customer journey product management

The Essential Guide to Customer Journey Mapping for Product Managers

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

Why is Customer Journey Mapping Important?

• Identify customer pain points and address them to improve satisfaction
• Gain insights into potential areas of growth and optimization
• Enhance the customer experience to increase loyalty and advocacy
• Streamline processes and touchpoints to improve efficiency

Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Customer Journey Map

Step 1: define your objectives, step 2: develop customer personas, step 3: identify touchpoints and channels, step 4: map the customer journey, step 5: analyze your customer journey map, step 6: identify opportunities for improvement, step 7: implement changes and monitor progress, step 8: share your customer journey map with stakeholders, best practices for customer journey mapping.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams : Involve representatives from different departments to gain a comprehensive understanding of the customer journey and ensure alignment across the organization.
• Keep your map up-to-date : Regularly review and update your customer journey map to account for changes in customer behavior, product features, or market conditions.
• Prioritize actionable insights : Focus on identifying insights that can lead to tangible improvements in the customer experience and align with your product strategy.
• Test and validate assumptions : When making changes based on your customer journey map, be sure to test and validate your assumptions through user testing, A/B testing, or other methods to ensure your efforts yield the desired results.

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

Updated: April 17, 2024

Published: May 04, 2023

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

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

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

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

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

• What’s included in a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Steps for creating a customer journey map.

• Types of Customer Journey Maps

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Customer Journey Design
• Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Free Customer Journey Template

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

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

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

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

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

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

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

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

1. Use customer journey map templates.

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

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

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

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

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

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

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

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

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

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

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

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

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

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

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

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

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

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

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

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

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Customer Journey Map

What is a customer journey map.

A customer journey map is a visual depiction of all steps a customer or prospect takes when interacting with your company with a specific goal in mind. This could include, for example, the path a visitor to your website takes to reach your trial-signup page. You might also develop a customer journey map to document the entire process a customer goes through to buy your product — from their first visit to your website, through signing an agreement with a sales rep.

Why Are Customer Journey Maps Important?

Customer journey mapping is an important process because it can help various teams across a company gain a better understanding of the experience that prospective and existing customers have when dealing with their organization.

Sales teams, for example, can develop customer journey maps to get a holistic, objective view of every step a prospect must take as they move through the sales funnel. When stepping back and viewing this entire process, for example, the team might discover there are too many steps — some of which are unnecessary or could at least be shortened — and that as a result, they are losing prospects.

Similarly, when they can see and review their entire sales funnel, the team might realize there are missing steps in their customer’s journey, meaning they are asking their prospects to take too big a leap at some point to the next stage in the sales funnel.

What Can Product Managers Learn from a Customer Journey Map?

Product managers can benefit in several ways from creating customer journey maps. For example, by mapping out the entire first-time-user experience, from landing on your product’s website to actually purchasing it, you and your product team can take a more objective look at the process from a potential user’s point of view.

This can help you better understand where a prospect might become confused or frustrated along their journey — as well as where your cross-functional team has created a compelling message or painless transition that will carry the prospect along to the next stage of the buying process.

You can then share this journey map with marketing, sales, design, and other teams across the company so you can work together to improve the customer experience where it’s needed.

As an example, here is a ProductPlan customer journey map that UX Raw founder Jeremy Rawson created to depict his experience with our company, from the first website visit through creating his company’s first product roadmap with our app.

Other things product managers can learn from customer journey roadmaps include:

• Whether some area of your product itself does not allow your users to complete the desired action in a logical or streamlined way.

For a deeper discussion, read our blog on how journey maps can help product managers build better products .

How Can I Create a Customer Journey Map?

Marketing expert Aaron Agius offers the following six-step process as a customer journey map template.

Step 1: Decide what you want from this journey map.

Before you can start creating a journey map, you need to determine what your objectives are for it. Do you want to know how customers go through your sales funnel, for example, or how they interact with your support team, or how they use some aspect of your product to achieve a goal?

You can create several customer journey maps, each addressing specific interactions your customers have when interacting with your company. But you’ll want to keep each map focused on a single aspect of the customer’s journey, to avoid confusion and to give your team a clearer picture of that journey.

Step 2: Figure out your personas’ goals.

This step will help you better understand where your prospects and customers are coming from, what they need and value, and how they view themselves. When you have all of this persona data to check against your journey map, you’ll have a clearer picture of where your current customer journey conflicts with the process you’re asking them to go through.

For example, let’s assume your primary personas are executives who describe themselves as “extremely busy” in your surveys or the market research you’ve reviewed. Knowing this, when you view your journey map, you will want to make sure your current buying process does not include too many steps or take any longer than necessary.

Step 3: Identify all touchpoints.

Now you will want to identify all of the channels a prospect could possibly take as their first step with your company. This could include online ads, social media posts, organic search leading to various pages on your website, or your company’s outbound marketing emails.

Next, you’ll want to assign to each of these touchpoints the likely emotional triggers that compel users to take action and seek to engage more deeply with your company or product.

At the same time, look for any obstacles that could be stopping users from taking further action on any of these channels. When they see a social ad, for example, perhaps your product’s cost is a turnoff. Or perhaps the next-step action — filling out a lengthy form, for example — might turn prospects away.

Step 4: Determine what you want your journey map to show.

Here Agius lists the four types of customer journey maps you can use:

Current state: A detailed walkthrough of how customers currently engage with your business.

Day in the life: Also a detailed walkthrough of your customer’s journey with your company today, but put into the broader context of everything else your customer does in the day.

Future state: Your vision of how you’d like customers to interact with your product, company, etc. in the future.

Blueprint: A map of either your current-state or future-state customer’s journey, but with roles, responsibilities, and possibly timelines added for implementing your desired improvements.

Step 5: Take the customer journey yourself.

Now you’re ready to act as your customer and take the path your company has put in place to achieve whatever objective you’re trying to measure.

If you want to learn exactly what steps your prospects must go through to download your free trial, or speak with a sales rep, or complete an action using your mobile app, take that journey now.

Important: You will also want to document every step of your journey, and make notes at each stage as well about insights you’ve had, pain points you’ve identified, and any gaps or unnecessary steps in the process.

Step 6: Adjust your journey map as needed.

After you’ve completed the journey and reviewed your notes, you will want to make all necessary changes to the map.

Then you can begin translating those changes into action across your company — which could mean updating your sales process, streamlining your free trial funnel, etc.

Here are a couple of other examples, taken from Agius’s Hubspot post on customer journey maps . You can use these as templates to start your own journey map.

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World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience

The practice of customer-journey management.

July 18, 2021 2021-07-18

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Journey management is the ongoing practice of researching, measuring, optimizing, and orchestrating a customer journey to improve the customer experience for users and achieve business goals.

I think of journey management as the natural progression beyond the conventional interaction-level UX work that has been widely established across organizations over the last few decades. As digital technology became a mainstay in modern business, UX practitioners have become more and more cognizant of the broader journey-level customer experience . However, although many UXers are aware of this larger scope of experience and have dabbled in related activities like journey mapping and service blueprinting , most organizations do not dedicate resources to the design and management of customer journeys.

In This Article:

Why journey management, journey management as a user-centered–design practice, what’s unique about journey management, three competencies of journey management, establishing journey-management roles and resources.

With smartphones and other technologies giving customers immediate and continued connection to brands, users are much more immersed in product and service experiences than ever before. The result is awareness of the broader experience among customers.

A study by McKinsey shows that a good customer-journey experience translates not only into increased customer satisfaction, but also into better business outcomes (on metrics such as like revenue, churn, and repeat purchases). Moreover, according to Pointillist, a majority of organizations with a good customer experience have invested in roles or teams dedicated to journey management.

Many sales and marketing groups practice what they call journey management. In these settings, journey management tends to be focused around getting new users through the sales funnel and retaining existing users through marketing and relationship management. In this context, journey-management activities usually include:

• using behavioral data to identify “the current state” of individual customers:  where they are in the sales journey and whether they are a risk for churn, and
• designing marketing materials or other types of actions tailored to these customers in order to encourage them to move to a desired state (e.g., complete the purchase or stay engaged with the company).

The practice of journey management is valuable beyond sales, however. We can use it to manage any type of customer experience, to predict individual customers’ current needs and proactively meet them, ultimately producing easy, enjoyable, and fulfilling brand experiences.

Journey management involves applying user-centered design principles to the journey-level experience. For that reason, the same tenets of UX that apply to the design of interaction-level product experiences also apply to the design of journey experiences. The goal should be the same; to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother, with simplicity and elegance of design.

To implement journey management, we can apply the  UX learning loop: observe and understand, test, iterate, and learn . We start by understanding the current state of individual customers, where they are in the journey, and what they are trying to achieve. We experiment with various actions that we could take to move them as smoothly and quickly as possible to a desired state that meets their goal. We then learn from the results of these actions and go back to the drawing board to refine them.

Though the goals and tenets of journey management are shared with traditional UX work at the interaction level, there are certain elements that are unique to journey management. We discuss these below:

• Crossfunctional context: A customer journey is the end-to-end process that a customer goes through to complete a task over time. For example, the experience of researching a flight, booking a ticket, receiving follow-up emails, receiving customer support, checking in for the flight, traveling on the airplane, and receiving your luggage at the arrival airport are all part of a flight journey with an airline. Users interact with various channels of the organization’s ecosystem, and each interaction may be owned by different parts of the company — for example, marketing, support, various product teams, as well as the airport staff and flight crew. For this reason, journey-management work is inherently crossfunctional, requiring collaboration and alignment across normally disparate teams.
• Technical infrastructure and integration work: Again, because of the crossfunctional nature of customer journeys, journey management depends heavily on the integration of disparate data and systems from across the customer journey to create a unified source of customer data. Such a source of data allows for design control over the journey as a whole.

In our training course Customer-Journey Management, we teach three competencies of journey management: insights, design, and orchestration.

The user-centered design of the journey experience should be informed by a multipronged research practice. Combining qualitative research data and journey metrics can help researchers identify opportunities for design and orchestration. Various journey-performance metrics should be benchmarked and monitored to inform this effort. Because journeys take place across channels, early investment in the integration of systems is important, to allow for journey analytics and tracking of behavioral data across the journey for benchmarking and analysis.

High-level activities related to this competency include:

• Ethnographic research
• Creation of a journey map and service blueprint
• Integration of disparate systems and databases
• Establishing journey-analytics capabilities
• Conducting customer-listening or voice-of-customer research
• Analysis and reporting of data and insights

Utilizing the insights from research, practitioners will direct the strategic design of the journey in conjunction with leadership.

High-level design activities include:

• Prioritization of design work and road mapping
• Design thinking and ideation
• Prototyping, testing, and iteration of solutions
• Coordination of stakeholders and resources across functional groups

Orchestration

In addition to the user-centered design of the journey experience, journey management should also focus on delivering a personalized journey for every customer through journey orchestration . Orchestration is achieved by tracking behavioral data as a means to understand customers and anticipate their needs in order to deliver the right interactions on the right channel at the right time. It’s possible to do some degree of orchestration manually via existing systems; however, large organizations and mature teams utilize specialized journey-orchestration tools and real-time interaction-management platforms. These tools have various degrees of capabilities, with the most advanced ones utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning to aid in the delivery of personalized journey experiences.

High-level orchestration activities include:

• Implementation of specialized tools for orchestration
• Analysis of behavioral data and tailored delivery of those content and interactions that are most relevant and useful to the specific customer’s journey

I’ve been asked whether it’s appropriate and feasible to have existing UX or design practitioners take on journey-management activities, in addition to product-specific design work. Though these professionals may certainly be capable of carrying out the work required, good journey management requires dedicated resources. Organizations are starting to invest in this space by establishing dedicated roles and teams of individuals to manage the journey-level experience.

Journey-Manager Role

Journey management can be likened to product ownership. Just as a product team is responsible for the strategic vision and user experience of a product, journey managers own the customer journey, continuing to learn and optimize the journey that users take across channels to achieve a goal.

Though most organizations support various top user tasks, a journey manager should own just a single customer journey — for example, the journey of buying online with pickup in-store in a retail setting or the claims experience at an insurance company. It would not be feasible for a single journey manager to effectively manage multiple user journeys well. For this reason, journeys should be prioritized and selected strategically.

The responsibilities of the journey-manager role include:

• Managing the strategic vision of the customer journey
• Working closely with product teams and other functional groups to coordinate crossfunctional optimization efforts
• Continuously evaluating the quality of the customer-journey experience

Journey-Management Teams

A single journey manager might be sufficient for organizations that are small or just getting started with journey management. However, with the variety of skills required to deliver on each competency, for many organizations it makes sense to create a journey-management team including additional specialized roles. Some high-priority specialist roles include

• Data scientists, journey analytics or insights specialists, and UX researchers to deal with the Insights  aspect of journey management
• Service designers, UX designers, content specialists to address the Design and Orchestrate aspects of journey management

Where These Resources Fit in the Organization

One of the first questions that comes up when exploring the possibility of establishing a journey-management practice is: Where would these roles be situated in the organization chart and where would they report? Because organizations are structured differently, there is no single right answer to that question. It could be appropriate for these resources to be aligned with UX, design, marketing, customer experience, or customer success (if these functions already exist). A new function could be established within the organization as well. Below, we discuss some considerations for determining the best fit in your organization.

• Journey management requires a wide scope of influence . Journey managers must connect siloed teams and functional groups. They need a line of sight into all underlying product teams and functional groups. For this reason, it’s best if these roles are situated relatively high in the organizational structure, reporting to someone in leadership with influence over the underlying teams. If existing design and UX resources do not have this scope of influence, it may make sense to establish a new journey-management team or explore alignment with other teams that may already do related work, as discussed in the next bullet.
• Do any existing functions currently conduct related work ? Customer-experience, customer-success, and marketing teams may already do some journey-level research and management. There is, likely, a foundation of technology, and research capabilities that can be leveraged for a user-centered journey-management practice. If that’s the case, you could align the new roles with these groups.

Most organizational leaders now know that good customer experience is not limited to channel and touchpoint excellence, but now involves the journey-level experience. However, many organizations have yet to dedicate resources to the design and management of customer journeys  — often, because they don’t know where to start and how to evaluate return on investment .  

There are a few bits of good news for those organizations that are hesitant:

• More and more data shows strong evidence of return on investment across industries.
• Much of what journey management entails is familiar territory for organizations that already have mature UX practices .
• In the last few years, more and more practical guidance around journey management has been developed.

We recommend that organizations start small and explore this space with just a single dedicated practitioner. Focus your early efforts around what you can do now without significant technical and resource expenses. Track improvements and gains and scale your efforts with more mature solutions over time.

For more about customer-journey management, we offer a full-day training course,  Customer-Journey Management .

Pointillist. 2021. The State of Customer Journey Management and CX Measurement in 2021. Retrieved from http://myjourney.pointillist.com/content-customer-journey-cx-measure-report.html?utm_source=website&utm_medium=resources&utm_campaign=cjxm21-report .

McKinsey & Company. 2016. From Touchpoints to Journeys: Seeing the World as Customers Do. Retrieved from  https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/from-touchpoints-to-journeys-seeing-the-world-as-customers-do .

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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

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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.

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8 best practices to create a successful customer journey map

Customer journey mapping can be a challenge—there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to understanding the customer experience across every single touchpoint.

You need an organized, strategic approach to take the guesswork out of mapping the buyer journey. Apply best practices to ensure your customer journey map helps you better understand your users and what they need.

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This article outlines eight customer journey mapping best practices to help you optimize every stage of the buyer journey—and start building a brilliant product experience (PX) your users will love.

Discover how your customers interact with your website

Use Hotjar's tools to understand how your customers behave—and why—so you can improve their journey.

8 effective customer journey mapping best practices

Put these eight proven strategies into action to create an amazing buyer journey map that helps you elevate the user experience (UX):

1. Set clear goals

Before taking any action, define what you hope to achieve from your customer journey map. Following specific objectives throughout the process of user journey mapping will ensure your map is aligned with your customer and business goals.

Jamie Irwin , director & search marketing expert at Straight Up Search , emphasizes the importance of goal setting when mapping out the customer journey:

The most important part of the process is to define your goals. Before you begin mapping out your customers' journeys, it's important to know what you're trying to achieve. What are your goals? What are your KPIs? Once you have a clear understanding of your objectives, you can start designing a map that will help you meet them.

To set clear, effective goals, start by asking yourself a few questions:  

What do I want to achieve with this customer journey map? Maybe you want to get to know your users better to understand their needs; maybe you want to optimize your website for increased conversions by determining where users drop off in the customer journey.

What are my specific KPI goals? Decide on the most important customer journey metrics to monitor based on your overall customer and business goals: this might be customer satisfaction metrics, conversion rates, or engagement statistics, like time on page, the number of click-throughs , or social media shares. Setting specific KPIs will help you keep track of key customer journey touchpoints and determine the success of your efforts once you start using your map to optimize UX.

2. Understand your customers

Because every user is unique, you need to prioritize doing customer journey map research to understand each distinct buyer persona. 

To develop your customer personas , interview different categories of users with a tool like Lookback . Be sure to diversify your interviews by focusing on several different demographics—like age, location, gender, and socioeconomic status. 

Katerina Kondrenko , content marketing manager for the user persona creation tool UXPressia , warns that “fitting your entire audience into one or two personas means merging the needs of different people into a ball of contradictions.” Avoid this pitfall by speaking to a wide range of users and developing as many diverse personas as you need.

Pro tip: use Hotjar's Ask tools to get a better idea of what your users are looking for. Feedback and Survey tools let you hear firsthand how customers are experiencing their journey on your website—giving you valuable insights to improve UX.

Check out Hotjar’s bank of survey templates to get started. 

Learn what your users think of your website and the customer journey by asking the right questions with Hotjar Surveys.

3. Create a different map for each type of buyer

Once you’ve envisioned your main buyer personas, design a unique map for each of them. Different buyers operate in different ways depending on their roles and demographics—if you try to generalize every user persona under one broad customer journey map, you’ll miss out on the opportunity to create an enjoyable product experience for different buyers.

Maybe some Gen Zers find your brand through social media, and value these touchpoints more before and after purchase, while a sub-group of millennial buyers connect more through paid ads and organic search, and want email followup.

On your website, some sub-groups of users may scroll past the paragraphs of text on your homepage and jump immediately to a more engaging element, like a video or gif—while others want to find written content. Use Hotjar Heatmaps to identify the popular and unpopular elements on your pages, then adjust your website to help all users get to wherever they need to go, no matter what their journey looks like.

4. Collaborate with stakeholders 

Including a range of perspectives from relevant stakeholders is key to successfully creating any customer journey map. 

Jamie Irwin of Straight Up Search emphasizes the importance of “collaborating with stakeholders across your organization to ensure everyone is on the same page when it comes to delivering a great customer experience.”

For effective cross-functional collaboration , consult all teams that have insights about customer interactions and touchpoints, from sales and marketing to operations, design, customer service, and devs. 

Involve high-level decision-makers to get their buy-in on your final customer journey map and any corresponding actions.

Coming up with an actionable plan is only half the battle: you’ll need the approval of high-level management to implement it, and it’s much easier to sell your user mapping initiative at the initial stages than later on by engaging bosses throughout the process.

5. Track every step (including the ones in between) 

When building your map, be thorough: track every single phase a customer moves through in their journey, from the moment they find your product until long after they make their purchase . This could start when they see an ad for your product on search engines, continue to the first time they click on your homepage, extending all the way until after they check out.

Pay attention to touchpoints within customer touchpoints: map out specific touchpoints across your website—for example, from your homepage, landing page, and checkout pages to specific site elements like CTAs, signup forms, and media elements. 

Lisa Schuck , a marketing lead at Airship , reminds us that “aside from defining your touchpoints, you need to track how customers enter and exit each stage of the journey.” 

When you understand how users move between touchpoints, you give buyers the tools they need to move freely through their customer journey, making their experience smoother so they convert more and churn less. Pay attention to entry and exit points for each stage in your map: how do users begin engaging with each touchpoint, and when do they stop?

Pro tip: watch Hotjar Session Recordings and see exactly how potential customers move around key website touchpoints. What steps do they take before buying? Where do users that don’t convert drop off? Use these insights to improve your users’ purchasing experience.

Hotjar Session Recordings let you see your user's product experience as you watch exactly how they navigate your website to improve the customer journey.

6. Measure the outcome

Monitor the customer journey mapping KPIs you set in step one of this article to measure the overall outcome of your users’ journey and understand how different touchpoints impact your users—and conversions. Measure the following KPIs to see how effective your customer journey is at every stage:

Awareness stage: track impressions, reach, SEO ranking, bounce rate , and time on page to check whether customers are understanding the problem you solve and finding your solution.

Consideration stage: track clicks, click-through rate (CTR), engagement rate, and cost-per-click (CPC) to see whether customers are strongly considering your product solutions.

Decision stage: track conversion rate, sales, and cost-per-conversion (CPC) to analyze how customers make decisions about whether to purchase your product or service.

Customer retention: track customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, and customer lifetime value (CLV) to review whether customers are engaging with your product long-term.

Customer advocacy: track referrals and Net Promoter Score ®(NPS) to evaluate whether users speak about your solution to others.

7. Make it cyclical

Most customer journeys aren’t linear and your customer journey map should reflect this.

If you want high customer lifetime value (CLV) and strong brand advocates, mapping out a cyclical customer journey is essential: the journey doesn’t end when a user gets to know your product and makes a purchase.

Returning customers or long-term subscribers won’t return to the awareness stage, but they might hop between the consideration or decision stage several times as they make new conversion decisions. 

To maximize customer satisfaction, and, in turn, loyalty, you need to understand these different pathways to purchase. 

8. Create a living document

A static customer journey map won’t give you real insights into what your buyers need. Customer journey mapping is an ongoing process: review and update your customer journey map as you add new products and features to your business or change any key touchpoints.  

You should also adjust your customer journey map when there are changes in the market or customer behavior. 

Use Hotjar tools to spot changes in how users interact with your business and inform your living map. For example, if you notice a drop in conversions on your website, use Session Recordings to watch your users navigate and identify what’s going wrong so you can address the issue and update your customer journey map if needed.

Also, get customer feedback with Hotjar's Ask tools like Feedback widgets and Surveys to understand whether your map accurately reflects the experience users are having on your site.

Draw on best practices for a great customer journey map 

Though it requires some time and planning, a well-designed customer journey map helps you understand your buyers' behavior and needs so you can optimize their product experience. 

Implementing user-centric best practices will ensure you map out an effective map and turn curious prospects into happy repeat customers.

Use Hotjar tools to understand how your customers behave—and why—so you can improve their journey.

FAQs about customer journey mapping best practices

Why is it important to create a customer journey map.

The benefits of customer journey mapping include increased sales, improved key performance metrics, and happier, more satisfied users. It’s important to create a customer journey map to get a concrete idea of how to improve potential customers’ experience with your product or service at every touchpoint.

When should you implement customer journey mapping best practices?

Consider the best practices that should be used during each of the customer journey mapping stages . Certain best practices, like setting your goals and getting to know your users, should happen before mapping out the customer journey. 

Use best practices like collaborating with stakeholders and tracking the whole journey during the mapping process.  Follow-up practices, like measuring outcomes and keeping a living document, fit in after you create your user journey map.

What happens if you don’t follow customer journey mapping best practices?

If you don't follow customer journey mapping best practices, you’ll end up with a customer journey map that doesn’t give you the helpful insights it otherwise could.  

Plus, you may miss key steps in the mapping process, fail to keep all relevant stakeholders involved, and be unable to measure the success of the customer journey— which will result in unhappy customers, low customer retention, and overall decreased performance.

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CJM tips and how-tos

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What is a Product Journey Map and How to Build One?

11 min read

A product journey map is a key part of the product development and design process as it serves as a peek into how your users see and experience your product or service.

It also enhances the overall product experience and improves chances of customers reaching the activation then retention stages.

In this article, we’ll cover what a product journey map is, why you need it, and how to build one.

Let’s get started!

• Product journey maps are a representation of customer interactions with your product or service.
• It’s not the same as creating customer journey maps which are a representation of the customer journey and interactions with your business across each stage of the buying process.
• Journey mapping is important because it helps to identify customer pain points, gives you a feel of the customer’s state while using your product, and lets you uncover unique perspectives and potential solutions to improving it.
• There are 6 types of journey maps: current state, future state maps, day in the life, service blueprint, empty, and experience maps.
• You can build user journey maps using tools such as Miro, Lucidcharts, Smaply, etc.

What is a product journey map?

A product journey map is a blueprint of a user’s interactions within your product. It is a visual representation of every behavior and possible step or action the user takes while using your product.

It consists of everything a user does in the app. From signing up to activation, to how they experience and navigate your entire product and use specific features.

Product journey map vs customer journey map

A product map (also called a user journey map) covers all interactions a user has with your product and is used in UX and product development, while a customer journey map covers all interaction a user has with your brand and product across multiple channels, and platforms, even before the purchase, and is mostly used in marketing and sales.

With that being said, customer journey maps include your marketing efforts and MQLs and leads, while the former focuses on current users already using your product.

Before you can create a customer journey map, you have to decide on your company goal for the finished map. This will then determine which type of journey map you need to build to get the best results.

Here are the six types of journey maps product managers use to identify opportunities and create a better user experience.

Current state maps

Current state maps are the most common types of journey maps. They take a look at how your current users interact with your product right now. This map shows you what’s working today and what’s not in your product so you know what to improve.

Future state maps

Future state maps are an assumption or expectation of how users will navigate through and interact with your product in the future. This is built after the errors/blocks in your current state map have been fixed.

The future state map can also be used to set and track goals you hope to achieve with your improved product.

Service blueprint

A service blueprint template tracks customers’ experience with employees and other parts of your company. This helps improve the interaction between the business and customers.

Day in the life

Day in the life maps is a bigger picture of your user as a whole person, not just as a user of your tool. This looks into the customer’s emotions, behaviors, activities, and other things that make them who they are.

While this type of journey mapping may not directly involve your product, it helps you get into your user personas’ heads and design products and experiences that fit into their lifestyles.

Empathy maps

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person, in this case, the user. It’s an important skill for building products people love.

An empathy map, therefore, is a visual representation of how the user sees your product from their point of view. It doesn’t just map product interactions, it takes into consideration their feelings and struggles while using it. Empathy maps are built by running user research or interviews, and are usually divided into four parts to record:

• What the user says about your product and their experience with it
• What the user thinks when using the product.
• What they feel when using it
• What they do and actions/behaviors they display while using it

Each section gives you a better understanding of the user, what’s a problem to them, and exactly how to improve their experience.

Experience maps

A good or bad experience isn’t just a function of your product design or features. Every member of your product team is a part of the customer’s experience . So, experience maps are a visual slate of users’ experience with the different parts or touchpoints of your product during a given period.

To draw up an accurate experience map, you must first acknowledge the goal of the user then look at the paths taken to achieve that and their experience all through. Did it take longer than expected? How easy was it for them to get support? How many attempts did it take for them to get a task completed?

This particular map helps you discover and fix the hiccups in your customer journey and product flow.

Benefits of user and customer journey mapping?

Mapping customer experience or interaction with your product across the different stages of their journey can provide insights that could help with product development and improvement.

In other words, creating a customer journey map is a better way to develop products because it relies on how your user/customer base is experiencing your service. Here are a few other benefits.

Provide transparency across all teams involved in the development of your product

User and customer journey mapping look at the user’s interactions with your product (and brand as a whole), so the results you get from doing this can provide insight into how each team works at each stage of the customer’s journey. And also show you at what points improvements need to be made.

It helps cross-functional teams sync their actions of working towards the same business goal of improving customer experience. Instead of guessing/assuming, it shows the marketing team how their marketing efforts are received and which channels work best, the sales team gets insight into what kind of leads convert best, and the product team sees what parts of the product experience encourage users to move along their journey and where the friction points lie.

Drive product engagement and adoption

Customer journey mapping reveals what parts of your product work smoothly and which may be stalling users from progressing in their journey.

It could be a long and boring onboarding flow that keeps users from reaching activation so they leave. It could also be features that users are ignoring even though you know it’s important to their use case. Mapping how users use such a feature can show you how they experience it, and why they overlook it – it may be hard to find, they don’t see immediate value, hard to use, etc. This lets you know what needs to be done to increase product/feature engagement and adoption.

If you have a long-expected future, you can also use in-app announcements to notify users of new features.

Know which KPIs to track and why

There are a lot of KPIs or metrics to track in product marketing, so understanding how users see and experience your product can help you discover the most important ones to focus on right now. The customer journey mapping process helps you focus your efforts on what’s most important and remove friction points with in-app guidance.

A customer journey mapping examples could be of your users dropping off before reaching the activation stage. That could be your sign to focus on monitoring and improving onboarding flow and primary activation. Using a checklist, you can drive users to the activation point in their journey where they experience the value of the product.

How to create a product journey map?

Now you know what a product journey map is, and why you need it, the next thing is figuring out how to build one. The step-by-step process is what this section will cover.

#1 – Where to get data for your product journey map

The first thing to do is work out where the information you want to analyze will come from. You have two options:

Firstly, if you’re starting from scratch, the best way to get data is from user interviews.

This involves getting information directly from your users to understand how they interact with your product.

From user interviews, you can easily trace/map out how users see your product from their point of view. You can get a clear vision into their exact sentiments about several parts of the product and how easy or difficult it is for them to fulfill the desired action or achieve their goals.

The information you get here serves as a starting point. Since customer journeys aren’t static, your product map will need continuous adjustments as you move along.

Secondly, if you already have data from existing users you can:

• use product analytics tools to track in-app user behavior, user flow, friction points, etc
• Track user sentiments using in-app surveys like net promoter score (NPS) , customer satisfaction score (CSAT) , and customer effort score (CES) .
• Ask your sales and customer success/support teams for recurring customer queries, bugs, and common words or quotes. These give you a better understanding of users’ pain points and needs.

Check out this video on The What and Why of Continuous Discovery from Teresa Torres, author, Speaker, and Product Management Coach at ProductTalk.

#2 – Set your target

By identifying what goal you hope to achieve from your user journey maps, it’ll be easier to create one.

For example:

• Do you want to improve the user’s experience of your product? You’ll need a user journey map that highlights your friction points and tracks user behavior of those who churned out of your product.
• Or do you want to improve a specific feature ? An experience map of customer interaction with that feature will work best here to show how they experience it. From struggle points to the success areas.
• Looking to improve your product and make it more useful for your target user persona? A day in the life map of your target user can help you identify gaps and opportunities you can include in your product, because you’ll be able to see them as people, not just users of your product.

#3 – Define your user persona

Once you identify your goals and the type of user journey map you’ll be creating, the next step is to define your target user personas for the map.

By picking the necessary user personas on which your journey maps will focus, you’ll increase your chances of getting better results. So if your goal is to improve a specific feature, your target persona should be the users who use such feature.

Here’s an example of a Product Manager persona for Userpilot’s product adoption tool. It gives insight into their pain points, typical jobs to be done, the type of company they work for, and what they stand to gain from a tool like Userpilot.

#4 – Which journey stages are you mapping?

Your set objective will determine what stages of the user journey to map.

For example, if your goal is to improve onboarding flow and increase activation rates, your journey map will have to focus on only the primary onboarding stage of the user’s journey. This is because that’s the only part with influence on your goal.

#5 – Map out the key milestones in your product journey

Milestones are key points in the user’s journey through your product. They usually signify the end of a goal the user has achieved and are useful for tracking user progression.

Say your product is a meeting scheduling tool. There are several things your users have to do to achieve their goal.

• Sync calendar
• Create a meeting
• Share link.

If they don’t go through these steps they can’t experience your product’s benefit. But by completing the steps and achieving their goal of a scheduled meeting, they’ve reached one milestone in their journey.

Assigning milestones in your product journey map will give you insight into how the customer interacts with your product and if they’re advancing in their journey or not. Some examples of milestones include:

• Reaching the Aha moment
• Reaching the activation point
• Becoming an advanced user

Hint: translate those milestones into goals and track when users complete them using a product adoption tool like  Userpilot

#6 – Add relevant touchpoints to your product journey map

Using the meeting scheduling tool example from above, a milestone is a goal achieved by successfully scheduling your meeting. While the touchpoints in this case are all the steps you take to accomplish this.

The milestone is the fully baked cake, while the touchpoints are all the steps that went into baking it.

Touchpoints are a necessary addition to your product journey map because they show you how users navigate them to achieve their goals. Onboarding checklists are a great way to get users to each touchpoint in your product.

There are many tools companies use to create journey maps. Here are the best 6:

• UXPressia : their main focus is helping you improve customer experiences with your product. Asides from being a dedicated product journey mapping tool with several templates, you can also use this tool for your company employee onboarding. They also offer integrations with Slack and the design tool Marvel.
• Miro : this is one of the popular product journey map tools. With access to many preloaded templates, an easy UI, and a dedicated focus on product education which makes it super easy for anyone to use.
• LucidChart : If you use Google sheets, you may want to go with this tool because LucidChart integrates smoothly with it.
• Conceptboard : this is a recommended tool for remote teams. With this tool, you and your team can easily collaborate on creating product journey maps regardless of location.
• Smaply : With Smaply you can run multiple product journey maps across multiple roles and personas. This helps you compare and contrast and easily discover pain points in the journey flow.
• FlowMapp : this is a UX tool that helps you visualize various types of flow maps such as site maps and product journey maps.

The success of your product lies in how much your users love and value it. If they see the value, they stay and you grow. If they don’t, they leave.

Product journey maps reveal how users experience your product. They show you the user’s pain point with your product and how you can fix that to improve their experience.

Want to build product experiences code-free? Book a demo call with our team and get started!

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Customer Journey Touch Points for Product Managers

Product management leaders will view every discussion, planning session, and milestone with the customer journey touch points in mind. A well-aligned corporate culture, emphasizing the customer at every interaction, will drive customer loyalty.

By Laurie Harvey

Laurie is a leader with more than 20 years of experience skilled in turning ideas into unprecedented results.

PREVIOUSLY AT

Introduction

This article looks at customer journey touch points from a product management (PdM) perspective. It assumes that the investment in the product/service has been approved and there is a business commitment to getting it to market. This is not an exhaustive list of all the checklist items that a PdM needs to consider, but rather an approach to support a successful customer-focused business.

A well-organized PdM will have a plan for coordinating with the entire organization as they plan their go-to-market strategy. They will look at the big picture and ask hard questions. Their skills in communicating, negotiating, and educating will be well exercised as they work with sister organizations to make sure their customers enjoy a stress-free, positive relationship with the company.

A PdM decision should always evaluate customer risk and reward. “Will a customer leave us if I don’t do this thing?” “Will I win more customers faster if I make this choice?” “Will our risks be mitigated if we prioritize this ?” PdMs make decisions that provide the best outcome.

Refer to the product management customer journey touch points to tease out the detailed plan, create new approaches, get creative, and gain supporters. Walk through customer journey touch point examples by asking the “how” questions. Tease out the gaps to resolve them before they become escalations.

What Are Customer Journey Touch Points?

Customer journey touch points start from the very second that a potential customer hears about the product. The job, as an expert PdM, is to ensure that from that first second, the customer relationship creates a positive outcome.

When you think about a customer journey cycle, consider it a company’s smooth interactions with a potential customer as the measure of preparedness. Daily decisions concerning how to represent each product will be required, and it should be continuously reviewed for changes and exceptions.

Customers Need to Find Out About It

PdMs need to establish a framework for customers to find out about a solution. Some of the touch points below will help get this done.

Marketing is a critical partner. Marketing turns vision into the values that customers are looking for . They will help move from talking about cool functions and features to describing how amazing technology has business value–changing the conversation from bits and bytes to dollars and cents.

Look to the marketing team for supporting the key go-to-market activities including website, collaterals, social platforms, launches, user groups, webinars, industry events, road shows, giveaways, advisory boards, branding, and naming. Work with marketing on sales enablement in preparation of a product launch. If the go-to-market approach leverages channels, then the channel programs need to be ramped up.

Sales enablement is a valuable investment of time for a PdM. The more informed a sales organization is, the more productive they will be. Invest time with marketing to ensure sales enablement is comprehensive. Test processes and procedures for how to take a prospect and turn them into a sale.

With a focus on lead generation, brand positioning, market positioning, and customer conversion, PdMs have the opportunity to help marketing position products for success and set the right expectations.

Project Management

The project management role varies in different business, but as a critical gatekeeper, the operational day-to-day business operations must be taken care of. Project management should coordinate with responsible owners to help drive the release process, including documentation, roadmaps, stock keeping units (SKUs), verifying the handling of order processing, supporting the deal desk, documenting pricing models , and supporting pricing exceptions. A strong project manager has the unique skill of identifying gaps before they become sinkholes.

Engineering and Quality Assurance

Aside from delivering a high-quality product to market, the PdM needs to consider the “what if” scenarios. Is the code protected; is it ensured for high availability and planned for disaster recovery? Is the data protected; is there a proper data management policy in place; are the best practices of security policies applied? Is the security appropriate, and does it meet regulatory requirements? If the solution includes elements from other vendors, what happens if that vendor fails? Is there a backup vendor?

During the early phases of the customer journey touch points , engineering may be asked to support a demo environment. As the relationship progresses, a proof of concept (PoC) or minimum viable product (MVP) may also be requested. Prepare the engineering team to work closely with customers to incorporate the appropriate decisions, get useful feedback and validate the quality and performance of the MVP.

PdMs must work with legal to protect the company at every juncture of the customer journey. Some areas to review include intellectual property rights (IPR) protections/patents, end-user license agreement (EULA) or subscription service agreements, copyrights, trademarks, brands, and names.

If there are third-party vendors that contribute to a solution, is there an escrow arrangement established? PdMs will want to coordinate with the deal desk/sales and legal to make sure that the customer and channel contracts are appropriately scoped to support the product and the business models.

Customers Need to Be Able to Buy It

When the company is starting to get the word out it’s time to examine and test the buying processes. “Time to close” and “time to revenues” are critical key performance indicators (KPIs) to consider and explore how you can improve. Onboarding (getting a customer to use a solution) may take more than just pricing it in a catalog on the website. Review and test the pricing models, the contracting models, the invoicing models, the provisioning methods and the training models.

Marketing should be part of your team for the early adopter programs (EAPs), proof of concepts (POCs), and minimal viable product (MVP) programs with regular feedback and an open line of communications, rewards, and incentives.

It is during this phase that PdM and marketing are testing the messaging and evaluating the prospect’s responses to a product. Success at this stage is critical to generating qualified leads and building a sales funnel.

What needs to be in place to move a customer from a qualified prospect to a sale? Beyond sales enablement, what else is required? Some considerations that should be discussed may include App Store or online catalog integration, calls to action on the website, partner programs, market development funding (MDF) for partners, launch incentives, migration plans, polishing of customer-facing materials, and other functions that will simplify the sales closing functions.

Sales become involved at this stage as prospects become qualified prospects. In preparation for a sale, PdMs should walk through the sales process from that first interaction to delivery and onboarding. Identify any sales incentives, customer or sales promotions. Triple check that the sales team are ready and able, contracts available, channels (if appropriate) and routes-to-market understood.

It’s not unusual for a company to have a prioritized list of strategic accounts (sometimes referred to as a VIP or LightHouse account list). Align the product management efforts with the strategic account priorities to focus energies in the specific areas that align with the priorities of the sales organizations. On a weekly call, ask the question, “ What can product management do to help you close this deal this week?” Commit and follow up to create a close relationship with the sales organization. Closing deals will be the foundation for success.

Systems Engineering

The Systems Engineering team are often a buffer for PdMs. They should be the direct interaction point with the technical teams from your customer. Ensure that they are ready with the training, processes, and tools to support demos, POCs, and MVPs.

In many organizations, the training organization may be associated with the systems engineering teams. Review that they are ready with the customer-facing training programs.

Manufacturing

PdMs must forecast carefully to ensure that the company can deliver against its orders when there are physical products involved. Early and constant communications, coordinating with sales and the systems engineering teams to predict volumes well ahead of time, is a critical success factor.

Finance/Operations

Work with your project managers to walk through the buying processes and “follow the money” in your product-customer journey analysis. Ensure that the order processing is linked in with the provisioning and software license enablement. What about the need for license keys? Are there downstream royalties that must be managed? What is the impact and action plan for payment delays, returns, replacements, upgrades? How are commissions handled? Does the software track the right metrics for financial reporting? How are bookings and revenues calculated?

With a solid understanding of the financial aspects, PdMs can make more effective decisions about pricing, competitive positioning, and deal management, while ensuring that the company is positioned for sales and growth.

Test out every customer contract negotiating scenario. Having these discussions with sales, deal desk and legal ahead of time will dramatically reduce the last-minute stress of contract negotiations when dealing with quarterly or annual deadlines. Ask what contract issues are going to be show-stoppers, and what are the negotiating tactics? Often these discussions will surround policies for service level agreements (SLAs), support, warranties or guarantees and liabilities.

Customers Need to Be Able to Use It – Fix It

The contract is signed. This is just a kickoff for gaining adoption. Successful products will be able to demonstrate growth in usage, creating ongoing value for a customer. Product managers must consider the reports and metrics that will provide continuous feedback to the customer and demonstrate that they’ve made a good investment.

There will be unhappy customers. Even if everyone has done everything perfectly, customers will want more, or maybe they did not have the right expectations. Discuss the planning and processes that need to be in place to ensure the offering(s) work, and that the reputation of the company is protected. Work with marketing and sales to set appropriate customer expectations at every step of the customer journey.

The brand image of the company is core to the success of marketing. Work with the marketing organization to explore replacement / upsell programs, customer incentives, documenting and promoting customer wins (or recovery wins). Coordinate with them for analysts relations (AR) and public relations (PR). If market share and market positioning are part of your corporate goals, plan these in the go-to-market strategy.

Network/Cloud Operations

PdMs should talk through the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will drive your SLAs, manage and advertise uptime, report outages as required, and accelerate onboarding, upgrades, and migrations. Define if or how you will publicize outages while protecting your company brand.

PdMs should coordinate with Support to be prepared and responsive in managing SLAs, help desk response times, working with the user community, and driving customer training. Support will be a high-value contributor to the new feature request (NFR) process and the backlog.

Customer Success

An emerging model for most long-term customer relationships – prevalent in subscription services, is the customer success program. Usually a billable service, this role encompasses driving adoption of the offering to extend the customer lifetime value (CLV). If “value” (more revenues, reduced costs, etc.) has been identified as part of the sales process, a customer success team should be able to track progress towards that value and catch any lack of progress before the customer churns. They will also be a key contributor to the NFR pool for future development.

Engineering

PdMs should review the support escalation processes with engineering to prioritize fixes, solve issues, and meet commitments and SLAs.

Customers for Life—Learn More, Buy More

It’s a common premise that it costs 6 times less to keep or grow an existing customer than to acquire a new customer. Explore how the different teams can extend the relationship with the customer to drive the CLV.

PdMs need to be thinking years ahead. Create short- and long-term roadmaps, and create a strong vision that your customers can share in. Always look for the appropriate pricing and business models and stay competitive, or, better yet, lead the market with innovative solutions that solve customer problems. Create a differentiable value.

Marketing has a strong role in the CLV. Some common tactics for extending customer relationships include customer conferences, webinars, seminars, training, customer advisory boards, social networking blogs, customer communities, and awards. Managing the net promoter score (NPS) is a common gauge for customer satisfaction.

Customers generally want to contribute/drive product direction. The Support organization can help with managing NFR inputs, monitor and self-heal against SLAs, and track and report “time to fix.”

The customer success team often has the strongest relationship with the customer. PdMs should partner closely with customer success in developing roadmaps, performing market research , and validating assumptions.

Network and Cloud Operations

Encourage marketing to work with the network and cloud operations teams to market strong results. Track volumes of customers, track volumes of transactions, track performance uptimes and promote the strength of the offerings.

PdMs should also coordinate with engineering and the network and cloud operations teams to manage gross margins. A goal of continuous improvement will help to drive profitability.

Whether it’s inside or outside sales, PdMs should constantly explore how to optimize revenues, sell more, sell faster, and upsell to more comprehensive solutions.

Bring systems engineering together with customer success to help drive the roadmap, increase usage of your product, effectively use more of the features, and help customers to buy more products.

There is no single approach to getting product management right. It is a unique role, bridging technology with the business needs of the customer. Everyone in the company has a role in supporting the positive relationship between the customer and the company. Product management needs to take a lead in discussing the customer journey touch points with each person in the company. Ask how they fit. Ask what they need from product management to make the customer journey a positive experience for each and every customer. You’ll be surprised at the support you get when you ask.

Further Reading on the Toptal Blog:

• Growth Product Management: What You Need to Know
• Product Management Empowered by the Entrepreneurial Mindset
• Learning to Learn: 5 Tips to Master Any Product Management Domain
• Customer Journey Maps: What They Are and How to Build One
• Getting Started in AI Product Management
• HiPPOs and the Product Roadmap: How to Manage Senior Stakeholder Intervention
• 5 Signs Your Product Strategy Is Broken—and How Designers Can Help Fix It
• Creating Success: A Guide to Product Manager KPIs
• 5 Common Mistakes in Requirements Gathering

Understanding the basics

What is meant by customer journey.

Customer journey references any point of time that a prospect or customer engages in learning about, reading, connecting to, or calling the company to achieve a purpose.

Why is reviewing the customer journey important?

Product Managers need to influence their entire company to understand why they are being asked to help. Putting decisions in the perspective of the customer journey touch points will help with understanding and commitment from the team.

What are some examples of customer journey touch points?

Customer journey touchpoints may include a help desk request, a purchase, a request for pricing, or request for proposal. In early stages, it may just be a search of the corporate website, looking for specific product information.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a graphical representation of the points in time that a customer will interact with a system or a company. It will describe the inputs and outcomes of the “conversation.”

What are the four phases of a customer journey?

Phase 1 describes interactions with a prospect to find out about your product. Phase 2 will describe the conversion from prospect to customer touchpoints. Phase 3 will onboard the customer. Phase 4 will manage or upsell the customer.

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Laurie Harvey

Port St. Lucie, FL, United States

Member since October 26, 2018

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The complete guide to customer journey stages.

12 min read If you want to turn a potential customer into a lifetime one, you’ll need to get to know every step of the entire customer journey. Here’s why the secret to customer retention lies in knowing how to fine-tune your sales funnel…

What is the customer journey?

What do we actually mean when we talk about the customer journey? Well, the simplest way to think about it is by comparing it to any other journey: a destination in mind, a starting point, and steps to take along the way.

In this case, the destination is not only to make a purchase but to have a great experience with your product or service – sometimes by interacting with aftersale customer support channels – and become a loyal customer who buys again.

And, just like how you can’t arrive at your vacation resort before you’ve done you’ve found out about it, the customer journey starts with steps to do with discovery, research, understanding, and comparison, before moving on to the buying process.

“Maximizing satisfaction with customer journeys has the potential not only to increase customer satisfaction by 20% but also lift revenue up by 15% while lowering the cost of serving customers by as much as 20%”

– McKinsey, The Three Cs of Customer Satisfaction

In short, the customer journey is the path taken by your target audience toward becoming loyal customers. So it’s really important to understand – both in terms of what each step entails and how you can improve each one to provide a maximally impressive and enjoyable experience.

Every customer journey will be different, after all, so getting to grips with the nuances of each customer journey stage is key to removing obstacles from in front of your potential and existing customers’ feet.

Free Course: Customer Journey Management & Improvement

What are the essential customer journey stages?

While many companies will put their own spin on the exact naming of the customer journey stages, the most widely-recognized naming convention is as follows:

• Consideration

These steps are often then sub-categorized into three parts:

• Sale/Purchase

It’s important to understand every part of the puzzle, so let’s look at each sub-category and stage in turn, from the awareness and consideration stage, right through to advocacy:

Customer journey: Pre-sale

In the pre-sale phase, potential customers learn about products, evaluate their needs, make comparisons, and soak up information.

Awareness stage

In the awareness stage, your potential customer becomes aware of a company, product, or service. This might be passive – in that they’re served an ad online, on TV, or when out and about – or active in that they have a need and are searching for a solution. For example, if a customer needs car insurance, they’ll begin searching for providers.

Consideration stage

In the consideration stage, the customer has been made aware of several possible solutions for their particular need and starts doing research to compare them. That might mean looking at reviews or what others are saying on social media, as well as absorbing info on product specs and features on companies’ own channels. They’re receptive to information that can help them make the best decision.

Customer journey: Sale

The sale phase is short but pivotal: it’s when the crucial decision on which option to go with has been made.

Decision stage

The customer has all the information they need on the various options available to them, and they make a purchase. This can be something that’s taken a long time to decide upon, like buying a new computer, or it can be as quick as quickly scouring the different kinds of bread available in the supermarket before picking the one they want.

Customer journey: Post-sale

Post-sale is a really important part of the puzzle because it’s where loyal customers , who come back time and again, are won or lost.

Retention stage

The retention stage of the customer journey is where you do whatever you can to help leave a lasting, positive impression on the customer, and entice them to purchase more. That means offering best-in-class customer support if they have any issues, but it also means being proactive with follow-up communications that offer personalized offers, information on new products, and rewards for loyalty.

Advocacy stage

If you nail the retention phase, you’ll have yourself a customer who not only wants to keep buying from you but will also advocate on your behalf. Here, the customer will become one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal, in that they’ll actively recommend you to their friends, family, followers, and colleagues.

What’s the difference between the customer journey and the buyer’s journey?

Great question; the two are similar, but not exactly the same. The buyer’s journey is a shorter, three-step process that describes the steps taken to make a purchase. So that’s awareness , consideration, and decision . That’s where things stop, however. The buyer’s journey doesn’t take into account the strategies you’ll use to keep the customer after a purchase has been made.

Why are the customer journey stages important?

The short answer? The customer journey is what shapes your entire business. It’s the method by which you attract and inform customers, how you convince them to purchase from you, and what you do to ensure they’re left feeling positive about every interaction.

Why this matters is that the journey is, in a way, cyclical. Customers who’ve had a smooth ride all the way through their individual journeys are more likely to stay with you, and that can have a massive effect on your operational metrics.

It’s up to five times more expensive to attract a new customer than it is to keep an existing customer, but even besides that: satisfied customers become loyal customers , and customer loyalty reduces churn at the same time as increasing profits .

So companies looking to really make an impact on the market need to think beyond simply attracting potential customers with impressive marketing, and more about the journey as a whole – where the retention and advocacy stages are equally important.

After all, 81% of US and UK consumers trust product advice from friends and family over brand messaging, and 59% of American consumers say that once they’re loyal to a brand, they’re loyal to it for life.

Importantly, to understand the customer journey as a whole is to understand its individual stages, recognize what works, and find things that could be improved to make it a more seamless experience. Because when you do that, you’ll be improving every part of your business proposition that matters.

How can you improve each customer journey stage?

Ok, so this whole customer journey thing is pretty important. Understanding the customer journey phases and how they relate to the overall customer experience is how you encourage customers to stick around and spread the news via word of mouth.

But how do you ensure every part of the journey is performing as it should? Here are some practical strategies to help each customer journey stage sing…

1. Perform customer journey mapping

A customer journey map takes all of the established customer journey stages and attempts to plot how actual target audience personas might travel along them. That means using a mix of data and intuition to map out a range of journeys that utilize a range of touch points along the way.

One customer journey map, for example, might start with a TV ad, then utilize social media and third-party review sites during the consideration stage, before purchasing online and then contacting customer support about you your delivery service. And then, finally, that customer may be served a discount code for a future purchase. That’s just one example.

Customer journey mapping is really about building a myriad of those journeys that are informed by everything you know about how customers interact with you – and then using those maps to discover weaker areas of the journey.

2. Listen like you mean it

The key to building better customer journeys is listening to what customers are saying. Getting feedbac k from every stage of the journey allows you to build a strong, all-encompassing view of what’s happening from those that are experiencing it.

Maybe there’s an issue with the customer sign-up experience, for example. Or maybe the number advertised to contact for a demo doesn’t work. Or maybe you have a customer service agent in need of coaching, who only makes the issue worse. By listening, you’ll understand your customers’ issues and be able to fix them at the source. That customer service agent, for example, may just feel disempowered and unsupported, and in need of the right tools to help them perform better. Fixing that will help to optimize a key stage in the customer journey.

The key is to listen at every stage, and we can do that by employing the right technology at the right customer journey stages.

Customer surveys, for instance, can help you understand what went wrong from the people who’re willing to provide that feedback, but conversational analytics and AI solutions can automatically build insights out of all the structured and unstructured conversational data your customers are creating every time they reach out, or tweet, or leave a review on a third party website.

3. Get personal

The other side of the ‘listening’ equation is that it’s worth remembering that each and every customer’s journey is different – so treating them with a blanket approach won’t necessarily make anything better for them.

The trick instead is to use the tools available to you to build out a personalized view of every customer journey, customer journey stage, and customer engagemen t, and find common solutions.

Qualtrics Experience iD , for example, is an intelligent system that builds customer profiles that are unique to them and can identify through AI, natural language processing , and past interactions what’s not working – and what needs fixing.

On an individual basis, that will help turn each customer into an advocate. But as a whole, you’ll learn about experience gaps that are common to many journeys.

Listening to and understanding the customer experience at each customer journey stage is key to ensuring customers are satisfied and remain loyal on a huge scale.

It’s how you create 1:1 experiences, because, while an issue for one person might be an issue for many others, by fixing it quickly you can minimize the impact it might have on future customers who’re right at the start of their journey.

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Related resources

Customer Journey

Buyer's Journey 16 min read

Customer journey analytics 13 min read, how to create a customer journey map 22 min read, b2b customer journey 13 min read, customer interactions 11 min read, consumer decision journey 14 min read, customer journey orchestration 12 min read, request demo.

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Illustrating the user experience with customer journey maps

To truly build great products, you need to understand the thought process of customers before and after they purchase from you. However, sometimes product managers oversimplify this by assuming that you only need to know what the user wants/needs while they’re interacting with the product. The reality is it’s vital to have information that captures before, during, and after.

To do this, you’ll need to create a customer journey map. In this article, you’ll learn what a customer journey map is, what they’re useful for, and read examples of ones in practice.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a flowchart that depicts the various stops that customers make before, during, and after purchasing.

Product teams can refer to their customer journey maps for various reasons. In fact, different roles have different uses for them — product designers can use them to identify and then solve customer/user problems, UX designers can use them to design smooth customer/user experiences, marketers can use them to plan effective marketing campaigns, and so on.

Real-life examples of customer journey maps

To better understand how you can use customer journey maps, as well as what you can gain from them, let’s take a look at some real-life examples from successful companies. While reading through these, try to make a mental note of things that you see that might be effective for your own product. Each case is specific, so seeing a number of different ones should illustrate some of the key similarities and differences.

My favorite customer journey map example is from Spotify. Although it doesn’t depict the entire customer journey like most customer journey maps do, it’s clean and easy to understand. The objective was to increase the number of users sharing music using Spotify, thus the purpose of the customer journey map was to learn where in the customer journey users would want to be able to do so.

Let’s break it down:

Most customer journey maps are segmented into stages, where each stage encapsulates a moment in the journey where customers do something significant. For example, the moment at which customers become aware of the brand or product might be labeled, “awareness stage.”

Next, what customers actually do at each stage is clearly described. This part is typically fueled by different types of research (e.g., the awareness stage might be fueled by a “Where did you first hear about us?” question in a survey). This particular customer journey map would’ve been fueled by session recordings exclusively since it focuses on what customers do on an app.

After that, customer journey maps usually declare the goals/expectations of customers. In this example, this has been replaced with their thoughts. Goals/expectations reveal intent whereas thoughts reveal needs, wants, outcomes, solutions, and other insights. Thoughts are useful but too vague by themselves — I recommend displaying both!

At this point it doesn’t really matter what comes next, but Spotify has opted to display the touchpoints. Touchpoints are where the steps of a stage take place. On this journey, most of the steps take place on the Spotify mobile app while a few others take place on WhatsApp and Messages.

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Touchpoints are usually labeled or described (at the awareness stage you might even see an intangible “word of mouth” touchpoint), but since customers only touch down on apps on this journey, Spotify has chosen to display its app icons.

In addition, Spotify has combined the touchpoints with the ‘actors’ involved in them, providing an even clearer image of what’s happening at each stage. Displaying the actors isn’t as popular as it once was, but they’re nice to have if they don’t make the customer journey map look cluttered.

Other things that you might see on a customer journey map include general insights for added context, the customer emotions of each stage, the business objectives of each stage and any KPIs (key performance indicators) used to track them, any opportunities/plans to improve the customer experience of a stage, and NPSs (net promoter scores).

The most obvious thing about this customer journey map after having observed the Spotify customer journey map is that it’s not organized like a table. This layout makes it harder to pinpoint specific snippets of information:

To add to the cognitive overload there are a few visual cues that are meant to symbolize something, but it’s not immediately clear what. This doesn’t mean that you should avoid visual cues, just that they need to be clear. Putting that aside though, showing where customers interact with customer service representatives, drop off, come to a halt, and skip stages is a nice touch and does present a richer story.

However, what’s missing from the story is the prologue and epilogue — how do they become aware of the product, what are their motivations for investigating it, and what do they feel and think after using it? For B2B (Business-to-Business) products where the customer isn’t necessarily a user, knowing what happens before and after can be even more critical than knowing what happens during.

To wrap this one up on a positive note though, I like that TurboTax displays the customer journey map’s NPS (that’s the number in the top-right corner). A customer journey map’s NPS represents how likely customers are to recommend the brand to friends, family, or colleagues based on the journey in question.

Right away you’ll see that some stages (e.g., “problem identification” and “problem analysis”) are categorized by an overarching stage (“define need— one to two weeks” in this case). This creates additional reference points and provides more clarity:

This particular example also specifies the timeframe of each “superstage,” since the customer journey takes place over several weeks. Keep in mind that your customer journey map might need something that no other or few other customer journey maps have.

“Relevance” refers to how important each stage is. Now I know what you’re thinking, shouldn’t they all be important? Well with a good customer experience the answer is yes, but to achieve that you’d first need to improve or even remove stages with low-to-medium relevance, and the first step towards doing that is identifying them.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that most customer journey maps depict the customer emotions using emojis, which is often the clearest way to do so. However, considering a retirement home for one’s parents can be a very emotional process not easily summarized by emojis, which is why this customer journey map explicitly puts the customer’s “thoughts” and “feelings” into words. You can also use words and emojis when it feels right to do so, like Spotify.

A bit further down on the customer journey map you’ll see “tactics”, which are basically the business objectives of each stage. It’s not enough to keep customers flowing, they must be converting or on their way to converting.

Rail Europe

Rail Europe’s customer journey map is fairly ordinary, but what it includes before and after the actual map is noteworthy. At the top (so before the map) you’ll see “guiding principles” — these are essentially general insights for added context. At the bottom it lists “opportunities” for improvement, prompting investigation and thus another iteration of the customer journey map. These provide stakeholders with more of the story as they jump into the map and also opportunities to improve the story as they finish up with it:

Without these, you risk the customer journey map becoming a static resource that goes out of date.

Key takeaways

As you can see, customer journey maps provide a useful way of visually displaying the interactions a user has with your product. What works for one product doesn’t necessarily work for another, so it’s important to tailor your map to the goals that you have.

Is there a particular customer journey map that stands out to you? Or do you have a different example that you’d like to share? If so, please do so in the comment section below, and thanks for reading!

Featured image source: IconScout

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What is the Customer Journey: A Guide

Understanding what is the customer journey is important in today’s business landscape, where customer-centric strategies drive market success. A customer journey includes every interaction a customer has with a brand, from initial awareness to post-purchase behavior.

This blog post will explore the various facets of customer journeys, from their definition to their strategic importance, and how businesses can effectively map and analyze these journeys to improve customer interactions.

What is the Customer Journey?

The customer journey is a comprehensive map of all touchpoints a customer encounters with your brand. Unlike traditional sales processes, which often focus on short-term transactions, customer journeys provide a holistic view of the customer’s experience, emphasizing long-term engagement and satisfaction.

In industries ranging from retail to software, understanding the customer journey allows companies to tailor their strategies to meet customer needs more effectively. This is crucial in today’s digital age where customer expectations are higher than ever.

By understanding the customer journey, businesses can create more personalized, seamless experiences that drive satisfaction and loyalty. Learn more about customer journey maps , which are effective tools to visualize the path customers take, highlighting areas for improvement and opportunities to enhance engagement.

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Customer Journey Vs. Buyer Journey: Understanding the Differences

Companies use marketing roadmaps to plan buyer journey touchpoints and employ detailed marketing plans to develop both acquisition and retention strategies. Differentiating between customer and buyer journeys allows for more effective allocation of marketing resources and better alignment of strategies with business goals. It helps in understanding how to attract customers and keep them engaged and satisfied over time.

Phases of the Customer Journey

Understanding each phase of the customer journey is crucial for businesses aiming to enhance customer experience and boost retention. Let’s delve into each phase, highlighting key strategies and tools that can aid in this process.

This is the initial stage where potential customers first come into contact with your brand or product. It’s vital to make a strong first impression here, which can be achieved through targeted marketing campaigns, social media engagement, and content marketing. The goal is to make potential customers aware of your solutions and how they stand out from the competition.

Consideration

Once customers are aware of your brand, they move into the consideration phase. Here, they start evaluating how your product or service meets their needs. This is where detailed product information, customer testimonials, and case studies play a significant role. Tools like customer journey map templates can help in visualizing the needs and behaviors of customers during this phase.

The purchase phase is when a customer decides to buy. Ensuring a smooth transaction process is key. This includes having a user-friendly website, multiple payment options, and excellent customer support. Post-purchase follow-up emails or surveys can also enhance the experience, making the customer feel valued.

Retaining a customer is more cost-effective than acquiring a new one. This phase should focus on customer satisfaction by providing excellent service, loyalty programs, and regular updates about new features or products. Regular feedback loops and personalized communication are strategies that help maintain a strong relationship.

In the advocacy phase, satisfied customers become your brand ambassadors. Encouraging reviews, referrals, and social media shares are excellent ways to leverage happy customers. Exclusive rewards for referrals or featuring customer stories in your marketing materials can also promote advocacy.

Each phase of the customer journey offers unique opportunities and challenges. By understanding and optimizing these phases, businesses can significantly enhance their customer lifecycle management, leading to increased loyalty and higher customer lifetime value.

Benefits of Knowing the Customer Journey

Improves lead generation.

By understanding the various stages of the customer journey, businesses can create more targeted marketing campaigns that speak directly to where a potential customer is in their decision-making process. This strategic alignment increases the chances of converting leads into customers.

Enables More Effective Marketing

With insights into the customer journey, marketing teams can craft messages that are more likely to resonate with their audience. This tailored approach not only improves engagement but also boosts the overall effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

Enhances Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

When businesses understand and anticipate the needs and challenges of their customers at each journey stage, they can provide better service and solutions. This proactive approach not only satisfies customers but also fosters loyalty, turning customers into brand advocates.

Reduces Churn

By identifying and addressing pain points within the customer journey, companies can prevent dissatisfaction and reduce churn rates. This not only helps in retaining customers but also enhances the brand’s reputation.

Case studies have shown that companies that invest in understanding and optimizing their customer journeys see a marked improvement in customer retention and revenue.

Tracking and Analyzing Customer Journeys

Understanding the customer journey is pivotal for businesses aiming to enhance customer experience and optimize marketing strategies. However, the real power lies in effectively tracking and analyzing these journeys. Let’s delve into the tools and techniques that can revolutionize how you view customer interactions.

Tracking customer journeys is about observing and gaining actionable insights that can drive strategic decisions. Here are some essential tools and techniques:

Customer Journey Mapping Software: Tools like customer journey mapping software provide a visual representation of the customer’s experience with your product or service. This visualization helps in pinpointing areas of strength and those needing improvement.

Data Analytics Platforms: Utilizing analytics platforms can help you gather and analyze data across various touchpoints. This data is crucial for understanding customer behavior and preferences.

Feedback Mechanisms: Implementing direct feedback tools such as surveys and feedback forms at different journey stages gathers real-time, actionable insights from the customers themselves.

By integrating these tools, businesses can not only track but also analyze the depth of customer engagement. This analysis is crucial for refining marketing strategies and enhancing overall customer satisfaction.

Benefits of Using Specialized Software

Employing specialized software for journey mapping offers numerous advantages:

Comprehensive Visualization: These tools provide a holistic view of the customer journey, highlighting key interactions and potential bottlenecks.

Real-Time Collaboration: Many of these tools support real-time updates and collaboration, allowing teams to work together seamlessly and make informed decisions quickly.

Enhanced Customer Insights: With advanced analytics features, these tools help in understanding the nuances of customer behavior and preferences, which is essential for crafting targeted marketing strategies.

By leveraging these sophisticated tools, businesses can transform raw data into strategic insights, fostering better decision-making and ultimately driving business growth.

The Importance of Customer Journey Knowledge

As we wrap up our blog post on what is the customer journey, it’s clear that understanding this concept is beneficial for businesses aiming to thrive in a competitive landscape. The journey from a potential customer’s initial awareness to their advocacy offers invaluable insights that can shape more effective marketing strategies and enhance customer engagement.

By integrating the principles discussed, businesses can not only understand but also anticipate customer needs, leading to more successful outcomes and a robust bottom line.

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Hansani has a background in journalism and marketing communications. She loves reading and writing about tech innovations. She enjoys writing poetry, travelling and photography.

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Customer Journey Stages: The Complete Guide for Product Managers

22 August, 2018

Content Manager

To satisfy your user, you have to start thinking like a user and not like a product manager.

.css-61w915{margin-right:8px;margin-top:8px;max-height:30px;}@media screen and (min-width: 768px){.css-61w915{margin-right:38px;max-height:unset;}} “…maximizing satisfaction with customer journeys has the potential not only to increase customer satisfaction by 20 percent but also to lift revenue by up to 15 percent while lowering the cost of serving customers by as much as 20 percent. ” – McKinsey

Do you know what the customer thinks along their journey to purchase your product? If you want to provide the best product to your potential customers, you should learn what the user journey is.

In this article, you will learn more about these customer journey stages . You will learn to understand your users better.

6 Stages of the Customer Journey

What the user thinks: He knows that he has a problem, an issue. Nothing more, nothing less, and especially not what a solution could look like.

What to do next as a Product Manager: Arouse the customer’s interest. Let him know that your product or company exists and give him the first information and let him get in touch with your product for the first time. For this, you can talk with your marketing team and develop a strategy on how to communicate.

You have aroused the user’s interest, and now he wants to know more about your service.

What to do next as Product Manager: Make sure that you are findable online and/or offline. Give the user further and more detailed information. It is a must to do user research to get to know how to catch the user. Try to find out what the user is looking for.

What the user thinks: He knows that he doesn’t want to buy the first product he sees. The user has a clearer picture of what the solution could look like, and now he wants to compare different products and companies.

What to do next as Product Manager: Show him that your product could solve his problems and satisfy his needs. What to do if your product doesn’t fit his problems? Don’t worry; your product will fit someone else! Also, make sure that your product solves a problem in the first place.

Congratulations: The user wants to buy your product. You should design the purchase as easy as possible for him. A fast, easily understandable, and self-proclaiming process is the most comfortable for the customer.

What the user thinks: The user makes his own experiences with the product. He has the chance to influence the user journey of other users, e.g., posting on social media or writing reviews.

Do you know: 76% of customers read online reviews a minimum of half of the time before purchasing the product.

What to do next as a Product Manager: You should make sure that someone communicates with your customer and makes them feel cared for and safe. Moreover, you can ask the customer for a review if there are any indicators that the customer likes your product. These indicators can differ depending on what kind of product you sell. For an app, it could be the constant use of the app.

Re-Purchase

What the customer thinks: If the customer had positive experiences with your product and trusts in your company, he could be interested in using more of your products or in upgrading his already used products.

What to do next as Product Manager: Stay in contact with your customer and give them the chance to buy more of your products or use more of your services. There are many ways to offer your customer more of your products, e.g. an offer in a newsletter or a separate page in an app.

The right content for the stages of the user journey

Most of the time, your customer has a problem or a need, and he is looking for a solution to solve this problem. Now it’s your turn.

You, as a Product Manager, can influence how the marketing team creates the content for your product. Make sure that they create the right content to give your customer the right information at the right time of the user journey.

Because of this content, the customer could decide whether your product fits his needs or not.

This passage will focus on two different kinds of content. Awareness and research content.

Awareness Stage Content

Goal: Inform the user and show him what a solution could look like. Lead him to the Research Stage without giving him the feeling he is compelled to buy.

What to do: Focus on the user’s problems and issues and get him to trust in your product and company. Avoid aggressive promotion of your product. Don’t start your content by promoting your product. Create content that shows the user what a solution could look like and tell them gently that your product can help them to reach this goal.

The right content: The most powerful channels during this stage are search engines, official websites, newsletters, or emails.

Research Stage Content

Goal: The user has a clearer picture of his problem and what a solution could look like. But he still hasn’t decided which product he wants to buy. Get him to decide on your product.

How to: Show your user why he should buy your product. Give him more information about that in the Awareness stage and let him know what you can offer him and why you offer the best product for him.

The right content: You can link from Awareness Content to Research Content or a landing page. Moreover, you can provide your lead with downloadable resources like ebooks, guides, and templates. Another type of content you could provide is comparisons to show why your product is a fantastic choice compared to other products and companies. Demo versions of your product are also great. They give the customer an insight into what you offer.

How we at UXCam can help you: If you run a mobile app, UXCam will help you with User Journey Analysis.

Annemarie Bufe

Passionate hobby dancer. Working at UXCam.

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4 Strategies to Simplify the Customer Journey

• Richard L. Gruner

Making things easy is harder than you think.

While it may be tempting to offer your customers a never-ending array of products, customizations, and information, research shows that simplicity is almost always the best option for boosting both company value and customer loyalty. But what does it take to build a customer experience that’s smooth and simple from end to end? In this piece, the author offers four strategies to ensure simplicity is baked into every aspect of the customer’s journey: identify and communicate what simplicity means to your organization, look beyond product development to find ways to simplify throughout the customer journey, embrace internal complexity to achieve external simplicity, and remember that while simplicity is often necessary, it isn’t always the answer.

The modern consumer faces hundreds — if not thousands — of choices every day. What to read. Where to shop. What to buy. And each of those decisions takes a mental toll.

• RG Richard L. Gruner  holds a PhD in marketing from the University of Melbourne and is Senior Lecturer (A/Prof) at the University of Western Australia. His work has been published in many top ranked peer-reviewed international journals, and he has a professional background in the media industry. One of his main research interests lies at the intersection of consumer psychology and digital tools.  Find out more about Richard’s experience .

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Customer Journey Map

By ux planet.

A customer journey map represents the user's experience with your product or service. It is usually presented graphically to build shared knowledge and empathy of the various thoughts, ideas, feelings, and emotions a user has with your product, service and brand. Journey maps are a result of deep customer research and insights compiled from multiple stakeholders within your company.

The customer journey map typically consists of user personas, a timeline, customer emotions and feelings, customer touchpoints, and channels where the interactions are occurring. The journey map is a useful communication tool within an organization. It can also be used to provide insight into the critical areas of the user flow in which the product team should focus.

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Customer journey management

Quick definition: Customer journey management is the process of figuring out the best way to interact with customers at each stage of a customers at each stage of a customer’s journey in order to continue moving them through the sales funnel.

Key takeaways:

• Customer journey mapping allows companies to understand customer behavior to inform the customer experience.
• Companies need a way to process and analyze data as a part of a solid marketing platform overall to successfully manage customer journeys.
• Customer journey management follows customers through all the stages of the customer journey all gives companies the insights they need to interact with high-level customers at the most important touchpoints.

The following information was provided during an interview with Chaewon Hwang, product marketing manager for Adobe Campaign.

What is a customer journey? What is customer journey management? What are the stages of customer journey management? What tools are needed for customer journey management? How do brands determine which tools to use? How do companies get started with customer journey management? What are customer journey management best practices? What are some common mistakes companies make with customer journey management? How will customer journey management continue to improve?

What is a customer journey?

The customer journey is the entire process of a customer’s interactions with the brand, from the first moment of contact until the customer leaves. It starts with the awareness phase, where the customer learns about the brand and starts engaging. The customer will then further investigate the brand and make purchases. The customer journey only ends if the customer stops engaging with the brand completely.

What is customer journey management?

Companies need to create strategies to keep customers interested and coming back. Customer journey management (CJM) is the process of determining what information customers need it in each phase of their journey to move them to the next step.

For example, if a customer is investigating a brand, the company needs to know how to convince them to make a purchase. And after the customer makes a purchase, CJM includes steps to make that individual a repeat customer.

Customer journey management involves defining what types of messages to deliver to the customers and when in order to engage them in each phase of the buying process.

One of the benefits of customer journey management is that companies can figure out which customers have the highest lifetime value and use marketing tools and practices to keep those customers engaged and moving through the conversion funnel. Success in CJM is defined by the level of engagement within the funnel itself or by the ability of the brand to move customers to the next phase of the conversion process.

What are the stages of customer journey management?

It starts with data consolidation. Ideally, companies will have all the data gathered from the different touchpoints in one place so they can get a holistic view of their customers.

Next, they would want to be able to segment customers into different customer journey “buckets” to identify which customers are in which phase.

Then with their marketing platform, they would deliver messages through email , SMS, push, in-app messages, direct mail, call centers, and social media to reach their audience, depending on the customer’s preferences.

To close the loop, the company would analyze which customers react to what types of messages in which phase of the journey, and whether their marketing campaigns were successful or not. To do that, they would need everything from the data piece to the analytics piece .

What tools are needed for customer journey management?

Companies need tools for data management segmentation, marketing, and analytics. When it comes to deciding which tools and platforms to use, ideally a brand would use multiple solutions from one company to maintain consistency.

For the data piece , there are customer data platforms (CDPs) that offer data consolidation and segmentation at the same time. Marketing platforms tend to be slightly more focused on the marketing piece itself. They do offer data consolidation, but it isn't as robust as the CDP itself. The analytics piece is generally similar to a CDP, but it gives more of an insight on which actions the brands can take next versus just doing segmentation.

In an ideal world, all the platforms and teams would work together seamlessly, but in reality, there are many different teams within bigger companies using different tools, which can cause disruptions in the process. For instance, Team A might not know what team B is using. So if team A t starts using Oracle, for example, but team B signs up for another mobile push service, like Braze, you get a disruption. The best-case scenario is for a company to use a single solution that offers everything from data consolidation to marketing to analytics, but in most cases, it doesn't really work that way.

How do brands determine which tools to use?

They need to figure out which tools will work best with their company’s strategy. If it's a start-up, for example, they would generally use the cheapest tool that can help them bring the data together. They may even build their own platform to take a look at all of their customer activities.

Then, from there, they would start doing basic segmentation. Once they have enough data to be able to define the customer journey and what that is, then they would start launching marketing campaigns to make sure they reach all the customers in a certain segment and encourage them to move to the next stage of the journey .

How do companies get started with customer journey management?

Brands usually start with basic segmentation — simple things like customers who have purchased product A in the past 30 days. Then once they gather enough data to be able to understand which customers are in the awareness phase and which customers are in the purchase or retention phase, they are able to launch even more segmented marketing campaigns to target different customer brackets.

What are customer journey management best practices?

It's important to have all the data in one place so companies can get a holistic view of the customers and define the phases that are important to the brand. So being able to pull all the data from the different touchpoints would be the first thing the brands need to do.

Brands should also pay attention to increasing the conversion rates between phases and even within the phase by doing A/B tests across the different marketing campaigns to figure out what messaging improves customer engagement.

What are some common mistakes with customer journey management?

A lot of companies still have problems with data silos. They have trouble bringing all their data to one place. And even if they do, they don't think in real-time, so it's difficult to capture real-time information at once across their multiple touchpoints. Even when companies do have all of their data in one place, it's still difficult to draw insights out.

A lot of companies don't know what to do with the data, so they end up doing basic segmentation, but beyond that, they don't know which customers typically fall under which phase. That makes it harder to understand the next steps to increase the conversion for each funnel.

To overcome these challenges, companies first need to start by implementing a data consolidation piece. For bigger companies, it's a heavier lift because they need to talk to the different teams who are using the different databases. So, it requires a lot of effort for companies who have their data scattered in different places. It requires talking across different teams and then selecting one tool that can actually bring all the data together.

Some companies don't feel the need to start using customer journey management tools — they might not know these things exist, they might not feel they're at that level yet, or they might not think these tools will help them do the things that they want to do.

Companies might say, "Oh, I want to do targeted marketing. When customer A finishes action A, I want to recommend action B right after that." This is more easily done when the company has finished their customer journey management analysis. But sometimes they might not think it's a required action before launching their targeted marketing campaigns.

How will customer journey management continue to improve?

Data processing is currently done in near real-time, but future advancements could allow it to happen in actual real-time, so it syncs right away instead of waiting 24 to 48 hours. Another layer will be artificial intelligence and machine learning. Most platforms aren't quite where they need to be with AI, and so the continued development of the technology will provide more actionable insights.

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