The customer journey is a long and often unpredictable road. Understanding it can be even more complicated.
That’s why customer journey maps were invented: to understand the roadmap of a customer, from the very first touchpoint throughout the lasting life of their relationship with your business.
Customer journey maps can be an invaluable resource for companies, from marketing to sales to UX, and are known to help businesses increase their ROI by 13–22% if done correctly.
Below we cover customer journey maps from top to bottom, their importance, characteristics, and review examples, along with what you need to make your own.
Key takeaways:
Customer journey mapping is a strategic (and successful) approach to truly understanding your customers.
There are real and valuable business reasons to journey map.
There are six basic types of customer journey maps.
Customer touchpoints are every instance of interaction or engagement that happens along the journey.
There are current- and future-state customer journey maps that can help predict future behavior.
What is a customer journey map?
A customer journey map (sometimes called a user journey map, UX map, or CJM) is a visualization of a customer’s experience with your brand, from awareness to purchase and beyond.
Customer journey mapping lets you create personalized experiences across all touchpoints—for every individual—across all channels.
Companies can use this shared understanding to identify opportunities for innovation and improvement.
These maps can be simple or complex, depending on what you're looking to gain from them.
Why do you need a customer journey map?
For any company, a customer journey map helps to enhance the customer experience and increase customer loyalty.
A customer journey map can prove invaluable for optimizing across multiple departments—marketing, sales, product, and customer service—in many, many ways. Mapping your customer journey can help you:
Promote a customer-centric culture internally and externally
Identify your ideal buyer and connect with customer needs
Glean insights into your audience that can drive revenue by evaluating customer’s motivations
Improve sales funnels & conversion rates authentically
Amplify customer experience by understanding the customer’s perspective
Reduce customer support tickets by locating customer pain-points
Aid in marketing campaigns
Generate repeat business
Decrease customer churn and increase customer lifetime value
Together, these advantages translate into higher sales for your business.
Characteristics of customer journey maps
A typical customer journey map includes:
Actors
Actors—or potential profiles of customers—usually align with personas and their actions in the map are rooted in data. These actors will be the foundation of your map, and they will dictate the actions needed to create the desired outcome.
Customer personas and buyer personas: What’s the difference?
A buyer persona is a profile that showcases your ideal customer based on existing customer data and market research. Buyer personas help humanize the ideal customer you are trying to attract, which helps you understand them better and pick the right marketing strategy to convert them.
A buyer persona is your ideal customer—they’re in research mode. You can have more than one buyer persona for your company, and understanding this buyer is the key to creating a successful customer experience. This buyer will turn into your customer.
Here’s what makes up your buyer persona:
Demographics—including personal, professional, and specific (age, gender, location, education, income, marital status, skills, routines, etc.)
Goals—including personal and professional, priorities, and challenges
Values—including personal and professional, and what they find to be important in products and companies
Preferences—including the content they consume, their communication choices, communities, groups, or associations, and how they spend their day, on and offline
All of these characteristics make up customer journey maps on the buying path.
Journey phases
Journey phases are the different high-level stages in the customer roadmap. They provide organization for the rest of the information in the journey map (actions, thoughts, and emotions).
The stages will vary from scenario to scenario, and each organization will usually have data to help it determine what these phases are for a given scenario. Often you will see awareness, research, evaluation, and decision making in the customer phases.
Customer expectations
Journey maps are best for scenarios that involve a sequence of events, describe a process, or might involve multiple channels.
Pain points are a specific problem that customers or prospective customers of your business are experiencing in the industry.
Scenarios can be real (for existing products and services) or anticipated—for products that are yet in the design stage.
Actions, mindset, and sentiment
Every customer has a particular action that they take, because of a mindset that they have and will express it in their own sentiment.
Actions: When a customer engages with your brand with a purpose.
Mindset: Correspond to users' thoughts, questions, motivations, and information needs at different stages in the journey.
Emotions: How customers feel about your brand, whether positive, negative, or neutral. Plot these emotions in a single line across the journey phases, signaling the emotional highs and lows of the experience.
Opportunities
Opportunities of a customer journey map are desired outcomes. Maps should include key components, which can depend on the goal of the journey-mapping initiative.
Opportunities are also insights gained from mapping—they speak to how the user experience can be optimized.
To create a customer journey map, identify the personas, map the triggers that lead to desired outcomes, and discuss opportunities.
What are customer journey touchpoints?
Customer journey touchpoints are individual transactions through which the customer interacts with a business.
Customer journey touchpoints for omnichannel brands are everywhere, here are a few examples:
Social media posts
Product demos
Live chats
Advertisements
Brick and mortar visits
Website visits
You’ll also have the added returning customer touchpoints to consider—like how engaged they are with your product, if they are returning to your website or if they are attending your events for the second or third time.
Examples of customer touchpoints
Identifying each touchpoint is crucial for creating a customer journey map that will drive a better customer experience. Once you’ve identified the touchpoints, list out possible customer actions for each.
Some actions that derive from customer touchpoints might be:
Downloading an ebook
Clicking on your FAQ
Requesting a demo or call
Subscribing to your blog
Clicking a paid ad
It’s important to know which touchpoints to invest time and resources into. Your map maps out the areas you can improve, retain and scale.
Types of customer journey maps
Each customer journey map has a different objective and business focus. There are six types to familiarize yourself with:
Current state—These illustrate what customers do, think, and feel as they interact with your business currently.
Future state—These illustrate what customers will do, think, and feel as they interact with your business in the future.
Day in the life—These examine everything that customers or prospects do, think, and feel (within a specific area), whether that involves your product or not.
Service blueprint—This is a diagram that usually starts with a basic version of an existing or future state journey map.
Circular—These are used for subscription-based models to visualize the customer journey as a circle or loop. This helps reinforce the importance of customer retention and lifetime value.
Empathy—These are used to create a shared understanding around the wants, needs, thoughts, and actions of a customer.
Journey map variations
Journey maps are meant to be used as a strategic planning tool. Use these definitions to guide you towards aspects of other methods that your team has not previously considered.
Journey map vs. Experience map
A journey map is specific to a product or service, while an experience map is more general and can be used outside of a business's scope.
Since experience maps are more generic in nature, they can also be used to find pain points in a product or service for a future journey map.
Journey map vs. Service blueprint
If journey maps are a product of experience maps, they will need a blueprint to direct them there.
Service blueprints are a continuation of journey maps in the service industry. They lead the roadmap for service-based customer journeys.
Journey map vs. User story map
User stories are used in Agile to plan features or functionalities, much like a future customer journey map.
In the user story map case, each feature is condensed down to a deliberately brief description from a user’s point of view. The typical format of a user story is a single sentence:
“As a [type of user], I want to [goal], so that [benefit].”
How to create a customer journey map
To create a customer journey map, it helps to have an idea of the steps involved. You can break the process of creating a customer journey map down into the following steps:
Define—Define your map goals with the customer’s journey in mind and your business goals at the finish line.
Describe—Describe your customers and personas in detail from all aspects of their lives.
Determine—Identify customer touchpoints from the beginning of the roadmap of engagement with your brand.
Design—Lay out the customer journey every step of the way.
Designate—Mark customer milestones, motivations, frustrations, and turning points.
Decide—Flag events that require action and make the necessary arrangements to fix any errors.
Deploy—Adjust and optimize for a smoother customer experience.
Customer journey map templates
Having a template is a great way to get started. There are a few different templates to choose from:
Current state customer journey map
The current state journey map visualizes the current experience with your product or service. It involves defining the scope of the customer experience with customer touchpoints.
This type of customer journey map is designed with the considerations, thoughts, feelings, and actions of your customers in mind. Current state mapping is a practical approach to identify existing pain points and create a shared awareness of the end-to-end customer experience.
Day-in-the-life customer journey mapping
A day-in-the-life journey map is another simple grid map based on time, created especially for the daily grind of the customer. Instead of different journey stages, it represents times in the day related to actions based on decisions in the path of purchasing.
This template helps you visualize your customer’s daily routine even if these actions are outside your company. It typically is organized chronologically to systematically show the course of the habits of the day.
Day-in-the-lifes are great for giving you insights into all the thoughts, needs, and pain points a customer experiences throughout their day. You can use this type of map to evaluate when your product or service will be most valuable in your customer’s day.
Future-state customer journey map
With a future-state journey map template, your goal is to learn how your customers feel about a new product launch or about how they will require your service in the future.
Future-state journey mapping is a useful approach to explore possible customer expectations and to create new experiences. Mapping out a future customer journey helps to align your team around a common goal—the betterment of the customer experience.
Service blueprint customer journey map
A service blueprint helps you design a roadmap of your service process—much like building a house. The goal is to be able to make projected changes to the service where needed and to be able to visualize each step in the eyes of the customer.
Service blueprint maps reflect the perspective of the organization and its employees and visualize the things that need to happen behind the scenes in order for the customer journey to take place.
Service blueprints are created when making procedural changes, or when trying to pinpoint solutions to roadblocks in the customer journey.
Circular customer journey map
A circular customer journey map is just that—circular instead of linear or graph-like to showcase a different type of business model. For instance, a SaaS company may find it more useful to visualize the customer journey as a loop or wheel.
This subscription-based journey map does a nice job of portraying both the customer interactions and sentiments, as well as their journey from awareness to purchase.
Empathy customer journey map
The empathy journey map is a bit different because it aligns with the customer's feelings and emotions. Empathy is a big factor in the customer journey and this template is designed to help teams align their customer journey mapping exercise with these types of needs.
With empathy, you can get into your customer’s shoes and truly feel what they feel as it pertains to your product or service.
Customer journey map tools
As with anything, you’ll need customer journey mapping tools to help you. The key is to find the right tool that works with your team and workflow.
Here are a few tools to consider:
With the right map and the right tools, you can overcome roadblocks and open a path to scalability and success.
Enhance your journey mapping process with customer intelligence. Look at data points like heatmaps, scroll maps, and other insights you can glean from session replay. Combining these quantitative and qualitative insights will help you in your journey mapping process.
Using journey maps to drive organizational change
It may not be easy to get buy-in to support the changes in strategic planning that result from customer journey mapping.
You can use what insights you’ve gleaned from the current state journey map in these beneficial ways:
Align your organization around the customer viewpoint. Engage with each department and set up a commitment to put the customer experience moments top of mind with an initiative for growth.
Enlist team members and partners to generate empathy for customers. Use your journey map to bring together relevant teams to train on customer experience best practices.
Supplement a new strategy with internal communications that encourage better customer service. As new initiatives roll out, use internal channels to communicate how you’re improving the experience of the customer, and how team members can help.
Optimize your user journeys with FullStory
Understanding your users' digital experience and optimizing your most important touchpoints can be make-or-break.
With FullStory Journeys, you can easily see how users explore your site or app and see step-by-step page navigations and other key interactions along the way. This lets you identify if users are using your site how you intended; what the most common navigation paths are; and how users typically arrive at your most critical pages.
It's no longer a guessing game—it's data-driven and actionable.
FullStory's DXI platform combines the quantitative insights of customer journeys and product analytics with picture-perfect session replay for complete context that helps you uncover opportunities.
Sign up for a free 14-day trial to see how FullStory can help you combine your most invaluable quantitative and qualitative insights and eliminate blind spots.
