How to Create a Customer Journey Map

TL;DR Summary

A customer journey map visualizes how customers interact with your brand. Map a customer journey by defining your goals, choosing a persona, listing touchpoints, dividing the journey into phases, and identifying pain points.

• Stages of the customer journey: Awareness, consideration, decision, follow-up, retention, and advocacy.
• Customer experience mapping: Shows the overall thoughts and feelings customers experience throughout the journey.
• Components of a customer journey map: Persona, journey phases, touchpoints, sentiments, pain points, opportunities, and ownership.

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How a customer interacts with your brand can be thought of as a journey. Imagine if you could trace a path across every customer touchpoint, from the initial contact to purchase. That’s what we mean by customer journey mapping.

But there’s more to it than that.

Let’s dive deeper into how to build a customer journey map. This article answers the following questions:

• What is a customer journey map?
• Why is customer journey mapping important?
• What should you include in a customer journey map?
• What are the different types of customer journey maps?
• How do you create an accurate customer journey map?
• What are the dos and don’ts of customer journey tracking?

Buckle up for an informative, eye-opening read.

What Is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a visualization of every step a customer takes when interacting with your business. It tells the story of how far customers go to purchase (or not purchase) from your brand.

Think of a customer journey map as a story-like diagram, showing every move the customer makes. While individual customers may follow different routes, there’s always an overarching and predictable pathway that most customers take.

Customer Journey Map Definition

A customer journey map is defined as a visual, story-driven representation of the step-by-step interactions a customer has with a brand over time.

How Journey Maps Visualize Touchpoints, Actions, Thoughts, and Emotions

Think of the customer journey map as a road trip itinerary. Your customer is the traveler.

The path they choose is basically the empty map. Every stop along the way (for snacks, gas, or rest) represents a touchpoint or interaction with your brand. Traffic, roadblocks, and bumps are customer pain points. And the scenic views are positive customer experiences.

At the end of the trip, you can trace out the traveler’s experience. Where were they frustrated or happy? And did they get what they wanted? You can also read the thought processes that led to certain actions or decisions.

That’s basically how a customer journey map works.

Customer Journey Map vs. Customer Experience Map vs. Service Blueprint

All three concepts are somewhat related. But each measures different customer relationship metrics.

A customer journey map helps you understand customer actions, thoughts, and emotions when interacting with your brand. It shows you what customers go through to achieve certain goals.

A customer experience journey map captures a broader view of the overall experience throughout the customer journey. It paints the whole picture of experiences from a customer’s perspective. CX maps are primarily used to identify pain points and gauge customer satisfaction.

A service blueprint visualizes the entire process of service delivery. The map details how a service really works. It shows what customers get, how they get it, and the behind-the-scenes processes that make it all possible.

RELATED ARTICLE — Ideal Customer Profile

Why Customer Journey Mapping Matters

Should you really bother with customer journey mapping?

Well, yes! In fact, you should make journey mapping a priority.

Businesses are always looking for ways to improve customer experience and satisfaction. You can’t do that without knowing how customers actually interact with your brand.

Customer journey mapping helps you in four main ways.

Identify Friction Across the Customer Experience

In a PwC survey, 29% of customers said they stopped buying from a brand after just one bad experience. Customers truly care about the experience. Some experts even argue that customer experience matters more than pricing. And in some cases, that’s true.

Mapping out the customer journey helps you identify potential culprits for customer frustrations. It shows you where customers get stuck, improvise workarounds, or leave altogether. With such visibility, you can smooth the customer journey to give the best experience.

Align Marketing, Sales, Support, and Operations

Customer journey maps are full of actionable insights. Tracing the customer journey essentially puts you in the customer’s shoes. Looking at the business from that perspective can reveal critical areas of improvement.

For instance, you may learn how to streamline operations or offer better customer support. It helps with sales and marketing too. You can figure out tactics that speed customers along the buyer’s journey.

Improve Conversion, Retention, and Customer Satisfaction

Mapping customer pathways reveals places where customers get stuck or turn around. These might be processes that slow conversions or cause churn.

From there, you can work out how to eliminate these roadblocks. The results are better retention, conversion, and satisfaction rates.

Prioritize Investments Based on Customer Pain Points

Understanding the customer journey helps you identify high-impact CX efforts. In other words, it highlights strategies that directly address customer pain points.

Say customers are getting stuck waiting for a payment to approve. You can see that as a pain point on the map. And the obvious solution is to invest in a faster payment system.

What a Customer Journey Map Should Include

Customer journey maps vary widely among businesses. The same business can even map multiple journeys for different types of customers.

Regardless, all customer journeys have seven key components.

Actor or Persona

The actor is the customer going on the journey. This could be a walk-in customer, a new lead, or a returning client.

The persona provides a specific point of view or pathway.

Scenario and Customer Goal

What is the actor trying to do? Also, what are the circumstances surrounding the action?

The scenario and goals describe the particular situation and expectations that the map follows. For instance, the map might be tracing the exact pathway a returning customer takes to upgrade a service subscription.

Journey Phases

Customer journeys have phases or stages. Those phases depend on the scenario. For example, a typical software purchase journey may follow these five phases:

• Awareness
• Research
• Trial
• Negotiation
• Signup
• Payment
• Implementation

Touchpoints and Channels

Touchpoints and channels are the actual elements that the customer interacts with. They commonly include sales reps, business website, social media, payment systems, apps, and communication lines.

Customer Actions, Questions, Thoughts, and Emotions

These are the actor’s thoughts, behaviors, decisions, feelings, and concerns throughout the journey. They are captured in every stage of the journey. This is how you can picture what goes on in the customer’s mind as they interact with your business.

Pain Points and Moments of Truth

Pain points are the frustrations that customers experience along the way. They normally occur due to delays, dissatisfaction, or misdirection.

Moments of truth are critical turning or inflection points in the customer journey. In these pivotal moments, the actor takes make-or-break steps that dictate how the journey proceeds. For example, a customer demos a service and immediately decides not to follow through with the purchase.

Opportunities, Owners, and Success Metrics

“Owners” refers to those responsible for specific journey phases or pain points. The list of owners may include CX teams, sales reps, developers, or marketing teams.

Opportunities are the insights and revelations gained from mapping. When a map shows you an area needing improvement, that’s an opportunity.

Success metrics represent your ideal vision of the customer journey. A smooth customer journey, for instance, might translate to more conversions, sales, and revenue.

RELATED ARTICLE — How to Track Customer Feedback

Common Types of Customer Journey Maps

Customer journey maps come in various shapes and forms. But generally, we have four main flavors of customer journey maps.

Current-State Journey Map

This is the most common type of journey map. It depicts what customers currently do, feel, and think when interacting with your business. It’s a here-and-now kind of map.

It gives you a real-time snapshot of the ups and downs of the customer journey.

Future-State Journey Map

A future-state map predicts how customers will act, behave, think, or feel when interacting with the business at some point in the future.

This type of map is often used to visualize journeying scenarios for new offerings or customer segments. It helps businesses design customer journeys ahead of product launches or changes to service delivery.

Day-in-the-Life Journey Map

This type of map explores or studies the day-to-day life of an actor. In this case, the actor can be a potential customer, existing customer, or the general public. It takes journey mapping well outside interaction with your business.

Mainly, day-in-the-life mapping is used for market research. The map can be tuned to show unmet needs, market niches, and business opportunities.

Service Blueprint

A service blueprint is sort of like the other side of the journey mapping coin. It gives you a backstage view of the clockwork that makes the customer journey possible. The idea is to map out internal processes such as employee action, logistics, and technologies.

With a service blueprint, you’re basically mapping out the resources and processes that build customer journeys.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map Step-by-Step

Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating a customer journey map.

Define the Objective and Scope

Start by stating the purpose of the map. You can trace customer journeys for many different reasons, including:

• Accelerate conversions
• Identify customer pain points
• Improve customer satisfaction
• Align marketing strategies
• Optimize service delivery

What do you hope to get from the customer journey map? Your answer will determine the mapping approach.

Choose the Customer Persona or Segment

Next, choose the persona you want to investigate. Draw the persona from your customers’ demographic. The persona may be a particular type or segment of customers.

The key here is to be very specific. Create a detailed persona that ideally represents a relevant group of customers.

Gather Qualitative and Quantitative Customer Research

Research customer behavior to get a clear picture of what they do when engaging with your business. The research will, of course, focus on the persona you’ve chosen to map.

Gather as much customer data as possible. Learn things like customers’ entry points, what they buy, what they normally ask, and the pages they visit on your website. You can do so through surveys, web analytics, interviews, transaction logs, etc.

List Touchpoints Across the Full Journey

Find all the ways that the persona interacts with your brand. List both in-person and virtual touchpoints. Again, these could be web pages, sales reps, support staff, chatbots, or mobile apps.

Organize the Journey Into Phases

By this point, you should have a good idea of what the customer journey looks like.

Now break it down into distinct phases. The boundary between two phases is where the customer’s goals, mindset, or behavior change, for instance, from researching a product to trying it out.

Map Actions, Emotions, Questions, and Pain Points

Use data to quantify what customers feel, do, or think at the various journey stages. Are they excited, happy, confused, frustrated, surprised, etc.? Draw the data from analytics, support tickets, or your customer feedback software.

Doing this should reveal any hidden pain points.

Identify Gaps, Bottlenecks, and Ownership

Look for roadblocks, bottlenecks, and gaps in the customer journey. Check for anything that slows or hinders the flow. These are the pain points that we’re talking about.

While at it, identify who owns each of the pain points.

Prioritize Opportunities by Customer and Business Impact

Once you’ve mapped out the pain points, identify opportunities for improvement. Work out what must be done to overcome any hurdles in the customer journey.

You might not be able to fix everything all at once. So, prioritize opportunities with the greatest impact on customer experience and business success.

Validate the Map With Customers and Internal Teams

Check whether your map is actually accurate. Go over the visualization with internal teams and departments. Also, compare the map to what you see with real-life customers.

In short, ensure the journey map is grounded in reality, not assumptions.

Turn Insights Into an Action Plan

The final step is using what you’ve learned to improve the business. Devise an action plan to turn those insights into impactful business decisions.

Align the action plan with the goals you had at the beginning. That should bring you full circle, right back to where you started.

Customer Journey Map Example for a Service Business

Curious what a journey map looks like?

Let’s look at a simple example of a service business journey map. For this example, we’ll use a plumbing business.

Awareness

The customer becomes aware of the plumbing company. They learn about it after searching the web and social media for local plumbers.

Consideration

The customer starts thinking about hiring the plumber for a piping job. At this point, they are actively exploring the plumber’s website and have already requested a quote.

Booking and Purchase

After mulling over the plumber’s quote and reputation, the client makes a decision. They opt to go with the plumber and book a site visit. The site visit goes well, and the client decides to close the deal.

Service Delivery

The client now waits as the plumber lays the pipes. After the job is done, the client seems pleased with the results. A payment is made, and the plumber goes their way.

Follow-up, Retention, and Advocacy

The plumber keeps in touch with the client via email. Every once in a while, they get called in for routine maintenance and minor repairs. The client even recommends the plumber to other homeowners in the neighborhood.

RELATED ARTICLE — What Is a CSAT Score?

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

Let’s discuss more about how to do customer journey mapping. In this section, we’ll cover the top tips and best practices for journey mapping.

Map One Persona and Scenario at a Time

It’s okay to have more than one persona. But don’t trace them all on one map. Do one persona and one scenario at a time.

Otherwise, your map will be all over the place. And it will be difficult, if not impossible, to capture any meaningful insights into the customer journey.

Use Real Customer Data Instead of Assumptions

Draw the map using real customer data. Set aside any assumptions, intuitions, or guesses. This is the only way to get an accurate map.

Include Emotional Highs and Lows

Do not forget to capture customer emotions at every stage of the journey. Remember, customer sentiment changes throughout the experience. One minute, they’re casually navigating your website, and the next, they’re cursing at a declined credit card payment.

These emotional highs and lows are clues to identifying pain points.

Assign Owners and Metrics to Every Improvement Opportunity

Once you find an improvement opportunity, get someone on it immediately. More importantly, make it clear what must be fixed and why.

Say, for instance, clients are having trouble scheduling appointments online. Get the web developer to sort out the issue. Explain that the booking should be seamless, quick, and intuitive.

Revisit the Map as Customer Behavior Changes

Customer journeys are not set in stone. For one, changes in customer behavior can affect how they interact with your business. Also, some internal changes may disrupt your service blueprint and subsequently the customer pathways.

Review the map every time such changes happen. Check how the map gets affected and make any necessary improvements.

FAQs About Creating a Customer Journey Map

How do you create a customer journey map?

To create a customer journey map, start by defining your goals, building buyer personas, and listing touchpoints. Then break down the journey into phases, study customer sentiments, and identify pain points.

What should be included in a customer journey map?

A customer journey map should include the following elements:

• Persona or actor
• Journey phases
• Touchpoints
• Actions, thoughts, and feelings
• Pain points
• Opportunities
• Moments of truth
• Ownership

What are the stages of customer journey mapping?

A typical customer journey encompasses awareness, consideration, decision, follow-up, retention, and advocacy.

How often should you update a customer journey map?

Update the customer journey map every time customer behavior changes. Make updates, too, when internal changes affect customer interactions.

What data helps with digital customer journey mapping?

Qualitative and quantitative customer data are essential for accurate journey mapping. This data may come from web analytics, CRM reports, customer surveys, support logs, and sales transactions.

Conclusion: Use Journey Maps to Turn Customer Insight Into Better Experiences

Customer journey maps are invaluable tools for enhancing customer experience. If done correctly, journey mapping reveals valuable insights for high-impact improvements. And that starts with using the right tools and data.

Use digital tools to get relevant customer data for accurate journey mapping. Listen360 is a good place to start. It’s an all-in-one customer data and experience platform ideal for service-based businesses. You get a single platform that does it all, from capturing leads to managing customer feedback.

Start turning customer data and insights into better experiences with digital customer journey mapping. Book a Listen360 demo today and see what we mean.