just as well create the structure yourself.

Step 1: Map the stages

Let’s use getting a haircut at the local barbershop as our example journey.

Photo by Guus Baggermans on Unsplash

The first thing we're going to do is create our Customer Lifecycle lane and divide our journey into 3 stages: 1) before, 2) during and 3) after the service encounter.

These 3 stages will be the uppermost lane in our map.

That's enough for now. You can always expand and elaborate later.

Start your map with the Customer Lifecycle lane

Step 2: Map the activities & situations.

Now we're going to add a second lane below the stages lane we've just created.

In this second lane, we're going to map Customer Activities & Situations. These are basically what your customer is doing in the different stages of the journey.

The first card you're going to add is the moment of interaction with your service.

In our example this could be something like: sitting in the chair and chatting with the barber.

You add this card to your map below the during stage. It should be exactly in the middle of your map.

Add your first activities card below the during stage (click to enlarge)

From this first card, we're going to work our way back. We do this by naming 3–5 moments that happen before this interaction.

It could be moments like:

• Getting invited to speak at a conference
• Thinking about getting a haircut
• Booking the appointment
• Checking if there are no delays through WhatsApp
• Taking the bike to the barber

The examples above all fall into the before stage of the journey.

We could just as well define some moments in the during stage that happen before the actual haircut, for instance, waiting in the shop for the barber to be ready. But I never arrive early at my barber... 😉

About 3 to 5 cards in the before stage is enough for now

After this, we're going to repeat the process. This time, look forward in the journey and name 3–5 moments in the experience:

• Paying the bill
• Feeling the leftover hair itching
• Receiving compliments from your spouse

Naming moments that happen further on in the journey can be a bit more challenging. For now, just make sure you have at least 1 customer activity mapped in the after stage. Again, you'll be able to expand later.

Your journey map should look similar to the image below.

The completed Customer Activities and Situations lane (click to enlarge)

Pro tip: You'll get major bonus points when you create a quick drawing for each moment instead of just describing it in text.

If you're still not quite sure what you should add to this lane, take a look at A Practical Customer Journey Mapping Guide for CX Professionals , which covers this more in depth.

Step 3: Map the needs.

We're on Step 3 in the process: mapping the Customer Needs.

This should be quite straightforward, if you know the customer going through the journey well enough.

Hint: You probably don't, even if you think you do. Really, do some research.

But since I'm mapping my own journey to the barbershop in this example, I can probably say a thing or two about my needs.

In real journey mapping projects, you are never your own customer. Even if you are. Promise me you won't make this mistake.

Did you add the third layer in your map called Customer Needs ? Good!

Below each customer activity, try to write down the most important need in that moment.

Write down these needs regardless of whether this need is currently fulfilled by your service or not . This is very important.

Let's go back to the barbershop, shall we?

I'm someone who highly values a personal approach during the service, but I hate inefficiencies in the process leading up to it.

So, going over the customer activities we mapped in Step 2, we could describe my needs as follows:

• I want to book this appointment in 2 minutes, on my own schedule. Even if it's 11:00 p.m. and I'm already half asleep, thinking about that upcoming conference.
• The day of the appointment, I want to know up front if there are any delays so I can plan my trip accordingly. Waiting at the barbershop isn't my favorite pastime.
• When I come through the door, I like to feel recognized as a customer. Even though they cut and shave dozens of clients (and I'm certainly not their biggest), a "Hi, Marc, good to see you back!" means a lot.
• It's nice when during the cut the barber and I can continue talking about the topics we discussed last time, rather than going over the weather or vacation plans.

As you can see, we have not described a need for every card in the customer activity lane. That's okay for now.

Our goal here is to capture the needs that stand out and are typical for me as a customer.

At this point, our journey map looks like the image below.

Mapping the customer needs onto activities and situations (click to enlarge)

You might be thinking: But how can I describe the customer needs in the stage when I haven't done the research? Excellent point. Thanks for bringing this up!

The answer is simple.

When we have 30 minutes to create a journey map, we're going to make a lot of assumptions based on our prior experience.

My tip here is to be very explicit about the assumptions you make.

Pro tip: You could add scores ranging from 1–10 to each customer need card, defining how strongly this customer need is based on research.

A score of 1 means that it's a total assumption. A 10 means that you have a big stack of customer interviews that support this need.

If you want to learn more about how to define good customer needs, head over to the Practical Guide .

Step 4: Map the experience.

The final lane of information we're going to add is Customer Experience.

This customer experience layer is the iconic curved line that you (should) see in every journey map.

In this lane we're going to map how satisfied or unsatisfied the customer is at each moment in the journey.

This is going to be sort of a benchmark on how well our service is performing in terms of fulfilling the needs of our customer.

Let's go over each moment in the Customer Activities & Situations lane and think about the actual service we are providing.

How does our service at that specific moment stack up to the customer needs we've identified in the previous step?

If we think that we're doing a good job of satisfying the needs, we add a point high on the curved line. If we think we’re failing to do so, it's a low point on the line.

Do this for at least 3–5 moments in the journey. Try to pick the moments that are most important to your customer.

Finally, mark as neutral those moments for which we haven't yet described a customer need.

How will we know if we're doing a good job? For now, we'll have to make assumptions again.

Once we move to version 2.0 of this SFD, we're going to back up our claims with some proper user research.

Going over the needs in our visit to the barbershop, these would be some of the highlights regarding the customer experience:

• This barber allows me to book the appointment through an online system. I'm happy.
• They send a reminder and updates through WhatsApp on the day of the appointment. This reduces the risk that I'll be waiting in the shop.
• The barber greets me by name and recalls our previous chat. I’m not sure how he remembers since I only visit once every 4–6 weeks. Maybe he keeps a secret diary.

These are all moments where I'm really satisfied with the service. And to be honest, for me, there's not a single moment in this journey where I'm truly unsatisfied.

So, our Customer Experience lane looks something like this now:

The Customer Experience is visualised as a curved lane in the journey map (click to enlarge)

Now comes the final and critical step in our journey mapping process.

We need to go over the moments where we've highlighted the customer experience with either a very satisfied or unsatisfied customer.

Now describe why our customer is satisfied or unsatisfied at that specific moment.

To find the answer to this question, we must go back to the Customer Needs.

In the barbershop example, booking the appointment online caters to my need for efficiency, as do the reminders through WhatsApp.

Hearing my name the moment I walk through the door makes me feel at home and plays on the personal touch that I value.

When we fail to describe the reason why our customer is satisfied or unsatisfied, our Customer Experience lane will just be a pretty curved line without much business value.

Again, we've skipped a lot of steps. But this is one step you can't do without.

Our final customer journey map now looks like this:

Every journey map should have these fundamental elements

3, 2...1, stop the ⏰!!

What can I do with this journey map?

Congratulations on making it this far! You've just taken a very important step in your journey mapping journey.

Now comes the big question: What can you do with a journey map that you've created in 30 minutes (or less)?

You've actually got a few good options:

• Use the journey map as a conversation tool to gather input and get feedback from the people around you.
• It's a great way to check your assumptions and see if there's already some internal research data available on this journey.
• Connect the customer journey to your business . Start adding the internal systems and processes to the journey map in a backstage lane.
• Use the map as a starting point to get stakeholders thinking about the needs of customers rather than internal processes.

I'm sure that you'll find other useful applications for your SFD.

It was Dennis Boyle (employee #4 at IDEO) who said: " Never go to a meeting without a prototype ."

So, remember that it's always better to bring a shitty first draft to your next meeting than just some ideas.

Do I need to create a persona or customer profile first?

Creating an "anonymous" journey map is one of the most common journey mapping mistakes .

And when you think about it, you can't have a customer journey without a customer.

In our journey mapping process, we didn’t have the time to create a customer profile, persona, or empathy map.

But we of course had a customer in mind the whole time. We couldn't have described the customer needs otherwise, right?

These customer needs already paint a picture of this customer, albeit a very crude one.

Deeply understanding the customer who is going through the journey is a key factor in getting value out of your map.

We only skipped this step due to our very strict time constraints.

So, now that we're done with our SFD, spend another 15 minutes to describe your customer in a basic empathy map .

Miro.com is a nice tool to quickly create an Empathy Map

Just like with our journey map, the goal with this empathy map is not to be complete.

The goal is to get our assumptions about who the customer is out of our heads and onto paper so that we can have a more structured conversation.

Creating Assumption-based Journey Maps

I'd argue that user research is the most important thing in the journey mapping process (and I'm not the only one as you'll see in the video below).

And still, we've created a journey map based on assumptions. What's going on?

Assumption-based maps can actually be very useful in order to get resources for user research.

Imagine that you have to explain to your manager that you want to conduct some interviews or do a field study before creating the journey map.

You know that even if you think you know who your customers are and what they need, you probably don't. Even if you've been with the company for 10 years.

Your manager, on the other hand, might feel that there's already enough knowledge within the organization.

But you want to literally point to the customer journey and start asking questions like: Do we really know what happens in this part? How confident are we about how the customer feels at this moment?

With a tangible map, it becomes much easier to agree on the current blind spots and make your case to invest in some proper user research.

When creating an assumption-based journey map, you just have to be very mindful about the assumptions you make.

Pro tip: Make your assumptions explicit by assigning a confidence score to each card in the map.

And don't forget that user research isn't just a way to validate your assumptions. It's also a way to explore and discover customer needs that you didn't see before.

Check out this video to learn more about how much research you need to create meaningful journey maps.

Recommended Next Steps

Congratulations! You've just taken a very important step toward putting customers at the heart of your organization.

What's next? Start using the map!

Share it with people. Get feedback. Have discussions about the contents.

As you start having these conversations, you'll see that there's still much to explore and improve.

You'll run into questions like:

Which journey should I map first? And which customer should I pick? Where does the journey start and end?

These are questions that you'll need to answer in order to take your journey maps to the next level.

Check out the Customer Journey Mapping Essentials Masterclass , which will get you up to speed on these questions in no time.

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Co-creating journey maps

Co-creative workshop.

Using the know-how of a group of invited participants to create one or more journey maps or service blueprints.

01 See #TiSDD 3.3, Journey maps , and #TiSDD chapter 10, Facilitating workshops , for hands-on tips on facilitation and how to build a safe space.

In a co-creative journey mapping workshop, invite participants who have solid knowledge about the experience you are mapping. If you want to create a journey map about customer experiences, this might mean inviting customers (yes, real ones!) and/or frontline employees. Be careful if you conduct this type of workshop with participants who only have a superficial or abstract knowledge of the experiences you focus on. The results might look convincing, but often they are very biased. For example, if an IT team without prior qualitative research and without deep knowledge of the daily lives of customers conduct a co-creative workshop on the journey map of their online customer experience, the outcomes tend to represent their idealized process rather than the actual customer experience.  [01]

Think about inviting workshop participants with either a shared perspective (such as customers of a particular target group) or from differing perspectives (such as customers of various target groups or customers and employees). Clearly communicate the scope of the journey map, such as a high-level journey map vs. a more detailed journey map focusing on one specific situation within a high-level journey map.

Step-by-step guide

• ‍ Define main actor and journey scope  Select a main actor, such as a persona, whose shoes you want your workshop participants to walk in. Define the time frame (“scope”) of your story. Are you talking about an experience of 10 minutes, 2 hours, 5 days, or 10 years?
• Plan and prepare  Determine who you’ll invite as workshop participants and prepare your invitations. Describe the aim of the workshop, set expectations for your workshop, and think of an incentive for participating in the workshop if appropriate. Prepare the room (or any other venue you choose for your workshop) and write a list so that you don’t forget any essential material (templates, sticky notes, pens, personas, research data, etc.). Write a facilitation agenda and establish facilitation guidelines to create a safe space through warm-ups and so on.
• Welcome and split into smaller groups  Start your workshop with a welcome, describing the workshop’s aim and agenda, and facilitate a round of introductions. After a warm-up, split the participants into subgroups of 3–5 people and give them clear instructions on what to do. 
• Identify stages and steps  Let the workshop participants start with the rough stages of a journey map, such as “inspiration, planning, booking, experience, sharing” for a holiday. Now fill up the stages with the persona’s story. Sometimes it helps if you start “in the middle” with the most crucial steps and then ask yourself what happens before and what happens after these. Use simple sticky notes for this so you can easily add or discard steps and stages.
• Iterate and refine  Refine the journey by going through it from end to end to check if you missed a step or if you need more/less detail in certain parts. You can always break up a step into two or more steps or condense several steps to one. Depending on the project, it might make sense to find a consistent level of detail throughout the whole journey map or to highlight a specific part of the journey in more detail.
• (Optional) Add perspectives  Add more perspectives, such as a storyboard, an emotional journey, channels, involved stakeholders, a dramatic arc, backstage processes, “What if?” scenarios, etc.
• (Optional) Emotional journey exercise  Ask the subgroups to number the steps of their journey maps, and let a participant from one subgroup present their main actor and journey map step by step to either the entire group or a partner group. Each workshop participant should write down on their own how they think the main actor feels at each step – for example, from –2 (very dissatisfied) to 0 (indifferent) to +2 (very satisfied). In a second step, let each participant mark their values on the emotional journey of the journey map. You’ll see steps where the entire group agrees that it is a positive or negative experience, but you’ll also discover steps with very diverse ratings. Use this as an input for discussion and try to find out if you need to clarify the main actor (persona), or the description of the step, or if there are other reasons why the group is not yet on the same page.
• Discuss and merge  Give participants some time to reflect. Discuss similarities and differences between the journey maps of the different subgroups. Let the group merge the different maps into one map (or several), but make notes on different opinions and insights – they might be useful for you later.
• Follow-up  Go through your notes and check different positions taken by your workshop participants. Index the generated data and highlight important passages. Sometimes it is useful to schedule follow-up interviews or further workshops with some or all participants. If needed, process your journey map into a format that is easier to comprehend (physical or digital). Write a short workshop summary that includes your conflated key findings as well as the journey map and raw data you collected during the workshop from your participants, such as quotes, photos, or videos. 

Method notes

• ‍Define the situational context of the experience you want to map in your workshop (weekdays vs. weekends, daytime vs. nighttime, summer vs. winter, rainy vs. sunny, etc.). This will help workshop participants to develop a shared frame of reference.
• Consider repeating the workshop with different participants, or a different situational context, or basing your journey map on different personas to identify patterns and understand particular distinctions between these. 

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[email protected]

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Customer Journey Maps vs. Service Blueprints: What’s the difference?

When it comes to design research tools, two of the most frequently used are Customer Journey Maps and Service Blueprints . Both are incredibly valuable communication tools that show the end-to-end processes and experiences of your staff and customers. BUT, what’s the difference, and how do you know which one is right for your project?

Whenever we meet with a new client or read a project brief, we’re faced with some of the same questions. Today we’re answering those tricky questions and breaking it down for you:

What is a Customer Journey Map?

What is a Service Blueprint?

What is the purpose of each tool and why are they helpful?

What are the key differences between each tool?

How to choose the right tool for your next project?

Core Concepts of Service Design

Before we can really dive into the differences between the mapping tools used in service design, we need to explain the core concepts of service design — and we’ll use the analogy of a theatre or play.

One of the biggest differences between journey maps and service blueprints is the actors or people that are considered in each one. In service design, actors are anyone involved in customer interactions and supporting business activities and processes that directly impact the customer’s experience. For example, store clerks, customer service/support, warehouse staff, and customers themselves.

Service design also uses a theatre analogy to explain the different parts of the service, all that goes into making it work, and which parts of the service are customer facing versus operational.

Front-Stage : The front-stage includes everything the customer sees and experiences. These are activities conducted by the people involved directly with your customers. Using the analogy of a theatre, they could be the play actors, ticket sales people, snack kiosk workers, ushers… and more!

Back-Stage : Back-stage activities are behind the line of visibility and involve the people and activities that your customer’s don’t see. Back to the analogy of a play, back-stage activities can include lighting, sound, rehearsal, costumes, and a lot of people reading lines getting ready to take their turn on the front-stage. Without these activities, the show would not go on and it certainly wouldn’t be a great experience for the audience. Applying the back-stage theatre analogy to business, these jobs are often customer support representatives, warehouse workers, managers, etc.

Behind-the-Scenes: These are all of the activities that customers don’t see, but they ensure that the production goes off without a hitch. It’s all of the support processes, administrative work, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and organizational tasks that need to happen to ensure the organization is running smoothly.

Customer Journey Maps

What is a customer journey map.

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the end-to-end experience your customers have when they interact with your service or try to accomplish a goal through something you offer (e.g. trying to renew their driver’s license). We always recommend that journey maps are created using in-depth research (such as interviews and observations ) with your company’s real customers and users. The “actor” in customer journey mapping is the customer or end-user themselves. It’s an artifact that is created from the perspective of your customer or end-user. Typically, a journey map will also consider the front-stage experience, but won’t dive deep into the activities of other actors (or staff).

A journey map will include all of the tasks and activities of a user or customer, their pain points and challenges, and the brand touchpoints they encounter (e.g. your website, an app, a customer support person, and more). It also includes the thoughts and feelings they experience as they go along their journey. These among other attributes of the map help to tell a story of what that person’s experience was, and all of the steps and miss-steps they took along the way.

Why is it useful?

Customer journey maps are useful for highlighting key areas in the customer’s journey that provide a poor experience and highlighting opportunities for improvement within your product or service. Customer journey maps can also show major inefficiencies in the customer experience. Take for example someone who is trying to use an online system to remedy a billing issue and update their payment information — If for some reason the online service doesn’t work or provide the information they need, your customer resorts to calling the support team. Here, they wait on hold before having to explain themselves to a few different people and their goal of fixing their credit card information be accomplished. As you can imagine, and have probably experienced in your own lifetime, this is a bad experience. By outlining this arduous journey, we discover key areas of improvement and places where processes could be streamlined.

The ultimate goal of customer journey mapping is to:

Identify areas for improvement and places to reduce friction – ultimately making things easier for the customer.

Identify new product, service, or feature opportunities!

Prioritize which areas of the experience should be fixed first – (journey maps are great at showing the relative importance of one issue over another, since they are all in one map together)

Bridge the gap between siloed teams. Not every department is focused on customer experience, but surely the customer’s experience throughout different parts of the journey will impact your organization’s various departments (such as marketing, IT, and customer service).

Build empathy for your customers by stepping into their shoes. You’ll find out what their experience is really like, what’s motivating them, and most importantly, what’s bugging them! So you can fix it and design a better experience.

Service Blueprints

Okay, so now you know what a customer journey map is and why they are helpful tools. Let’s dive into service blueprints.

What is a service blueprint?

Service Blueprints focus on how an organization supports the customer journey, keeping customers, staff, and other key players at the forefront. Blueprints depict the business’s processes and operations that occur within the front-stage (customer facing), backstage (internal) and behind-the-scenes!  Ultimately, a service blueprint is a business process mapping tool. The main differentiator between service blueprints and other mapping tools? Instead of “swimming lanes” used in traditional workflow diagrams to depict different task owners, we approach service blueprints from a human-centered lens . Similar to customer journey maps, service blueprints should be created through research with the actors (in this case, staff) involved. This might mean shadowing employees as they interact with customers and go about their day-to-day work, or conducting several interviews over a few days or weeks with employees. By doing this, we can understand what the back-end processes are and where your employees think things are going wrong/could be improved.

Service blueprints also tend to be a bit more specific – zooming in on a single business process vs. looking at an end-to-end journey with an entire service.

Service blueprints usually focus on actions and physical evidence (aka tools and technology needed by the actors to do their work). To summarize, the anatomy of a service blueprint includes:

Physical Evidence (tools, technology, websites, resources, etc.)

Customer Journey (actions/steps taken by customers)

Front-Stage (actions taken by employees who directly interact with customers, as well as the technology they’re using)

Back-Stage (actions taken by employees who help front-stage staff behind the line of visibility, or front-stage staff who complete an activity outside of the view of customers)

Behind-the-Scenes (actions taken by employees who support the business internally)

Pain Points (issues or challenges that staff might experience when completing certain tasks)

Time (the length of time it takes to complete certain tasks or a series of tasks)

Why are service blueprints useful?

Service blueprints are an amazing tool to outline the inner workings of your business. They look at all of the activities (good, bad, and useless) that your employees are doing and highlight the reasons why parts of the customer experience are failing. In particular, service blueprints help to:

Pinpoint weaknesses in the current business processes.

Find opportunities to optimize business and support processes – with a detailed breakdown of all the steps involved.

Tie the customer journey together with the inner workings of the company.

Understand complications and inefficiencies within your organization

  View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Outwitly | UX & Service Design (@outwitly)

Journey Maps vs. Service Blueprints over on Outwitly’s Instagram account!

Key Differences Between Journey Maps and Service Blueprints

Now that we understand both of these mapping tools, let’s call out their key differences:

Customer Journey Map:

Depict an end-to-end experience as a narrative

Focus on customer/users

Focus on the customer’s experience, thoughts and feelings, and pain points when trying to accomplish their goal

Focus on the customer actions and some front-stage (customer facing) tasks, tools, and touchpoints

Service Blueprint:

Depict the business processes and operations

Focus on customers and mostly on staff (and any other actors involved)

Focus on how the organization supports the customer journey (what activities, tasks, and physical evidence are needed)

Focus less on the actual visceral experience – but will usually show pain points

Focus on the front-stage, backstage, and behind-the-scenes tasks (using the customer journey as a foundation)

How to Choose the Right Tool?

Ultimately, these tools are complementary to one another. The customer journey map provides the step-by-step tasks that form the foundation for a service blueprint. To be specific, the activities completed by customers are the first row of tasks in a service blueprint. Journey maps can help you understand where to focus and which business areas may need further investigation using a service blueprint and service blueprints will breakdown all of the processes involved in making that experience a reality.

When to choose a Customer Journey Map

Start with a journey map when:

You want a broader understanding of your end-to-end customer experience

You need to learn about how your customer is experiencing your offerings (services, products, user interfaces, customer support, online touch points)

You don’t have a lot of clarity about where things are going wrong or why your customers are unhappy

Then once, you have a deeper understanding of the areas which need improvement — launch a service blueprinting activity to find out what is happening behind-the-scenes in the company.

When to choose a Service Blueprint

Create a service blueprint when:

You feel confident in your understanding of the customer’s all-encompassing experience, but need to alleviate friction with a specific pain point

You want to take a more detailed look into a specific process and find efficiencies!

Getting Started

If you want to know more about how to create a journey map, dive into our three-part blog series all about customer journey mapping!

The Power of Customer Journey Mapping: 101

How to Research and Build a Customer Journey Map: 201

How to Make your Journey Map Actionable and Creating Change: 301

Resources we like…

The Difference Between a Journey Map and a Service Blueprint by Practical Service Design

Defining Service Blueprints by Nielson Norman Group

Similar blog posts you might like...

Making your Journey Map Actionable and Creating Change: 301

Service Design, UX, & HCD: What’s the difference?

7 Steps to Better Customer Experience (CX)

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World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience

Journey management vs. service design.

Summary:  Service design is an active effort to design a service solution for a customer need, while journey management is an ongoing effort to improve or sustain the quality of an existing service or journey.

4 minute video by 2023-12-06 4

• Kim Salazar
• Customer Journeys Customer Journeys

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The Practice of Customer-Journey Management

User journeys should be managed like products — by people and teams with specialized, journey-dedicated roles who continually research, measure, optimize, and orchestrate the experience.

Video Author

Kim Salazar is a Senior User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. Salazar combines her background as a developer and education in Computer Science with her user experience expertise, particularly around complex applications, to bring well-rounded insights to her work.

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Technologies

RADWIN's 'Train-to-Ground' WiFi Service Powers 45 Terabytes of Daily Downloads for Moscow Metro

• 1.7 min read

RADWIN, the leading provider of train-to-ground wireless communications solutions, has announced the completion of the onboard Wi-Fi deployment for the Moscow Metro. RADWIN’s  FiberinMotion® train-to-ground solution  was chosen by MaximaTelecom - the system integrator and service provider - to deliver high-speed Wi-Fi services onboard the metro service.

According to a statement by RADWIN, Moscow Metro serves over 9 million passengers daily and its Wi-Fi services are provided onboard its 650 trains and 5000 cars along 600 KM or 400 miles of tracks. The train-to-ground Wi-Fi solution, says RADWIN, delivers speeds of 90 Mbps per each train.

Boris Volpe, CEO, MaximaTelecom   We chose RADWIN’s train-to-ground solution because it delivers the optimal combination of high capacity and extensive coverage, significantly reducing the amount of infrastructure required in the tunnels. This ambitious project was completed in just 14 months. Today Moscow Metro passengers download over 45 Terabytes per day, with aggregated capacity continuously on the rise.

Nir Hayzler, VP, Marketing, RADWIN Our FiberinMotion® solution is in various stages of deployments worldwide, and we have also concluded successful trials with leading public transport operators in North America, Asia Pacific, Latin America and Europe. Providing broadband Wi-Fi onboard trains and metros poses unique challenges, which requires advanced technology as well as an in-depth understanding of the transportation industry’s requirements. Our solution provides the highest capacity in the industry combined with an advanced air-interface, management tools and expert services. This allows us to exactly fulfill public transport operators’ requirements for high-speed Wi-Fi connectivity for trains and metros.

• wifi services

Ray is a news editor at The Fast Mode, bringing with him more than 10 years of experience in the wireless industry.

For tips and feedback, email Ray at ray.sharma(at)thefastmode.com, or reach him on LinkedIn  @raysharma10 , Facebook  @1RaySharma

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