customer journey mapping bcg

Related Expertise: Customer Insights , Customer Journey , Marketing Function Excellence

CEOs Need a Customer Experience Revolution—Not an Evolution

August 02, 2021  By  Bharat Poddar ,  Yogesh Mishra ,  Karen Lellouche Tordjman , and  Rob Bell

• By radically changing the way they think about, develop, and implement their CX program, companies can see a boost of as much as 30% to 50%.
• We recommend a whole new paradigm, the “MIDAS touch”: measure business impact beyond survey results, innovate human experiences, deliver customer journeys by integrating front-line and back-end teams, activate a customer-first culture, and synchronize customer engagement across channels.

Thanks to digital technologies and digitally savvy customers, companies across industries can create a customer experience unlike anything ever seen before. CEOs, take note: this could be the biggest growth opportunity to come along in decades.

That’s because an exceptional customer experience (CX) is as good for companies as it is for customers. It’s the kind of customer insight that differentiates market leaders like Amazon, Apple, and Google. According to BCG research, companies with the highest customer satisfaction scores have generated twice as much shareholder value over the last ten years relative to the average score. These companies have seen not only better earnings but also higher price-to-earnings ratios and, therefore, greater total shareholder return. (See Exhibit 1.)

Most CEOs readily acknowledge the need to improve their CX and have already invested heavily in doing so. They also acknowledge that progress is slow and often fails to meet expectations. The key reason, in our experience, is that CX outcomes are not explicitly linked to business benefit and financial targets. So companies by default make incremental fixes to the status quo—rather than the bold innovations that are required to power real progress.

To achieve a truly differentiated CX that realizes business value, CEOs cannot rely on incremental evolution alone. They need wholesale revolution—a paradigm that changes the way their organizations think about, develop, implement, sustain, and monetize their CX program. Our paradigm, “the MIDAS touch,” has five key elements: measure, innovate, deliver, activate, and synchronize.” (See Exhibit 2.)

Here’s what CEOs should be thinking about as they adopt the MIDAS mindset.

Measure Business Impact Beyond Survey Results

When it comes to measuring CX, companies are accustomed to looking in the rear-view mirror—they rely on CX metrics from surveys conducted after the experience has happened. But survey findings don’t necessarily shed light on the causes of CX issues or their business impact. And because the metrics lag the experience, there’s minimal opportunity to course-correct in real time.

A smarter approach, BCG’s CX measurement system, provides the digital capabilities lacking in traditional listening programs. It measures, in real time, every interaction the customer has with the company as well as with third parties; moreover, it generates insights for developing real-time interventions and ties actions to business outcomes.

Building this more advanced system requires a thorough understanding of key customer journeys. As an example, a typical retail bank has six such journeys: joining to save or transact, funding purchases, buying a home, using account services, making transactions, and resolving problems. Each journey has a balanced scorecard with real-time metrics like cycle time, error rate, and funnel leakage. Most importantly, these metrics are explicitly linked to business metrics that align with business impact and KPIs. For instance, cycle times would be linked to cost and control outcomes, and funnel leakage would be linked to churn rates and attrition.

Once the metrics are identified, companies need to build a data source that they can continuously monitor and, through that process, refine core metrics. An analytical engine can then be built to identify issues along the customer journey and recommend corrective actions. Applying these interventions to the relevant physical and digital channels, companies can improve the customer journey in near real time and boost balanced-scorecard outcomes. By understanding the impact these interventions have on business outcomes, companies can create a learning system for improving the customer journey over time.

Innovate Human Experiences

Incremental improvement is a trap. For years, companies have relied on process reengineering, lean, and customer-journey-mapping techniques to understand current processes and experiences. The objective: to solve for pain points, eliminate inefficiencies, and generally improve the CX. But this approach ties up the best talent and dollars (both of which are often in short supply) in small improvements, and it has marginal impact: in our experience, it brings only 5% to 7% improvement year over year. For meaningful impact, improvement in the 30% to 50% range is required.

To develop a customer experience that is a true game-changer, companies need to embrace human-centered design. This means building a robust design function that hires, trains, and nurtures human-centric designers. With a deep understanding of the customer in context, experience designers make use of zero-based-design techniques—the proverbial clean sheet of paper—to find solutions that challenge the status quo. This method allows for breakthrough improvements that start by targeting a future state and work backwards to meet that target, as opposed to less impactful incremental methods that apply Band-Aid fixes to the current state. For this reason, human-centric designers need to be part of almost every change effort, not just digital builds.

• Digital Marketing
• Companies Gain When CMOs and CFOs Measure Success Together
• How Nimble CMOs Invest Their Marketing Budgets
• The Consumer Sentiment Series

To develop a customer experience that is a true game-changer, companies need to embrace human-centered design.

Take, for example, a retail bank that wanted to improve the process for replenishing checkbooks. Instead of mapping the journey and implementing efficiency initiatives, such as reducing the need for manual data entry, the bank implemented a new process using human-centric, zero-based-design techniques. An algorithm would proactively identify when the customer’s checkbook was running low and trigger the process for replenishing it without much customer or employee intervention.

This innovation significantly improved the experience for the customer, and it made checkbook replenishment less prone to security issues and more efficient for the bank. The results were significant: costs were reduced by more than 30% and cycle times by more than 75%, while customer satisfaction was boosted by 30 points.

Deliver Customer Journeys by Integrating Front-Line and Back-End Teams

When it comes to innovating and organizing change initiatives, many companies are in a rut: they allocate funding to various functions based on the prior year’s expenditures. For example, one retail bank had 220 different, uncoordinated initiatives to improve the CX running simultaneously across 30 functional departments. Since departments seldom shared projects or budgets, the changes delivered were not material for either the customer or the business.

To realize change that is truly transformational, companies need to consolidate their many change initiative budgets and projects into fewer and better-coordinated efforts, each of which integrates product, functional, and strategic perspectives to focus on customer journeys or customer-centric value streams. To make this approach work, companies need to adapt the way they handle governance and funding. A customer journey approach requires pooling talent and financial resources from various parts of the company to create multifunctional teams that eventually deliver results that are more than the sum of their parts. Teams should be empowered to make design and implementation decisions, while leaders set the direction and authorize the release of funding.

A robust transformation addresses customers’ needs at each step of the journey.

While a robust transformation is rooted in optimizing the CX, it also aims to deliver an optimized workforce, a better employee experience, stronger regulatory controls, and profitable revenue and cost outcomes. It addresses customers’ needs at each step of the journey (from consideration to fulfilment of a request) and the activities needed to support each step from front to back (from marketing and sales to back-office operations).

A customer journey transformation done right consistently delivers substantive benefits for both the customer and the company. An Australian bank, for example, was able to improve its customer advocacy scores from lagging to leading in the market, refresh its employee value proposition, and surpass its peer group in shareholder returns.

Activate a Customer-First Culture

All too often, CEOs launching a CX initiative neglect to bring the full organization along. Rather than creating a broad umbrella of accountability, they assign the responsibility for the transformation program’s success to a small number of people, either a specially created CX department or the relatively few employees who interact directly with customers. But this approach does not embed the necessary level of customer focus throughout the organization and frequently leads to suboptimal results.

To create transformation that is deep and sustainable, it’s critical to foster a customer-first culture.

To create transformation that is deep and sustainable, it’s critical to foster a customer-first culture. This means making the delivery of an outstanding CX the responsibility of every leader and employee, rewarding behaviors that drive good customer outcomes. Companies, therefore, need to take deliberate action on three levels: the executive leaders, the transformation teams, and the front-line leaders:

• Executive Leadership. The role of senior executives in the transformation is to activate other leaders and to set the example for the organization to follow. So, every senior executive should be measured against CX outcomes along with traditional metrics. Companies should set action plans that encourage senior executives to “walk the talk” and model the new behaviors in regular routines like staff meetings so that they can pass the culture down to their teams. Deploying world-class coaches can help leaders change ingrained habits and work in new ways.
• Transformation Teams. The teams engaged in delivering the change have the unique responsibility, privilege, and burden of executing on both business needs (inside out) and customer needs (outside in). They need to be fully cross-functional, with representation from the marketing, HR, finance, technology, and risk departments. Ways of working need to emphasize the importance of being close to customers and understanding their needs, while linking customer goals to financial and business outcomes.
• Front-Line Leaders. To activate the organization, it’s essential to create a dialogue between senior executives and front-line leaders on what they’re learning from customers. Nontraditional channels like events are a good way to strengthen this dialogue as changes are being rolled out. Companies should also assess leaders based on the new target behaviors, identifying “heroes” whose behaviors are worth emulating. Conversely, if some leaders miss the mark, companies shouldn’t hesitate to make whatever talent changes are necessary.

Synchronize and Unify Customer Engagement Across Channels

It’s become critical to engage with customers through seamless, personalized interactions across multiple touch points. But many companies are still facing two basic, confounding issues: disconnected channels and siloed management. Reliance on multiple, nonconnected databases makes it difficult to create a true 360-degree view of the customer that is consistent across the organization. Furthermore, interaction channels are managed independently of each other, which is likely to lead to conflicting messaging.

To address these issues, companies first need to create a centralized database and put all information on every customer’s interactions across all channels and business lines there. That way, everyone in the organization has the same level of customer understanding, thus removing friction. A centralized database should be a priority even in businesses like automotive and insurance, where an intermediary has primary access to customers and their data.

Next, companies need to develop a highly automated solution, usually powered by artificial intelligence, that can continuously gather and analyze the data for each customer and recommend the next best action. Companies can use various metrics, depending on the particular business objective; they include propensity to buy another product or service, price sensitivity, and preferred channel.

Then, companies should launch the recommended actions in the recommended channel. Call centers, branch staff, and marketing teams must be completely aligned in order for actions to be fully coordinated and the right content activated.

A telco that wished to increase its revenue from top-ups (prepaid charges for mobile phones) invested in an AI platform to understand why customers buy them—or not. The platform made it possible to test several different reasons for these purchase decisions, including the particular channel used for the communication, the content of the message itself, and the time of day when the message was sent. The company sent targeted messages to consumers who had used up nearly all their credit. Moreover, it prevented customers from dropping the service by calling and offering a discount. The first of these two actions boosted revenue from top-ups by 15%, and the second reduced the churn rate by 20%.

To turn your CX into gold, we’re advocating nothing less than a revolutionary overhaul of most companies’ CX programs: an operating model that puts humans at the center of the business. Like any major transformation, it’s critical to begin with a broad vision and assess how current CX capabilities measure up against it. Once the gaps are identified, companies should develop a roadmap to address them systematically.

Customer experience is not a fuzzy, feel good thing; it is a business imperative and CEOs need to treat it as such. Companies that don’t will be left behind.

Managing Director & Senior Partner

Managing Director & Partner

Mexico City

Knowledge Expert

ACC – London

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• Case Studies

Total CX: Mastering the Complexity of the Customer Journey(s)

A good Customer Experience strategy should reflect the holistic journey of all existing and potential customers, resulting in a Total Omnichannel CX. Learn more about the development and implementation of complex Customer Journeys

“Customer Experience Manager” or “Chief Customer Experience Officer”—more and more often these job roles appear in job advertisements. Business journals report about wellknown brands setting up CX departments and announcing that they want to focus on increasing the recommendation rate or customer satisfaction. Customer Centricity has become increasingly prominent in the consciousness of companies in recent years. However, there is often a lack of an effective strategy for responding adequately to dynamic technological developments and the resulting change of customer expectations.

After all, consumer habits have long since ceased to be influenced primarily by the product or service. The subjective perception of the customer, their emotions at every contact with the brand are decisive for the conversion. The task of CX management is to positively influence this perception across all channels and touchpoints. For many traditional business models, this means disruption. The pressure is mounting: To remain competitive, these companies must swiftly develop a solid CX strategy.

This is important and correct for two reasons. First, consistently focusing on the customer and optimizing CX has been proven to increase business success and to have a lasting positive impact on the entire company. Second, the complexity of customer—company interactions has increased dramatically, which also leads to more diverse Customer Journeys. Existing patterns of experience design have to be adapted to this—in other words, redesigned.

Mastering the complexity of the Customer Journey

Designing a holistic CX strategy is a major challenge. More and more touchpoints and channels–both physical and digital–need to be considered when designing a holistic CX. The idea of so-called Total CX (TCX) takes an omnichannel approach. In doing so, companies must understand the emotional dynamics that touchpoints trigger. They need to understand how customers feel, think, and ultimately act at every touchpoint of the Customer Journey.

To understand this, CX performance must be measured and monitored, which in turn requires companies to have high CX performance and maturity.

The complexity of analyzing and developing CX along the Customer Journey becomes clear when you consider the following: Every single touchpoint can be classified as an interaction point—from face-to-face contact and any physical or digital perception of the product, service, or communication with the company to spatial perception in stationary stores, for example.

Each touchpoint can be perceived differently depending on individual customer types or the respective phase of the Customer Journey and can trigger different (re)actions.

In a holistic end-to-end Customer Journey, the transitions between different channels and the phases, such as pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase, happen with a low level of friction.

Companies must act at every touchpoint of the Customer Journey.

It is challenging to implement a successful CX strategy under these conditions, but it is possible if companies commit to understanding the needs of their customers and if they know in which direction they want to further develop the CX.

The following questions highlight how organizations should think about their core CX approach when designing their future CX strategy:

• What are the customers’ needs and are they meet by the current experience? Where is the biggest gap and how can the organization solve this problem?
• What is working well in the current Customer Journey and what is not? Where are the friction points and how can they be resolved?
• What is the organization currently measuring along the Customer Journey? What data does the company currently not have?
• Where do customers drop out along the Customer Journey?
• How effective is the current CX approach?

CX differentiators and approaches of organizations

As part of our analysis and in several successfully completed projects, BCG Platinion has developed a framework based on seven core differentiators from which organizations usually define the leading elements of their CX strategy.

Each differentiator represents a core CX strategy identified through an iterative process of analyzing the current CX engagement of companies in a wide range of industries.

No company belongs to just one cluster. Overlaps, even multiple ones, are normal. Nevertheless, there is always a strong tendency toward one of these cores. The other differentiators are also important, but they are not at the center of the respective CX DNA.

Developing a successful strategy step by step

For the development of a CX strategy, these core differentiators form a solid foundation, and they provide inspiration.

Nevertheless, solving the above challenges is not trivial. It requires a deep understanding of customers and their current needs.

A TCX strategy should therefore be implemented step by step —starting with the understanding of the current CX landscape, followed by the redesign and ultimately the application of the optimized CX strategy.

Discover the rest of our series on Customer Experience:

The Next Frontier of Customer Experience

Companies can gain an edge by developing an overarching CX strategy and management

All or Nothing: Designing Holistic Customer Experiences

The first article of our series dives deep into why using frameworks helps in building a new CX strategy and reducing the complexity of the process

Stand out from the Crowd: Defining the Core CX Differentiators

The second article in our CX series shares how to define the CX differentiators based on strengths and objectives

About the Authors

Dr. iana kouris.

Iana is a Managing Director at BCG Platinion in Frankfurt, heading Design & Engineering Team in Berlin. Iana leads projects across industries focused on Customer Experience Strategy, Customer Journey Redesign, Design Thinking enablement and Digital, Agile and Human-Centered Transformations. Iana joined BCG Platinion from Nokia & Nokia Bell Labs, where she was leading Transformation by Design and before that was driving Business Operations & Executive Customer Engagement. Prior to that, Iana spent 7 years in management consulting at McKinsey & Company Inc. Connecting different disciplines was always Iana’s passion, which is reflected in her multidisciplinary studies, including a Dr. degree in Business Administration from RWTH Aachen University, Dipl. in Mathematics, BA in Philosophy & Economics, and further qualifications in Design, Fine Arts and Music.

Dr. Martin Böckle

Martin has a strong focus on designing human-centered digital experiences within the practice areas of BCG Platinion solving strategic design challenges through the application of qualitative and quantitative research. He is a strong advocate for behavioral design concepts like gamification and contributes to the emerging research stream of human-centered artificial intelligence (HCAI). Furthermore, he focuses on other topics such as design due diligence (DDD), design leadership and design strategy for Metaverse applications.

Robert Thorpe

Robert is a Senior Strategic Designer in the Berlin office of BCG Platinion. His core proficiencies include large scale qualitative and quantitative research practices, customer experience journey mapping, technological design flow management, as well as UX/UI best practices and benchmarking.

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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.

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

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

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

• What’s included in a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Steps for creating a customer journey map.

• Types of Customer Journey Maps

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Customer Journey Design
• Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Free Customer Journey Template

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

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

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

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

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

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

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

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

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

1. Use customer journey map templates.

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

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

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

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

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

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

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

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

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

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

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

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

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

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

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

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

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

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

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

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

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customer Journey Map: Definition with Examples

Improved customer service, customer loyalty, and increased ROI; 3 things that every organization wishes they could achieve overnight. It’s possible, although not overnight, but with the right tools and the effort.

One such tool is the customer journey map and it’s there at the top with the other powerful tools that help drive customer-focused change effectively.  

In this guide, we’ll explain the steps you need to take to create a customer journey map that drives the expected results while avoiding the common mistakes others make. Scroll down to learn:

• What is a Customer Journey Map?
• What Are the Benefits of Using a Customer Journey Map?

Factors to Consider Before Creating a Customer Journey Map

What are the components of a customer journey map, how to create a customer journey map in 6 steps, tips and best practices when creating a customer journey map, common mistakes to avoid when creating your customer journey map, customer journey map definition.

A customer journey map, also known as a customer experience map, is a visual representation that outlines the various steps and touchpoints a customer goes through when interacting with a company, product, or service. It chronologically represents each step of interaction the customer takes with your business. A customer journey map usually starts with the initial step of when the customer discovers your product/ service and depending on your goal it can extend as long as you want to.

Customer journey map is a tool used to understand and analyze the customer’s experience, from the initial awareness or consideration of a product or service through the purchase and post-purchase stages. It reveals customer actions, emotions, pain points and expectations along the customer journey. And it helps the business see things from the customer’s perspective which in turn helps the business gain a deep understanding of the needs of the customer.

What are the Benefits of Using a Customer Journey Map?

There are many benefits to customer journey mapping. The customer journey map helps

• To enhance the customer experience. It helps businesses gain insights into customers' various touchpoints and interactions with the product or service.
• To reduce costs by identifying the areas the business should prioritize investing in and spending effort on. Customer journey mapping can help businesses identify and eliminate unnecessary touchpoints or processes that may not add value to the customer journey. Get valuable insight into what the customer is expecting from your brand, their internal motivations, and needs which will, in turn, help you improve your customer experience.
• To innovate and differentiate by discovering the gaps between customer expectations and current customer experience, unmet customer needs, pain points, and opportunities.
• To improve customer satisfaction by identifying severe customer experience issues and eliminating them effectively.
• To increase customer loyalty by helping to build strong customer relationships by understanding their needs, preferences, and emotions.
• To align teams by facilitating collaboration within organizations. This helps to provide a shared understanding of the customer’s journey, enabling different teams to align their efforts toward a common goal.
• Data-driven decision-making based on gathered insights from customer research, feedback, and analytics.

Before you delve into creating a customer journey map, it is important to consider several factors to ensure that the final outcome is accurate, effective and actionable.

• What is your team trying to achieve? Make sure to define your objective and purpose of creating the customer journey map, clearly.
• Identify the target customer segment as different customer segments may have different touchpoints, pain points and requirements leading to different journeys.
• Carry out a thorough research by gathering data and insights via customer research, feedback and analytics. Conduct customer interviews, surveys, feedback forms, social media and website analytics among others.
• Make the customer journey mapping a collaborative effort by involving cross-functional teams. Invite the marketing, sales, customer service, product, and design teams to work together to understand and align efforts.
• Consider including the emotional aspects of the customer journey such as feelings, motivations and perceptions at each touchpoint.

A customer journey map typically includes the following components:

• Touchpoints: All of the interactions and experiences a customer has with a company, including in-person, online, and mobile interactions.
• Customer personas: Representations of the target customer segments, including their demographics, behaviors, motivations, and pain points.
• Emotions: A visual representation of how the customer feels at different touchpoints during their journey.
• Channels: The ways in which a customer interacts with the company, such as website, phone, or in-person interactions.
• Data and insights: Customer behavior data and insights from surveys, analytics, or other sources.
• Pain points and opportunities: Identifications of areas where the customer experience can be improved, as well as opportunities for innovation and differentiation.
• Recommended actions: Specific recommendations for improving the customer experience, based on the journey map analysis.
• Alignment with company goals: A visual representation of how the customer journey aligns with the overall goals and strategy of the company.

At a glance, a customer journey map may look easy to make. But there are many details you need to pay attention to when creating one. In the following steps, we have simplified the process of creating a customer journey map.

One thing you need to keep in mind is that customer journey maps may differ from company to company based on the product/ service they offer and audience behavior.

It’s also important to have the right kind of people who know about your customer’s experience in the room when you are mapping the journey.

Here are 6 six easy steps that you can follow when creating a customer journey map.

• Build your buyer persona
• Map out the customer lifecycle stages and touchpoints
• Understand the goals of the customers
• Identify obstacles and customer pain points
• Identify the elements you want to focus on
• Fix the roadblocks

Let’s look at each step in more detail.

Step 1: Build Your Buyer Persona

Creating a customer journey map begins with defining your buyer persona, which profiles your target customer based on extensive research.

The buyer persona usually consists of demographic data such as age, gender, career, etc. in addition to other behavioral and psychographic details like customer goals, interests, lifestyle, challenges, etc.

Your business can have one or many buyer personas depending on how many audience segments you are targeting. And to avoid creating a customer journey map that is too generic, you need to create separate customer journey maps for each of the segments you identify.

You need to also be careful to rely on real data rather than assumptions to avoid creating an erroneous customer profile that won’t do much for you.

You can gather as much data as you want from online research, questionnaires, surveys, direct customer feedback, interviews and with tools like Google Analytics.

Here’s our guide on creating a buyer persona . Refer to it to create your own buyer persona in 4 simple steps. Start with a template to save time.

Creating the buyer persona will also shed light on the goals of the buyer, which is another thing you need to pay attention to when mapping your customer’s journey.

Step 2: Map Out the Customer LIfecycle Stages and Touchpoints

What are the stages your customer goes through to come into contact with your product/ service? Breaking down your customer journey map into various stages will make it easier to understand and refer to.

Now, these stages may vary depending on your business situation, sales funnel design, marketing strategies, etc. but usually, it would contain – Awareness, Consideration, Decision, and Retention.

Map out the touchpoints to clarify the customer lifecycle stages even better. A touchpoint refers to any moment in their journey when a customer comes into contact with your brand (i.e. website, social media, testimonials, advertisements, point of sale, billing, etc.).

The data you collected during your buyer persona research will give you a pretty good idea about the customer touchpoints along the lifecycle stages; these include the steps they take when they first discover your brand to purchasing your product and subsequent interactions.

Identifying all potential touchpoints may sound overwhelming, but you can always rely on tools like Google Analytics which will generate behavioral reports (which show the user path throughout your website)  and goal flow reports (display the path a user takes to complete a goal conversion) for you to work with.

Or you can follow the traditional method and put yourself in the shoes of your customers and take yourself through the journey to identify the actions.

At the same time try to determine the emotional state (delighted/ frustrated) of the customer as they take each action. Knowing how they feel will help you understand whether they would go from one stage to the other in the journey.

Step 3: Understand the Goals of the Customers

This is where you need to focus your attention on understanding the goals your customers are trying to achieve at each stage. When it comes to optimizing your customer’s journey, it will help immensely if you know what your customers are trying to achieve.

Some methods you can use here include survey answers, interview transcripts, customer support emails, user testing, etc.

Once you know the goals your customers are trying to gain at each phase of the journey, you can align them with the touchpoints.

Step 4: Identify Obstacles and Customer Pain Points

By now you know what your customer is trying to achieve at each stage of the customer lifecycle, and each of the steps they take to get it done.

If your customer journey is perfect, then you won’t have your customers abandoning their purchases, leaving your landing pages without filling the forms, clicking the CTA only to close the tab, etc. If your journey didn’t have any roadblocks at all, then you wouldn’t be needing this user journey map in the first place.

But that’s not the case here, is it?

There might be many things that you are doing right to make your customer experience a smooth one, but there can still be many roadblocks that frustrate your users. In this step, you need to work on identifying what these roadblocks and pain points of customers are.

Maybe the product price is too high, or the shipping rates are unreasonable, or maybe the registration form is a few pages too long. Identifying such roadblocks will help you apply suitable solutions to improve your customer experience.

You can rely on the research data you gathered to create your buyer personas here as well.

Step 5: Identify the Elements You Want to Focus on

There are several types of customer journey maps and each focuses on a variety of elements. Based on your purpose, you can select one of them.

Current state: These maps show how your customers are interacting with your brand currently.

Future state: This type of map visualizes the actions that you assume or believe will be taken by your customers.

Day in the life: This type of map tries to capture what your current customers or prospects do in a day in their life. They will reveal more information about your customers, including pain points in real life.

Step 6: Fix the Roadblocks

Now that you know the issues/ roadblocks your customers come across as they interact with your brand, focus on prioritizing and fixing them to improve each touchpoint to retain customers at all stages of the journey.

Customers are constantly changing, and so should your customer journey maps. Test and update your customer journey maps as often as necessary to reflect the changes in your customers as well as in your products/ services.

Here are some templates you can start with right away.

Here are a few additional tips and best practices to ensure your customer journey map is accurate and effective.

• Use or create personas to better understand your customer and tailor your journey to specific customer segments. For example, if your business is fashion retail, you can develop personas such as ‘working professional,’ ‘fashionable mom,’ ‘teenage fashionista,’ etc.
• Use data and metrics to support your map and make it data-driven. Include data on customer satisfaction scores, conversion rates, or customer retention rates to identify areas for improvement. This can also help to prioritize actions and allocate resources effectively.
• Use multiple channels, both online and offline, to interact with customers. For example, a customer may discover your product or service on social media, then research more on your website, visit the store for a demo, and then make the final purchase.
• Go beyond existing touchpoints to include anticipated future customer needs as well. For example, if you are in the hospitality industry, you could include potential pain points and opportunities for pre-arrival, check-in, stay, check-out, and post-stay.
• Always keep the customer at the center of your customer journey map. Consider the customer’s emotions, preferences, and motivations at each touchpoint to create a more customer-centric experience. For example, a customer journey map for a subscription-based meal delivery service can include touchpoints for menu options, selecting meals, placing an order, receiving, and providing feedback.
• Customer journeys are dynamic and can evolve due to customer behavior, market trends, and business strategies. Therefore, continuously review and update by monitoring customer behavior, trends, and business strategies. Keep the customer journey map flexible and adaptable to changes.
• Create and present the journey map in a visually appealing and accessible format so stakeholders can easily understand it. Use visuals, diagrams, and infographics as required.
• A customer journey map is not a one-time exercise but a continuous process: test and iterate. Validate the map with real customers to ensure accuracy and relevance. Gather feedback, and conduct usability testing to gather additional insights to refine and make the map accurate.
• Keep it simple and accessible. Use clear and straightforward language and visual elements while avoiding jargon and cluttering. Make sure the customer journey map is easy to understand and accessible to all relevant stakeholders.

Creating a customer journey map can be a complex process. Here are a few mistakes you should be aware of and avoid at any cost.

Making assumptions without data

A common mistake is relying on assumptions without proper data or research. It would be best to put time into gathering data and insights from various sources. Make sure to carry out thorough research. Use a combination of qualitative and quantitative data to ensure accuracy and reliability.

Focusing on one touchpoint

Another mistake is focusing only on one touchpoint or a single interaction rather than considering the entire end-to-end journey. This can result in an incomplete or biased customer journey map. To avoid this, take a comprehensive approach and consider the whole customer journey from initial awareness to post-purchase stages. Include all relevant online and offline touchpoints, channels, and interactions.

Not involving cross-functional teams

Involve cross-functional teams in customer journey mapping to get diverse insights and a holistic view. Not involving different teams can result in biased views and missing valuable insights from different perspectives. Encourage team collaboration and communication to align the customer journey map and gather input from different stakeholders. This can help uncover blind spots and identify opportunities for improvements.

Failing to validate with real customers

Not validating the customer journey map with real customers can lead to inaccurate assumptions. Also, relying on internal assumptions or team perspectives will lead to skewed views and away from the reality of customer interactions. To avoid such a dilemma, validate the map through feedback loops, usability testing, and customer interviews. Gather input from actual customer experiences, preferences, and pain points.

Ready to Map Your Customer’s Journey?

Customer journey maps are a great way to gain deeper insight into your customers and their experience with your organization. Taking the time to understand how your customers interact with you, what they feel and what they want to achieve can go a long way toward retaining them.

Follow these 6 steps to get your customer journey map right. Use a template to save time.

And don’t forget to leave your feedback in the comments section below.

Join over thousands of organizations that use Creately to brainstorm, plan, analyze, and execute their projects successfully.

FAQs About Customer Journey Maps

Customer journey maps can improve customer experiences by providing companies with a clear understanding of their customers' experiences with their products, and services. This information can be used to identify pain points and areas for improvement, allowing companies to better meet the needs and expectations of their customers. By using customer journey maps to optimize the customer experience, companies can:

• Align resources and efforts to meet customer needs better.
• Create a more personalized experience for customers.
• Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Reduce customer churn.
• Increase customer lifetime value.
• Enhance the overall customer experience.
• Improve operational efficiency.
• Facilitate cross-functional collaboration to improve the customer experience.
• Stay ahead of the competition by offering a differentiated and superior customer experience.

The tools needed to create a customer journey map vary depending on the complexity of the map and the size of the company, but some common tools include:

• Customer feedback: Surveys, customer interviews, and focus groups can be used to gather customer feedback and understand their experiences.
• Analytics tools: Data analytics tools, such as website analytics, customer behavior tracking, and customer relationship management systems, can provide insight into customer behavior and preferences.
• Customer journey map software: Tools like Creately that can be used to create visually appealing customer journey maps.
• Project management software: Tools like to manage the journey mapping process and keep track of progress.
• Collaboration tools: Tools like Creately, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Google Workspace can be used to collaborate with team members and stakeholders.
• Identifying and resolving pain points in the customer journey
• Improving customer onboarding and retention
• Optimizing marketing and sales efforts
• Designing a customer-centric website or app
• Aligning cross-functional teams to deliver a cohesive customer experience
• You can use customer journey maps to drive customer-centric strategies in your organization by Identifying pain points or gaps in the customer experience and developing targeted solutions
• Aligning cross-functional teams and processes to meet customer needs
• Optimizing touchpoints to deliver a seamless and satisfying customer experience
• Utilizing insights from the customer journey map to inform marketing, sales, and customer service strategies

More Related Articles

Amanda Athuraliya is the communication specialist/content writer at Creately, online diagramming and collaboration tool. She is an avid reader, a budding writer and a passionate researcher who loves to write about all kinds of topics.

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The definitive 8-step customer journey mapping process

In business, as in life, it's the customer's journey that makes the company's destination worth all the trouble. No customer wants to jump through several different hoops to get to your product: they want it fast and they want it now.

Following certain customer journey mapping stages helps you improve your user's experience (UX) to create a product they love interacting with, ensures you stay ahead of key workflow tasks, and keeps stakeholders aligned. But a misaligned map can derail your plans—leading to dissatisfied users who don’t stick around long enough to convert or become loyal customers.

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This article walks you through the eight key stages of great customer journey mapping, and shows you how to adapt each to your unique business and product to optimize the customer experience from start to finish. 

Learn how customers interact with your product and website

Hotjar's Observe and Ask tools let you go ‘behind the scenes’ to understand your users’ product experiences and improve their customer journey.

An 8-step process for effective customer journey mapping

A customer journey map is a visualization of every point of interaction a user has with your company and product.

Mapping out the customer journey gives you insights into your buyers’ behavior to help you make changes that improve your website and the user flow between touchpoints. This helps you increase online sales and turn users into loyal customers and brand advocates.

Follow these eight proven steps to understand—and enhance—the customer experience.

Note: every business is distinct, so be sure to adapt these steps to your particular user and business needs. 

1. Define your purpose

The first step to creating a successful customer journey map is to define your product's vision or purpose. Without a clear purpose, your actions will be misguided and you won’t know what you want users to achieve during their journey on your website, product page, or web app. 

To define your purpose, consider your company’s mission statement and incorporate your specific user pain points as much as possible. 

Make your purpose specific to your company’s needs and goals—for example, the purpose of an ecommerce brand looking to help users navigate several different products and make multiple purchases will differ from that of a SaaS company selling subscriptions for one core product.

2. Make sure your team is aligned and roles are clear

Cross-functional collaboration is essential when mapping out your brand's or product’s user journey. Get insights from different teams within your organization to find out exactly how users engage with key touchpoints to derive a holistic sense of the user experience (UX), which will help you improve every aspect of the customer experience.

Lisa Schuck , marketing lead at Airship , emphasizes the importance of keeping “anybody that has a touchpoint with a customer” involved. She advises teams to “figure out how to align your external marketing and sales with your internal operations and service.”

Although sales, product, and marketing departments are often the key players in customer journey mapping, also involve your operations and design teams that are responsible for creating the user flow. 

If you have a SaaS company, for example, marketing creatives, sales teams, product owners and designers, and your customer experience department all need to participate in the process. Clearly define who’s responsible for different aspects of the map, and regularly check in to make sure your final map isn’t missing any important perspectives.

Pro tip: use Hotjar's Highlights feature to collect and organize key product experience (PX) insights and data on user behavior from teams across your organization to help you build your customer journey map. Then use Hotjar’s Slack integration to quickly share learnings with your relevant stakeholders to get buy-in and ensure everyone is aligned.

Hotjar’s Slack integration Slack lets teams discuss insights in the moment, so they’re up to date with critical issues 

3. Create user personas

Once you’ve defined your purpose and involved all relevant stakeholders, it’s time to design your user personas . Use resources like UXPressia and HubSpot’s Make My Persona tool to help you design various product personas . 

Create a range of user personas to understand what each type of buyer needs to curate a journey that’s easy and enjoyable for every customer. This is an important early step in the customer journey mapping process—because if you don’t understand your users, you won’t be able to fully comprehend how they interact with your brand to better it.

Create user personas for all your product’s possible buyers—for example, to map out a B2B customer journey for a company in the hospitality business means developing personas for a range of different customers, from large chain hotel managers to small vacation rental owners. 

4. Understand your user goals

Once you’ve designed your user personas, it’s time to define their jobs to be done . What do your users hope to accomplish when they search for your product or service? What do they want to do when they click on your website? Address and answer these questions to build a deep understanding of your users’ goals and pain points to inform your customer journey.

In a SaaS customer journey , perhaps users are looking for helpful comparisons of product features on your website, or want to easily sign up for a trial account in the hopes that your product will solve their problems. But you won’t know until you ask . 

Once you have users or test users, get direct insights from them with Hotjar's Feedback tools and Surveys to ask buyers exactly what their goals are as they browse different pages of your website or interact with product features.

Since user goals are at the center of your customer journey map, define them early on—but keep speaking to your users throughout the entire process to make sure you’re up to date with their needs.

5. Identify customer touchpoints

After you understand your users and what their goals are, it’s time to identify the ways they interact with your company and your product. 

"Touchpoints are the moments the customer interacts with your brand, be it through social media channels, your product, or customer support. The quality of these experiences affects the overall customer experience, which is why it’s important to be aware of them. Consider what happens before, during, and after a customer makes a purchase or uses your product."

Key customer journey touchpoints for a website or product include your homepage, landing pages, product pages, CTA buttons, sign-up forms, social media accounts, and paid ads. 

Collaboration is key to identifying touchpoints throughout the entire customer journey. Include insights from different teams and stakeholders —your marketing and sales teams will have a strong understanding of the touchpoints involved pre-purchase, while the customer experience department can shed light on post-purchase touchpoints. 

Post-purchase touchpoints can help turn users into loyal customers and even advocates for your brand. 

In the words of Lisa Schuck, "When you create a raving fan, or a brand advocate, who goes out and tells the world how wonderful you are, you get social credibility and validity. It’s becoming more and more important to have advocates."

Pro tip : speak with your users regularly to get direct voice-of-the-customer (VoC) insights on what they love and what frustrates them on their journey. Place Hotjar Feedback widgets and Surveys at key website touchpoints like your homepage and landing pages to get valuable user insights on what you can improve. Use Hotjar’s survey templates to get inspiration for your survey questions. 

An example of an on-site Hotjar Survey

6. Map out the customer journey

Once your user and product research are complete and all roles are distributed, it’s time to map out the full customer journey.

First, map out an overarching customer journey by putting your key touchpoints in order and identifying how your various user personas interact with them. Then, home in on the details, looking at how customers engage with specific aspects of your website, product, or social media accounts. 

Breaking down the mapping process into smaller phases will ensure you don’t miss any key interactions. 

Here’s how an ecommerce brand could lay out general touchpoints, then narrow each down into more specific actions:

Pro tip : it’s helpful to think of the user journey in terms of different functions when mapping it out, like:

Connect: how are buyers connecting with your brand?

Attract: how are you convincing them to convert?

Serve: how are you serving customers when they want to purchase?

Retain: how are you promoting brand advocacy and customer retention ?

7. Test the customer journey

Once you’ve mapped out the customer journey, it’s time to take it for a spin. You can’t understand how your users move through customer touchpoints unless you test out the user flow yourself. 

Start with an informational Google search, then visit your website, check out your social media pages, and simulate the purchase process. This will help you get a better sense of how users interact with each touchpoint and how easy it is to move between them. 

Be sure to try out the journey from the standpoint of every relevant user persona. For an enterprise software company, this could mean looking at how decision-makers move through the user flow vs. the employees who’ll use your software day to day. 

By walking through the customer journey yourself, you can identify issues and difficulties that users may have to address them proactively. 

Try out the user flow with test users to get a realistic perspective of the user experience. Be sure to use focus groups that represent every one of your user personas. 

8. Use continuous research to refine your map 

Continuously map out, analyze, and evaluate the customer journey by observing users and getting their feedback. Hotjar Heatmaps and Recordings help you understand how your users are experiencing the customer journey on your website: create heatmaps to see whether users are clicking on CTAs or key buttons, and watch recordings to find out how they navigate once they reach your homepage.

Then, use Google Analytics to get an overview of your website traffic and understand how customers from different channels move through the user journey. 

Finally, once you have these combined user insights, use them to make changes on your website and create a user journey that is more intuitive and enjoyable.

Pitfalls to avoid during the customer journey mapping stages

Jamie Irwin , director & search marketing expert at Straight Up Search , says companies should avoid these three common mistakes when mapping out the customer journey:

Don't map out the entire customer journey at once

Don't forget about the ‘hidden journeys’

Don't make assumptions about customer behavior

To sidestep these common pitfalls: 

Start by mapping out the overall journey, and only drill down into more detail once you have a broader, higher-level overview of the customer journey

Factor in every way that customers interact with your brand, even the ones you don’t have as much visibility on, like ‘dark social’ communications about your brand shared in private channels. Talk to your users to find out what they’ve heard about your brand outside of public channels , and use sticky share buttons to keep track of when your content’s shared through email or social media messengers.

Take a data-informed approach: don’t assume you already know your users —test out your hypotheses with real users and qualitative and quantitative data. 

Follow proven steps to successfully map out the customer journey 

Take the time to understand your business goals and users, involve the right teams, and test frequently to consistently improve your customer journey and make the decisions that will help you map out an experience that will get you happy and loyal customers.

FAQs about customer journey mapping stages

What is the purpose of customer journey mapping.

Customer journey mapping helps you visualize how users interact with your business and product, from the moment they find it until long after they make their first purchase. 

The purpose of customer journey mapping is to gain insights into the buyer's journey to create a more enjoyable, streamlined, and intuitive experience for your customers.

What are the benefits of following a customer journey mapping process?

The main benefits of a customer journey mapping process are: : 

Building on tried-and-tested processes

Not missing any key steps

Considering all buyer personas

Keeping all relevant stakeholders involved

Creating a valuable customer journey map 

Improving user experience

What happens if you don’t follow key steps in customer journey mapping?

If you don’t follow key steps when mapping out the customer journey, your map likely won’t give you the insights you need to enhance the experience users have with your most important touchpoints —like your homepage, landing pages, CTAs, and product pages. 

This can result in high bounce rates, low conversion, and unsatisfied users who fail to become loyal customers.

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What is customer journey mapping?

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

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

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

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

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

Free Course: Customer journey management & improvement

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

It enables you to assess:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When exploring and visualizing the customer journey we are assessing:

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

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

Customer journey vs process flow

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

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

Getting started with customer journey map templates

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

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

Download our free journey mapping template here

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

Step 1 – Create a customer persona to test

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

What do you include? Start with these characteristics.

• Family status
• Professional goals
• Personal goals

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

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

Create a diverse team

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

Step 2 – Choose a customer journey for mapping

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

Step 3 – Work through the mapping process

Ask yourself the following:

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

Step 4 – Innovate

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

Then, test it.

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

Step 5 – Measure

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

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

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

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

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

Use solicited data to understand the voice of the customer

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

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

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

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

Unsolicited data

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

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

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

Why using solicited and unsolicited data is important data

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So when should you use customer journey mapping?

There are four main uses:

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

Take stock and take action

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

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

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

Orchestrate your customer journey

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

Improve your employee experience

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

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

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

With Qualtrics CustomerXM , you’ll:

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

Free course: Customer journey management & improvement

Related resources

Customer Journey

B2B Customer Journey 13 min read

Customer interactions 11 min read, consumer decision journey 14 min read, customer journey orchestration 12 min read, customer journey management 14 min read, customer journey stages 12 min read, buyer's journey 16 min read, request demo.

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Guide to Building a B2B SaaS Customer Journey Map

10 min read

A B2B SaaS customer journey map is key to creating a wholesome product experience for your customers.

To get it right, SaaS companies must step back and see the product from the customer’s viewpoint. Starting from their first point of contact to when they subscribe and eventually become raving fans of your product.

In this piece, we’ll break down what a SaaS customer journey map is all about, its importance, and practical steps for building one that boosts product adoption.

• A SaaS Customer Journey Map refers to the path a customer takes from the moment they discover your product till they become paid users.
• The SaaS customer journey consists of six different stages: awareness, acquisition , adoption , expansion , renewal , and advocacy .
• At the awareness stage, customers are searching for a solution to a problem.
• The acquisition comes when your target audience begins using your tool. Impress users with a seamless onboarding process to win this stage.
• The adoption stage is when users transition into paying customers.
• At the renewal stage, a customer has tried a product and is satisfied enough to renew their subscription.
• Expansion is the stage of upsells and feature upgrades for existing customers. Here, you’re trying to upsell your customer to upgrade to a premium account.
• In the advocacy stage, customers become true fans of your products. They act as referrals, answer questions and eventually, help you with user-generated content.

Steps to build your B2B SaaS customer journey map:

• Establish your company’s goals and align them to the intended customer journey mapping.
• Create your user persona to gather important information about your target audience.
• Identify important customer milestones for the journey you are mapping.
• Analyze existing gaps to uncover gaps that could cause friction
• Continuously collect user feedback and optimize your map for a more accurate result.

What is a SaaS customer journey map?

A SaaS customer journey map is the visual storyline of every interaction a customer has with your company and software. Typically, customer journey maps include touchpoints , emotions, pain points, and actions.

It’s not just about creating a timeline—it’s about encouraging empathy and understanding how customers’ needs and feelings fluctuate throughout their journey. Thanks to this shared understanding, teams can identify opportunities for improvement and innovation.

Why is it important to map your customer journey?

For SaaS companies, the customer journey map unravels the answers to questions about your customers. It shows you what problems they want to be solved and how you can help them.

It also helps you achieve the following:

Understand where customers get stuck and remove friction

A customer journey map helps you identify unhappy paths in the user experience .

Ask yourself: did a customer reach a milestone and get stuck there? For example, did they click on the “create an account” button but never finished the signup process? Identify the friction, and remove it.

Understanding what the next milestone is can help you pinpoint where users get stuck so you can remove friction and improve customer retention.

Enhance customer experience and prevent churn

Instead of generic in-app help, using a customer success journey map can help you anticipate your customer’s next steps to achieve success with your app

This means your communication strategy can focus on micro conversions , driving users to success with in-app guidance , or 1 on 1 help, etc, that’s specific and relevant to where the customer is in the journey.

By offering granular help when and where they need it, you decrease the risk of churn .

You can also monitor engagement to spot inactivity and proactively reach out to users when they show signs of churning. But first, you need to know what to monitor, and a journey map helps you understand that.

Boost customer lifetime value

Knowing where your customers are in the buying process allows you to always recommend upgrades that are contextual and relevant.

So, instead of randomly trying to upsell, with a journey map you’ll know when a customer has reached the point in their journey where an upsell would bring them more value.

Types of SaaS customer journey maps

There are four main types of customer journey maps, which include:

• Current State Map: this is mapped around the present state of the customer in their journey. It takes into consideration the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of the customers while interacting with your product.
• Future state map: this map is developed around predictions or projections of the customer’s experience with your product. It should be mapped after effecting the corrections based on insights gotten with your present state map.
• Day in the life map: this map illustrates your customer’s day-to-day activities outside their interaction with your product. It covers their overall lifestyle including their fun time, work time, etc.
• Empathy map: an empathy map dives deep into the customer’s behavior to create a personalized product experience. With an empathy map , you’ll dig down to the unique actions of your target persona from their own point of view.
• Service blueprint maps: this map accesses other types of maps to identify hidden elements that can disrupt the customer’s journey.
• Circular customer journey maps: this helps you visualize the customer journey in a loop or circle.

Stages in the SaaS customer journey maps

There are six stages involved in the SaaS customer journey, each of which comes with its own touchpoints.

Let’s look at them in detail.

Awareness and Consideration

The SaaS customer journey starts at the awareness stage. Here, your customers are triggered to search for a solution to a problem. It’s also when they first discover and develop an interest in your product through an ad, referral, review, or SERP results.

Think of this stage as an evaluation stage. Your customers are comparing you with competitors and evaluating their options.

Awareness and consideration stage touchpoint examples

• Reviews on review sites like G2, Capterra, etc
• Testimonials on your website
• Search engine result page
• Influencer marketing campaign
• Ads e.g social media ads, Google ads, etc
• Top of the funnel content on blogs
• Social media content
• Whitepapers
• Digital billboards

Here’s an example of a touchpoint of the awareness stage: a paid social media ad from PromoRepublic explaining their product benefits.

Acquisition

Acquisition comes next, after awareness and consideration. At this point in the process, your target audience signs up for a free trial.

Creating a seamless onboarding process is the ultimate way to win over your user at this stage. After all, it determines the first impression a user will have about your product.

Most times, the slightest hiccup here can make a user opt-out before they experience the ‘ aha ‘ moment or reach the adoption stage. This is why SaaS companies must invest in product-led marketing to paint users a picture of what to expect with a product and how it will work for them.

Acquisition stage touchpoint examples

• Free trial or freemium tier
• Demo requests
• Account registration and sign in
• SaaS comparison pages
• Middle-of-funnel blog posts
• Onboarding emails

A seamless onboarding experience can work wonders for how your users see your product, and whether they choose to become paying customers.

When users transition into paying customers, don’t leave them alone to figure things out for themselves. Provide in-app guidance to drive product adoption faster.

Use checklists to help users get quick wins during the customer onboarding process. Tooltips and hotspots are great for describing product features and directing the user on the right path.

Adoption stage touchpoint examples

• In-app notifications
• Video tutorials and webinars
• Virtual customer communities and forums
• Email sequences on more advanced usage of the product
• Self-serve resources, like a knowledge base

As many SaaS products use a subscription model to generate recurring revenue, this stage is a major determinant of whether or not a SaaS company breaks even.

This stage is especially important at the end of a free trial since this isn’t a subscription renewal , but the first purchase from your user.

To hit this stage, dig into your customer data to uncover what makes customers hesitate in their customer journeys. Then implement customer retention strategies to keep them.

Renewal stage touchpoint examples

• Sales calls (b2b SaaS pre-purchase)
• Educational and promotional emails (pre-purchase)
• In-app notifications and surveys (pre-purchase)

• Subscription purchase screen (moment of purchase)
• Account and billing features (post-purchase)

Expansion is the stage of upsells and feature upgrades for current customers. At this stage, you’re trying to achieve revenue growth without acquiring new customers.

An example of an upsell in SaaS is the tiered pricing model. Most SaaS companies offer multiple features—as part of different packages—to entice customers to opt for a more expensive plan.

It could also be getting them to increase the number of seats or users for products that come with a per-user charge.

To drive account expansion, start with a problem compass. Understand your users’ challenges and align your expansion strategy with their journey.

At this stage, you’ve unlocked the true fans of your products.

Because of how complex the SaaS customer journey is, advocacy can happen at any point of the customer lifecycle . Someone could be an avid reader of your company’s blog, fall in love with the content, and recommend your product—all without ever using it.

The probability of advocacy happening is higher with companies that have a product-led strategy. People have a first-hand experience with your product and see it in action without paying upfront.

Advocacy is better done by your customers; they act as referrals, answer prospect questions on your behalf, and eventually help you with user-generated content.

Advocacy stage touchpoint examples

• Social sharing
• Referral and loyalty programs
• Reviews and testimonials

Steps to build your B2B SaaS customer journey map

Building a customer journey map sounds simple, but how exactly can we build one that works?

Here are five steps to creating a successful SaaS customer journey map:

• Establish your company’s goals and objectives.
• Create and describe your target personas.
• Determine customer milestones and touchpoints for the journey stages you are mapping.
• Analyze gaps between existing strategies and expectations.
• Constantly improve and optimize your map.

Establish your company’s goals and objectives

Every product decision, campaign or strategy you come up with, should be in line with your company’s overall goals.

With that in mind, consider the final results you’ll like to get from the intended customer journey mapping.

In doing this, factor in the type of product you offer, the industry you play in, trends, and your customer insights. All of these will help you determine if the goals you set are realistic.

Here are some examples of objectives you may want to achieve with journey mapping:

• Generating more leads
• Increased conversion rate
• Reduced customer complaints
• Relaunching of brand messaging
• New feature or product update
• Shortened customer onboarding process

Create and describe your target personas

Your user persona is a fictitious representation of a subset of your target audience. This is based on factors like demographics, behavior, lifestyle, and more.

There is a multitude of ways to collect the information needed to create personas , and one of them is through in-app microsurveys .

Take note of your target audience. Are they the decision-makers or end-users? This way, you’ll know exactly who to design for. For instance, your end-users might be the social media team. Meanwhile, the decision-makers could be the marketing lead.

Determine customer milestones and touchpoints for the journey stages you are mapping

What are the main goals? What does the customer want to achieve, and what should they do to get to that stage?

Lincoln Murphy defines success milestones as “functional milestones within the product, but they won’t just be an activity for activity’s sake”.

They must be the result of meaningful activity and should be tied to other inputs to ensure that the customer is achieving the “desired outcome”.

For example, in a social media app, creating a new post is a functional milestone. So is reaching the activation point in SaaS. The point is, customers must engage with specific features to achieve this.

Analyze gaps between existing strategies and expectations

Finally, you need to determine what customers expect from each touchpoint, as well as how your company is currently performing.

For instance, your customers may expect advance notice and a seamless renewal process at the billing touchpoint. But what your company provides is a three-day notice, and it requires several manual steps to renew.

You can also check customer tickets and reviews for hidden clues. Likewise, you can collect feedback at multiple touchpoints with in-app surveys to listen to what your customers have to say.

Constantly improve and optimize your map

SaaS customer journey mapping is not a once-and-done deal. You need to continually update the information you’ve collected and iterate designs as you go. This way, your customers will have a better experience with your product.

Using product adoption tools like Userpilot can help you set specific goals. You can also add your milestones as your main goals.

Track in-app customer behavior and see where users get stuck and drop off in the journey and optimize the low-converting touchpoints.

By mapping the customer journey and carefully optimizing the critical touchpoints, you’re setting your product up for success.

And if you need a tool to build better product experiences without coding, sign up for a Userpilot demo to get started.

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How to Create a Customer Journey Map: Methods and Tips

5 minutes read

The realm of customer experience is vast and ever-changing. To navigate successfully, you need a compass to guide you. A  Customer Journey Map  can be that guide. This comprehensive map lays out your customers' experiences, from their first contact with your brand to their journey's end as loyal customers.

Creating an effective Customer Journey Map not only allows you to better understand your customers' needs, preferences, and pain points but also offers valuable insights for improving overall customer experience. This article will unravel the what, why, and how of creating a compelling  Customer Journey Map  that will help elevate your business to new heights.

Create Your Customer Journey Map Here

What is a Customer Journey Map?

In the simplest of terms, a  Customer Journey Map  is a visual representation that illustrates the steps your customers go through when interacting with your brand. This interaction could be anything from purchasing a product, using a service, or achieving a goal with your brand.

This map often spans multiple channels - offline and online - such as your website, social media platforms, emails, customer service, retail stores, etc. It pinpoints customer interactions (or touchpoints), captures their experiences at each touchpoint, identifies potential obstacles, and highlights opportunities for enhancement.

A well-crafted  Customer Journey Map  brings your customers' experiences to life by diving deep into their actions, thoughts, emotions, and motivations. It helps to keep the focus on customer-centricity and underscores where improvement in products or services can generate a significant positive impact.

Why Should You Use a Customer Journey Map?

Using a  Customer Journey Map  provides an abundance of benefits for your business. By illuminating the customer's journey in its entirety, it enables you to see your brand from the customer's perspective, helping to identify gaps between their expectations and their actual experiences.

This user-centric approach aids in understanding the path customers take before making a purchase. It offers valuable insights into their needs and behaviors, revealing touchpoints that might need optimization to ensure smoother customer experience.

Furthermore, mapping out the customer journey promotes cross-departmental collaboration within your organization. Each department gets a clearer picture of its role in the customer's journey, leading to more consistent experiences across different touchpoints.

Lastly, by revealing areas of friction in the customer experience, it presents opportunities to improve and innovate - essential components in staying competitive in today's digital world.

5 Steps to Create an Effective Customer Journey Map

Creating an effective and efficient  Customer Journey Map  requires a significant understanding of your customers and your business, careful planning, and a healthy amount of collaboration. To help navigate this process, let’s break down each step in detail.

1. Define Personas and Objectives

Before you start mapping the customer journey, you must know who your customers are. Are they tech-savvy millennials or middle-aged homemakers? What are their motivations, needs, behaviors, and pain points? Creating detailed customer personas helps you understand the specific groups of people you’re aiming to serve and allows for the crafting of personalized journey maps that resonate with them.

Simultaneously, it's crucial to outline what you aim to achieve with your map. Do you want to enhance customer experience, boost customer retention, or increase sales conversions? Having clear objectives will guide your mapping process and ensure that your efforts are targeted towards achieving those goals.

2. Map out Touchpoints

Touchpoints are the various points of interaction customers have with your brand across different channels. These can range from browsing your website or store, reading your blogs, interacting with your social media platforms, talking with customer service, or receiving marketing emails.

By identifying all these touchpoints, you capture the entirety of the customer journey and understand how customers interact with your brand at every stage. It’s crucial to be exhaustive in this process - even seemingly insignificant interactions can have a major impact on the customer experience.

3. Identify Moments of Truth

Moments of Truth are crucial points within the customer journey where customers form critical perceptions about your brand. These moments significantly influence their decision to continue their relationship with your brand or seek alternatives.

There are several types of Moments of Truth - the zero moment (when a customer first becomes aware of your brand or product), the first moment (first purchase or interaction), and the ultimate moment (where customer loyalty is won or lost). By highlighting these moments on your map, you can take the necessary actions to ensure that these interactions result in positive experiences.

4. Map out Customer Emotions

A Customer Journey Map is not just about identifying touchpoints and actions, but also about understanding how customers feel at each stage. Are they excited when they discover your products? Do they feel frustrated during the checkout process?

Mapping out these emotions provides a more comprehensive view of the customer journey. It provides opportunities to amplify positive emotions and find solutions for stages where customers experience negative emotions.

5. Design Actions

Finally, once you have charted out the complete Customer Journey Map, it's time to strategize. Use the insights gained from your map to design actions for improving the customer journey.

These actions could range from making it easier for customers to find information on your website, providing better training for your customer service team, personalizing marketing efforts based on individual customer preferences, or even overhauling aspects of your product or service to better meet customer needs. The ultimate goal is to create a more seamless and enjoyable journey that keeps customers coming back.

Create Your Customer Journey Map Now

Tips to Use a Customer Journey Map Template in Boardmix

The task of creating a Customer Journey Map can seem daunting, especially if you are starting from scratch. To simplify this process, using a template in Boardmix can be instrumental. Here are a few tips to maximize its use effectively.

1. Make Use of Customization

Boardmix's templates are not a one-size-fits-all solution. Every brand is unique, and so are its customers. So, the first rule of thumb is to customize the template according to your business needs. Modify the touchpoints, personas, objectives, or any other element in the map that needs tailoring. This ensures your Customer Journey Map accurately reflects your brand and target personas.

2. Embrace Collaborative Mapping

Boardmix allows for real-time collaboration, making it easier to pool ideas and insights from different team members. Leverage this feature to get diverse perspectives. The best maps come from cross-functional teams that can provide a well-rounded view of the customer experience.

3. Regular Updates

As with any business strategy, your Customer Journey Map should evolve with time. As customers' expectations and experiences change, so should your map. Ensure you make regular updates to reflect these changes and to keep abreast of evolving trends. It helps your business stay relevant and attuned to your customers' needs.

Embark on your journey to superior customer experience today! Use this guide and start creating your own effective  Customer Journey Map  in Boardmix . The path to customer-centric success awaits.

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BCG Matrix and VRIO Framework for How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map

Posted by Sophia Morgan on Jul-30-2018

The BCG matrix is a strategic management tool that was created by the Boston Consulting Group, which helps in analysing the position of a strategic business unit and the potential it has to offer. The matrix consists of 4 classifications that are based on two dimensions. These first of these dimensions is the industry or market growth. The other of these dimensions is the relative market share of the strategic business unit. Strategic business units are placed in one of these 4 classifications. The BCG matrix for How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map will help decide on the strategies that can be implemented for its strategic business units.

Strategic business units with high market growth rate and high relative market share are called stars. Businesses should invest in their stars and can implement vertical integration, market penetration, product development, market development, and horizontal integration strategies. Strategic business units with high market growth rate and low relative market share are called question marks. These strategic business units require close considerations whether the business should continue with them or divest. Strategic business units with low market growth rate but with high relative market share are called cash cows. The business should invest in these to maintain their relative market share. Lastly, the strategic business units with low market growth rate and low relative market share are called dogs. The business should divest these strategic business units.

BCG Matrix of How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map

The BCG Matrix for How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map will help How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map in implementing the business level strategies for its business units. The analysis will first identify where the strategic business units of How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map fall within the BCG Matrix for How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map.

• The financial services strategic business unit is a star in the BCG matrix of How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map. It operates in a market that shows potential in the future. How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map earns a significant amount of its income from this SBU. How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map should vertically integrate by acquiring other firms in the supply chain. This will help it in earning more profits as this Strategic business unit has potential.
• The Number 1 brand Strategic business unit is a star in the BCG matrix of How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map, and this is also the product that generates the greatest sales amongst its product portfolio. The potential within this market is also high as consumers are demanding this and similar types of products. How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map should undergo a product development strategy for this SBU, where it develops innovative features on this product through research and development. This will help How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map by attracting more customers and increases its sales.
• The Number 2 brand Strategic business unit is a star in the BCG matrix of How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map as How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map has a 20% market share in this category. It also the market leader in this category. The overall category is expected to grow at 5% in the next 5 years, which shows that the market growth rate is expected to remain high. How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map should use its current products to penetrate the market. This could be done by improving its distributions that will help in reaching out to untapped areas. This will help increase the sales of How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map.
• The supplier management service strategic business unit is a cash cow in the BCG matrix of How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map. This has been in operation for over decades and has earned How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map a significant amount in revenue. The market share for How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map is high, but the overall market is declining as companies manage their supplier themselves rather than outsourcing it. The recommended strategy for How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map is to stop further investment in this business and keep operating this strategic business unit as long as its profitable.
• The Number 3 brand strategic business unit is a cash cow in the BCG matrix of How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map. This is an innovative product that has a market share of 25% in its category. How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map is also the market leader in this category. The overall category has been declining slowly in the past few years. How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map has the power to influence the market as well in this category. It should, therefore, invest in research and development so that the brand could be innovated. This will help the category grow and will turn this cash cow into a star. The overall benefit would be an increase in sales of How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map.
• The international food strategic business unit is a cash cow in the BCG matrix for How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map. This business unit has a high market share of 30% within its category, but people are now inclined less towards international food. This change in trends has led to a decline in the growth rate of the market. The recommended strategy for How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map is to invest enough to keep this strategic business unit under operations. If it no longer remains profitable and turns into a dog, then How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map should divest this strategic business unit.

Question Marks

• The local foods strategic business unit is a question mark in the BCG matrix for How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map. The recent trends within the market show that consumers are focusing more towards local foods. Therefore, this market is showing a high market growth rate. However, How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map has a low market share in this segment. The recommended strategy for How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map is to invest in research and development to come up with innovative features. This product development strategy will ensure that this strategic business unit turns into a cash cow and brings profits for the company in the future.
• The Number 4 brand strategic business unit is a question mark in the BCG matrix for How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map. This strategic business unit is a part of a market that is rapidly growing. However, this strategic business unit has been incurring losses in the past few years. It has also failed in the attempts made at innovation by research and development teams. The recommended strategy for How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map is to divest and prevent any future losses from occurring.
• The confectionery strategic business unit is a question mark in the BCG matrix for How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map. The confectionery market is an attractive market that is growing over the years. However, How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map has a low market share in this attractive market. The low sales are as a result of low reach and poor distribution of How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map in this segment. The recommended strategy for How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map is to undergo market penetration, where it pushes to make its product present on more outlets. This will ensure increased sales for How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map and convert this strategic business unit into a cash cow.
• The plastic bags strategic business unit is a dog in the BCG matrix of How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map. This strategic business unit has been in the loss for the last 5 years. It also operates in a market that is declining due to greater environmental concerns. The recommended strategy for How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map is to divest this strategic business unit and minimise its losses.
• The Number 5 brand strategic business unit is a dog in the BCG matrix for How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map. This is operating in a market segment that is declining in the past 5 years. The company also has negative profits for this strategic business unit. However, it is expected that the market will grow in the future with environmental changes that are occurring. The recommended strategy for How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map is to invest in the business enough to convert into a cash cow. This will ensure profits for How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map if the market starts growing again in the future.
• The synthetic fibre products strategic business unit is a dog in the BCG matrix of How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map. The market for such products has been declining, and as a result of this decline, How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map has been facing a loss in the past 3 years. The market share for it is also less than 5%. The recommended strategy for How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map is to divest this strategic business unit to minimise any further losses.
• The artificially flavoured products strategic business unit is a dog in the BCG matrix for How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map. These products were launched recently, with the prediction that this segment would grow. However, with increasing health consciousness, people are now refraining from consumption of artificial flavours. The market is shrinking, and How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map has no significant market share. The recommended strategy for How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map is to call back this product.

Some of the strategic business units identified in the BCG matrix for How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map have the potential of changing from their current classification. For example, a dog changing to a cash cow. These have been identified in the BCG matrix of How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map and recommended strategies to ensure such change have also been made.

VRIO Framework

The VRIO Framework or VRIO analysis is a strategic management tool that is used to analyse a firm’s internal strengths and resources. It helps identify which one of its internal strengths and resources can be a source of sustained competitive advantage. The analysis is based on the idea that a firm’s internal resources are a source of sustained competitive advantage if they are valuable, rare, cannot be imitated by competition, and are organised to capture value for the organisation. The VRIO analysis requires looking at a firm's resources based on these 4 factors.

Based on the analysis, each resource can either provide a sustained competitive advantage, has a good competitive advantage, temporary competitive advantage, competitive parity or competitive disadvantage. A sustained competitive advantage exists when a resource is valuable, rare, non-imitable and organised. A good competitive advantage occurs if it is valuable, rare, and non-imitable. A temporary competitive advantage exists if it is valuable and rare. A competitive parity occurs if it is only valuable. Lastly, the resource is a competitive disadvantage if it is neither of the 4. The analysis takes place in this order by first assessing whether a resource is valuable, rare, imitable and organised.

Barney, J. (1991). Firm resources and sustained competitive advantage. Journal of management, 17(1), 99-120.

Barney, J. (2002). Gaining and Sustaining Competitive Advantage, 2nd ed. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ.

Cardeal, N., & Antonio, N. S. (2012). Valuable, rare, inimitable resources and organization (VRIO) resources or valuable, rare, inimitable resources (VRI) capabilities: What leads to competitive advantage?

Hambrick, D. C., MacMillan, I. C., & Day, D. L. (1982). Strategic attributes and performance in the BCG matrix—A PIMS-based analysis of industrial product businesses. Academy of Management Journal, 25(3), 510-531.

Jurevicius, O. (2013a). VRIO Framework. Retrieved from https://www.strategicmanagementinsight.com/tools/vrio.html

Jurevicius, O. (2013b). BCG growth-share matrix. Retrieved from https://www.strategicmanagementinsight.com/tools/bcg-matrix-growth-share.html

Knott, P. J. (2015). Does VRIO help managers evaluate a firm’s resources? Management Decision, 53(8), 1806-1822.

Seeger, J. A. (1984). Research note and communication. Reversing the images of BCG's growth/share matrix. Strategic Management Journal, 5(1), 93-97.

Smith, M. (2002). Derrick's Ice–Cream Company: applying the BCG matrix in customer profitability analysis. Accounting education, 11(4), 365-375.

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