How to Use Customer Journey Maps (CJMs) for Business Success

Mapping a customer journey is a pivotal tool companies can leverage to understand better how to turn a customer into a loyal, long-term prospect. In simple terms, a journey map allows a business to contextualize its customer’s experience by identifying the steps a customer goes through while interacting with their service or product.

It leads to the discovery of which areas the customers find troublesome (known as pain points), and those are then applied when considering how to optimize the product by the UX design team.

With a revitalized design based on understanding this interaction, companies will improve their services or products, leading to higher customer satisfaction rates and securing future business from the targeted base. Studies have shown that upsell and cross-sell revenues by companies who engage in journey mapping increase by as much as 79% over those who do not. This guide will dive into the customer journey mapping artform, allowing your business to use the collected customer data more effectively to enhance customer experiences.

What Is a Customer Journey Map?

From a holistic standpoint, a customer journey map (or CJM) visualizes the customer’s interaction with a business from start to finish. This affords businesses insights into what motivates their customers, what they need, and what they expect from the product or service. A customer journey map helps businesses better understand customers, spot potential concerns, improve customer retention, and make better business decisions.

Customer journey maps have utility across sectors. A visual map of customer interaction routes with the company and its product(s) enables a more detailed understanding of how customers behave throughout their experiences, whether for UX design, marketing, or customer support reasons.

With this information, companies may adjust their goods to the needs of their clients and improve their overall experience. Happy customers will return and make purchases from the business again, allowing the organization to reap the financial rewards.

Source: NNGroup

The first step in a journey map is the customer’s product discovery. Still, other typical touchpoints generally include researching the product, deciding to make the purchase, making said purchase, obtaining it, and everything that comes after the sale. Customers may experience pain points at any time during this process, so the business can use the CJM to improve the necessary part(s).

Perhaps even more pertinent than the steps customers take during their interaction is how they feel about the product and whether they believe they are getting what they need. If a business can tailor the improvements to those needs, the customer experience will improve, driving the customer’s loyalty and engagement.

For instance, if a customer is trying to use the business’s website to research a product but finds this difficult, key adjustments to the website navigation tactics and research areas can alleviate this frustration. As a result, customers will have an easier time finding what they need, driving satisfaction up.

When a business understands its customers’ experiences, it allows them to adjust and, in turn, acts as a tool that bolsters the meaningful nature of its relationship with that business. CJM illuminates those areas that need improvement along the customer’s journey, generates more positive experiences, and, over time, allows users to return as loyal customers while referring others, which then grows the business.

Customer Journey Mapping Benefits

The primary benefit of CJMs is the ability to identify areas where customers encounter challenges and resolve them with targeted changes, which, in turn, bolsters customer satisfaction. By providing a tighter and more concentrated understanding of customer behaviors, businesses can employ more strategic tactics to improve the customer’s experience.

This includes multi-channel improvements, process streamlining, and other operational optimizations. Understanding and adapting to customer expectations is crucial to ensure the journey maps align with customer experiences and behaviors.

Journey maps also open opportunities for a business to grow and scale. With a deeper understanding of the needs of a target audience, companies can better personalize their offerings.

Source: Zapier

Observation and study of CJMs also inform businesses about the best ways to launch products and engage in marketing campaign strategies. This can be done in real-time, employing customer feedback to make the necessary adjustments or modifications and more efficient resource allocation, ultimately leading to a higher return on investment.

Therefore, every improvement CJMs offer serves a business on multiple fronts, from loyalty building to long-term profitability.

Customer Journey Stages

Awareness Stage

The awareness stage is the initial phase of the customer journey, where potential customers first recognize a problem or need that your product or service can address. During this stage, customers are actively seeking information and solutions, often conducting research, reading reviews, and engaging with your brand’s marketing efforts. As a business, it’s crucial to create awareness about your brand, product, or service through various marketing channels, such as social media, content marketing, and advertising. By effectively capturing attention and providing valuable information, you can guide potential customers toward considering your offerings.

Consideration Stage

In the consideration stage, customers have identified their needs and are now evaluating different options to solve their problems. They may compare your product or service with those of your competitors, read reviews, and ask for recommendations from friends and family. As a business, it’s crucial to provide valuable content, such as blog posts, videos, and case studies, to educate customers about your product or service and demonstrate its benefits. By offering detailed and helpful information, you can position your brand as a trusted resource and make it easier for customers to see the value in choosing your solution.

Source: Vendasta

Decision Stage

The decision stage is where customers have narrowed down their options and are ready to make a purchase. They may contact your customer service team to ask questions, request a demo, or seek additional information. As a business, it’s essential to have a seamless and efficient sales process in place, including a user-friendly website, clear pricing, and a responsive customer service team. Ensuring that customers have a positive experience during this critical stage can significantly impact their final decision and increase the likelihood of a successful conversion.

Retention Stage

The retention stage is when customers make a purchase and use your product or service. During this stage, it’s essential to provide excellent customer service, offer support and training, and encourage customers to provide feedback. As a business, you can use this stage to build a loyal customer base by delivering value, resolving issues promptly, and showing appreciation for the business. By maintaining a strong relationship with your customers and addressing their needs, you can enhance their overall experience and encourage repeat purchases.

Loyalty Stage

The loyalty stage is where customers become repeat customers and become loyal to your brand. They may recommend your product or service to others, provide positive reviews, and continue to make purchases. As a business, it’s essential to continue delivering value, offering loyalty programs, and recognizing and rewarding loyal customers. By doing so, you can create a loyal customer base that will drive growth and revenue for your business. Loyal customers not only contribute to your bottom line but also act as brand advocates, helping to attract new customers through word-of-mouth and positive endorsements.

By understanding these customer journey stages, businesses can create a customer journey map that accurately reflects the customer’s experience and identifies areas for improvement. By addressing pain points and delivering value at each stage, businesses can increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention, ultimately driving growth and revenue.

What Is Included in a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a comprehensive visual representation that illustrates a customer’s various stages while interacting with a brand, from initial awareness to post-purchase.

It typically encompasses several essential elements, such as customer personas, touchpoints, emotions, and pain points, each contributing to a holistic understanding of the customer experience.

Customer personas (or buyer or user personas) are detailed profiles that help to identify and understand the target audience, including demographic information, behavioral patterns, goals, and challenges. These personas enable businesses to tailor their strategies and communication to meet their audience’s needs and preferences.

Touchpoints are all the instances where customers interact with the brand, whether online through websites and social media or offline through physical stores and customer service interactions. Identifying and mapping these touchpoints ensures businesses optimize each interaction to enhance the overall customer experience.

Source: XM

Mapping emotions involves tracking the customer’s experiences and feelings at each journey stage. This provides deep insights into the customer’s emotional highs and lows, highlighting moments of joy, frustration, or confusion. Understanding these emotions allows businesses to create more empathetic and effective strategies.

Finally, highlighting pain points is crucial for recognizing areas where customers encounter difficulties or dissatisfaction. By identifying these challenges, businesses can address and resolve issues promptly, ensuring a more seamless and enjoyable customer experience.

Overall, a well-constructed customer journey map is a valuable tool for businesses to understand, enhance, and optimize the customer experience, fostering greater loyalty and satisfaction.

Customer Journey Mapping Process

The customer journey mapping process is all about getting into your customer's shoes and seeing your business from their point of view. It’s a way to track every step they take and every emotion they feel as they interact with your brand so you can make sure their experience is smooth, enjoyable, and memorable. Let’s break down how to create a customer journey map that really captures the heart of your customer's experience.

Step 1: Define Your Objectives

First things first—why are you making a customer journey map? Whether you want to boost customer satisfaction, improve your sales process, or figure out why people aren’t coming back, having a clear goal will help guide your focus. It ensures that everything you learn from the journey map turns into real, meaningful improvements.

Step 2: Identify Customer Personas

You can’t understand the customer journey without knowing who your customers are. Create customer personas—fictional but realistic characters that represent your key customer types. Use real data about their age, interests, challenges, and behaviors to build these personas. This helps you see the journey through the eyes of the actual people you’re trying to serve.

Step 3: Map Out the Stages of the Journey

Next, break the journey down into stages, like Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Onboarding, and Loyalty. Each stage is like a chapter in the customer’s story with your brand. Understanding what they need and feel during each chapter helps you provide the right support to keep them moving forward.

Step 4: Identify Customer Touchpoints

Touchpoints are all the different places and moments where customers interact with your brand—your website, social media, customer service calls, or even in-store visits. List all these touchpoints because they’re the moments that shape your customer’s experience. Knowing where they’re connecting with you lets you see the bigger picture of their journey.

Step 5: Document Customer Actions

For each stage of the journey, outline the actions customers are taking. Are they researching your product? Adding something to their cart? Calling customer support? Documenting these steps helps you see where customers might get stuck and where you can make things easier.

Source: Service Design Show

Step 6: Capture Customer Emotions and Pain Points

Understanding how customers feel at different stages is key. Are they excited when they first hear about you? Are they frustrated during the checkout process? Mapping out these emotions and pain points allows you to find those moments where things might be going wrong—and fix them. It also shows you where customers are delighted so you can amplify those positive experiences.

Step 7: Identify Opportunities for Improvement

After you’ve documented the journey, look for the bumps along the way—those pain points or frustrating moments where customers might give up. These are the opportunities for improvement. Maybe you can simplify your checkout process, make your support easier to contact or provide more helpful information. Addressing these issues can make a big difference in your customers' experience.

Step 8: Validate Your Journey Map

It’s crucial to check if your journey map matches what real customers are experiencing. Gather feedback from customers directly through surveys, interviews, or by analyzing their behavior. This step makes sure you’re not just guessing—you're actually reflecting their real experiences and needs.

Step 9: Share and Collaborate with Your Team

A customer journey map is only useful if everyone’s on the same page. Share it with all the teams involved—marketing, sales, product development, and customer service. Collaboration is key here. When everyone understands what customers are going through, you can work together to create a more consistent and satisfying experience.

Step 10: Continuously Update and Improve

The journey doesn’t stay the same forever—customers’ expectations evolve, and so does your business. Revisit your journey map regularly, update it with new insights, and ensure it reflects current trends and customer behavior. Think of it as a living document that grows as your brand and customers do.

Types of Customer Journey Maps

Not all customer journey maps are always applicable to every facet of a business. Certain types help certain companies achieve their particular goals better. Let’s discuss four different types of CJMs that businesses could use and their particular strength of purpose.

Current State

The current state map is immensely helpful for those looking to visualize the process of customer interaction with the product from beginning to end as it currently functions, yielding a better understanding of the needs and wants of the customer. This leads to businesses knowing the key areas to build upon or improve regarding their product. Surveys returned from customers, website analytics, and recordings from the company’s call centers are all perfect examples of metric and context tools that allow businesses to gather information based on which they will strategize to make informed decisions about the product’s current state.

Source: Fullstory

Future State

Future maps focus on how companies can improve future customer experience relating to their products and services by implementing new tactics and the utility of new technologies to enhance and enrich the customer’s journey. One example is the adoption of push notifications or chatbot software to personalize customer experience based on their wants and needs.

Source: Xtensio

Day in the Life

Another vital aspect for businesses to explore about the customer’s journey is tracking it over long periods across various platforms and channels. This drives companies to many leads about areas where the customer journey can be improved. Metrics used to draft this type of CJM include social media engagement, through which organizations can better assess what type of messaging engages the customers, affording feedback about the strategies that work better than others.

Source: Xtensio

Blueprint

This type of customer journey map is used to create a formula for the ideal customer journey. It considers product placement, pricing, and messaging alongside multiple other metrics. Once this CJM is formulated, organizations utilize it as a reference point that guides their decision-making strategies to optimize their customers' experiences and avoid potential problems. When drafting a blueprint CJM, companies could consider, for instance, a long-term objective like customer loyalty cultivation alongside short-term ones such as growing conversions.

Methods of Creating Customer Journey Maps

To craft a customer journey map, a company must thoroughly study, analyze, and consider its customers' needs, motivations, and expectations. The first step is to define the goals of the customer’s journey, or in other words, what motivates the customer to seek out the business’s product and what need the customer is looking to satisfy with it. Businesses can map the steps between those two reference points with that information.

Logically, the next step includes identifying all possible touchpoints along the customer’s journey that drive the process through which customers make their decisions regarding the product. These include product research, comparative analysis, reading reviews, and deciding to purchase the product.

Source: GeoJango Maps on Unsplash

Beyond identifying these touchpoints, this step also reveals the negative or positive ramifications of each touchpoint on the customer’s experience, which will ultimately guide the product's optimization strategies.

Once the touchpoints have been gathered, data about the interactions will be collected through methods such as reviewing web analytics (bounce rates, etc.), tracking survey responses, diving into call center logs and keeping a close eye on social media engagement. This data should fill any company's understanding gaps about the customer's journey, painting a more detailed start-to-finish picture.

Lastly, the compiled information should be leveraged to visually represent the customer’s journey, feelings, and sentiments regarding the product. This yields a full scope of the process, making it easier to identify its pain points and allowing businesses to respond to those by optimizing applications to the problem areas.

With these improvements, the pain points can be systematically addressed, bolstering customer engagement and satisfaction, proving a highly effective strategy for pleasing customers, and creating brand loyalty.

We collaborated with Discover to enhance their mobile app, focusing on improving user experience through refined onboarding processes, card activation flows, and new feature discovery. By mapping customer journeys, we identified pain points and optimized the app's design, making it more user-friendly.

This involved creating detailed flow diagrams, multiple UX prototypes for testing, and implementing a comprehensive design system with custom icons and illustrations, ensuring a cohesive brand experience across all platforms.

Customer Journey Map Implementation

A well-crafted map will be useless if it is not implemented correctly. If done right, it will yield results leading to a better customer experience. Through the correct application of CJMs, businesses can better understand the customer’s journey, allowing for proper adjustments and enhancements to grow engagement and loyalty, optimizing efficiency on an operational level along the way.

A CJM should leverage reliable data sources for their customer’s journey visualization, achieved through a review of bounce rates, page views, and other website analytic metrics like social media engagement measurements (survey responses, call center logs, likes, shares, etc.). With the sentiments and data points derived from the above, businesses can accurately capture the state of every step of the customer’s journey.

Source: NNgroup

Once the map is formed, it should be thoroughly reviewed to identify areas of improvement and any potential pain points in the process. Some aspects that must be addressed include website presentation features, messaging, or tweaks to connect with customers across various channels. Companies can enhance their customer interaction experience by testing new tactics and strategies before implementing them.

It is also highly recommended that businesses invest in tools to help them track customer journeys effectively. This allows for evaluating and comparing various strategies, adjusting them based on customer feedback for maximum success. These tools allow the CJM to stay updated and fresh so businesses have a consistent source from which to base their informed decisions about various product launches and marketing campaigns.

Key Elements of a Customer Journey Map Template

1. 1.

   Customer Personas
   Think of customer personas as the characters in your story. These are fictional profiles that represent your typical customers, each with unique traits, goals, and challenges. Including personas in the journey map makes sure you're looking at things through the eyes of your real customers, helping you understand what motivates them and what holds them back.

2. 2.

   Stages of the Customer Journey
   The customer journey is split into different stages — like Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Onboarding, and Loyalty. Each stage represents a milestone in the customer's relationship with your brand, from when they first hear about you to when they become a regular customer. Understanding these stages helps you recognize what your customers need at every point.

3. 3.

   Touchpoints
   Touchpoints are all the ways your customers interact with your brand—whether it's browsing your website, following your social media, chatting with customer support, or visiting a store. Listing out these touchpoints helps you see where customers are having meaningful interactions and where there might be gaps.

4. 4.

   Customer Actions
   At each stage, customers take specific actions, like researching products, comparing prices, or reaching out with questions. Documenting these actions shows you exactly what steps customers are taking and helps you figure out where things might be getting too complicated or confusing.

5. 5.

   Customer Emotions and Pain Points
   Understanding how customers feel at different points in their journey is crucial. Are they excited? Anxious? Frustrated? By mapping out these emotions, you can identify areas where customers might be struggling and find ways to make their experience more enjoyable. Reducing frustration and increasing moments of delight is what makes a great customer journey.

6. 6.

   Opportunities for Improvement
   Every journey has bumps along the way, but these challenges also present opportunities. This part of the template is where you list out those areas for improvement. Whether it’s making your website easier to navigate, speeding up your response time, or adding helpful content, this section captures the changes that will enhance the overall experience.

7. 7.

   Metrics and KPIs
   To understand how well your journey is working, it’s important to measure it. Metrics like customer satisfaction, conversion rates, or loyalty scores help you see what’s working and what isn’t. Including these KPIs makes it easier to track success and keep improving the customer experience.

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

Creating an effective customer journey map requires considering many factors and a careful plan. Certain best practices are recommended to achieve one.

Comprehensive Data Collection

Gathering as much information as possible about a customer's experience is vital before developing a user journey map. Tracking website analytics, gauging social media engagement metrics, compiling consumer survey replies, and going over call center recordings are just some techniques used to understand the user's experience more fully and to help pinpoint possible areas of concern or places for expansion.

Source: Scott Graham on Unsplash

Staying Up-To-Date

Customer journey maps must be modified frequently to account for shifts in buyer behavior. This includes ensuring the map covers all pertinent interactions, including marketing campaigns or product launches. Additionally, it is advantageous for organizations to use methods that enable them to monitor user journeys over time to assess the efficacy of various marketing initiatives and make necessary adjustments depending on client feedback.

Seeking Clarity

A consumer journey map strives to provide organizations with an accurate understanding of consumers' needs from beginning to end so they can develop focused techniques and plot business strategies that improve overall customer satisfaction. To do this, every process stage must be correctly portrayed on the map so businesses can immediately recognize any problems or areas for improvement.

Source: Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Testing Before Implementing

Companies should continually assess new strategies and tactics before adopting any changes based on lessons gained via the customer journey map to see how they will affect all customer experiences before launch. This enables them to pivot strategies to achieve the best results while mitigating risk.

Examples of Customer Journey Maps

Customer journey modeling is an effective tool for businesses of every size. Using a variety of examples and templates, one can generate an effective map. One such is the Customer Journey chart Canva, which uses four sectors to help businesses chart the customer's journey. With the help of this template, organizations can quickly pinpoint where clients begin their experience and which behaviors are observed through its various stages.

The Customer Journey Audit Template is another example that delves more thoroughly into the customer's journey. By examining consumer feedback, website analytics, and social media interaction indicators, this template aids companies in identifying any shortcomings of current tactics or potential areas for change. Businesses could then use this information to make adjustments to improve customer satisfaction.

Source: Figma

The User Journey Map Template from UXPressia is another template option that gives companies a thorough understanding of user behavior while continually monitoring their sentiment. It draws attention to matters including the nature of customers' engagement with products and services and what factors influence the degree of their satisfaction. Utilizing this knowledge, businesses can implement strategic changes that optimize user experience while minimizing potential issues.

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Final Thoughts

Companies must develop an effective user journey map to provide consumers with the most satisfying experience feasible. This valuable resource enables them to make well-informed choices about marketing campaigns and product launches by utilizing real-time data that focuses on their target audience. They gather thorough data, keep it updated with relevant touchpoints, strive for understanding in each process step, and evaluate strategic approaches before implementation.

Having a carefully thought-out user journey map will help companies better understand their consumers' demands, resulting in an overall boost in client satisfaction and revenues.