Attempting to enhance your business while being unaware of your customer’s journey is the same as attempting to fix something without understanding how it works. While you might know what you have to sell, do you know when your customer is confused, excited, or frustrated? That’s what customer journey mapping helps you to do!
It allows you to see the experience through your customer’s eyes—from the first interaction, to purchase, and beyond. If done effectively, you can see how you might create a better experience more seamlessly.
Let’s break it down—what it is, why it matters, and how to map it effectively.
Quick Overview: Customer Journey Mapping
Customer journey mapping is a visual story of how customers interact with your brand. It starts from the moment they find you till the time they reach the stage of recommending you to their peers, highlighting touchpoints, emotions, and pain points.
Key Stages Of A Customer Journey Map
- Stage 1: Awareness- when they first hear about you.
- Stage 2: Consideration- comparing options
- Stage 3: Purchase-deciding to buy
- Stage 4: Post-Purchase-support and satisfaction
- Stage 5: Loyalty/Advocacy-do they return or recommend?
What Is A Customer Journey Map?
A customer journey map is a visual narrative detailing how a customer uses your brand over time. It includes every engagement point such as seeing your ad, checking out your site, speaking to support, or reading a review. Each of these events contributes to the customer’s impression – or decision – to remain loyal to you.
You can consider the customer journey map as a timeline of your customer’s experience. It’s not just the big steps like purchasing a product. A customer journey map focuses on the little steps, too, like waiting on hold, clicking through confusing pages, etc. When the journey is all laid out, it’s easier to identify what’s gone wrong and where there are opportunities for improvement.
You can download customizable customer journey map templates from Canva!
Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping
Understanding your customer’s journey helps you identify pain points, improve experiences, and build stronger relationships. Here are a few benefits of customer journey mapping:
1. Better Understanding Of Customer Needs
By mapping the journey, you learn exactly what your customers are experiencing in reality. You will see where they get frustrated or where they drop off, and you will have the opportunity to rectify those issues before they become deal-breakers.
You can even offer them real-time support at those points, with AI chat assistants, for example, instead of letting customer journeys stall out and the customer become frustrated.
2. Enhanced Customer Experience
The ultimate purpose of customer success journey mapping is to make the journey easier and more pleasurable. If someone enjoys the experience of buying from you, they are more likely to return, all while sharing those experiences. The journey mapping allows you to have fewer dead ends and more “Wow, that was easy!” moments.
3. Encouraging Cross-Departmental Collaboration
A successful customer journey framework can help get your various teams aligned on the customer experience. Marketing, sales, and support teams all have a role in the customer experience. Once everyone has the same journey map to work off of, they can better unite to improve the weak areas, rather than pointing fingers.
4. Increased Customer Retention And Proactive Service
When you can recognize common pain points, you’ll be ready to help at the exact moment your customers need help the most, before they even complain. This is how a first-time buyer turns into a loyal fan of your products—not by listening to them go from frustrated to angry, but by proactively solving issues before they arise.
AI-enabled customer support software allows you to anticipate common issues, offer proactive solutions, and provide immediate, personalized assistance to your users. When you can anticipate user needs and address them in real-time, you establish trust with customers; this will improve overall customer satisfaction and create a streamlined customer experience.
Stages of Customer Service Maps
Each map is organized around a series of important customer journey stages that illustrate how someone goes from first hearing about your brand to growing into a loyal customer—and even a promoter. Think of it like a relationship: it doesn’t happen all at once. It develops over time, step by step. Let’s take some time to break each of these down:
1. Awareness – “Who are you again?”
This is the exact moment in which someone discovers your business. They could have seen you on social media, a Google ad, or heard about you from a friend. Here, the person isn’t necessarily even considering making a purchase; they are simply becoming aware of your existence. Your job here is not to sell.
Your job is to show up, make a strong first impression, exceed customer expectations, and offer them something compelling enough to want to seek you out and learn more. Within your customer journey framework, this is where your brand begins speaking to a stranger.
Example: A person is scrolling Instagram and sees an ad for a new fitness app. This is awareness.
2. Consideration – “Should I really go with them?”
At this stage, they have now acknowledged your existence, and they can’t help but think, “Is this a good use of my time (or money)?” This stage would likely be followed by them comparing you to other options, reading reviews, checking prices, or visiting your website. This is when doubt starts to creep in, and this is all very natural. This moment is very important.
You want to be clear, helpful, and credible. Make it as easy as possible for someone to clearly understand what you offer, how it works, and why this option is better (or different from) the rest.
Example: That same person has now visited your fitness app website, read testimonials, and compared features to another app. This is the consideration stage.
3. Purchase – “Let’s do this.”
At this stage, your customers have committed to taking action. This action may involve signing up for a newsletter, submitting an order, or calling to schedule a meeting.
However, here is the catch. While they are ready, the journey still needs to be seamless. A difficult-to-navigate checkout process, an extended order form, or poor communication may still deter the customer from proceeding.
A good customer experience journey mapping process will reveal opportunities for improving customer experience when ensuring a customer is prepared to take action.
Example: If they decide to download the app and subscribe to the monthly subscription plan, they have made a purchase.
4. Retention – “Will I stay or leave?”
The purchase isn’t the finish line. In fact, it’s just the starting point of an enduring relationship. Retention is what you’re doing to assist customers once they have bought from you. Are you being helpful? Are you keeping to your promises?
Are they receiving the value they were expecting? Retention can include onboarding, follow-up emails, loyalty programs, support teams, updates, etc. True, you have a happy customer, but if you skip this stage, they may never return.
Example: The user receives workout tips regularly, can see they are making progress, and finds the support team useful when they ask questions. That's retention!
5. Advocacy – “You Need To Try This!”
When all the parts come together—product, service, support—you’re not just getting a customer, you’re getting a fan. Advocacy means that the customer not only comes back to you, but spreads the good word about you to others.
The user may leave a sparkling review, refer a friend, or post about your product on social media. This is the gold standard in advocacy, as now your entire customer journey fuels itself—your existing customer/fan base pulls in new customers and prospects.
Example: A user posts on Instagram about their fitness transformation and tags your app in their post. That is advocacy.
When And Why To Use A Customer Journey Map?
You don’t have to wait for a problem to develop a better understanding of your customers. Smart companies use a customer journey map even before a problem develops. The customer journey map is not simply a vehicle for fixing problems; it helps create a better experience from the start. Let’s see when and why to use a customer journey map:
1. New Product Or Service Launch
Are you considering launching something new? A product or subscription plan, or a fresh onboarding experience for users? It’s always beneficial to put yourself in the customer’s shoes even before they use it. A journey map allows you to visualize each touchpoint with the product, from discovery to consideration and then to post-purchase contemplation.
This way, you can identify potential friction early, craft messaging that resonates with your customers’ needs, and enhance the overall first-time user experience. Essentially, the purpose of a journey map is to enable you to design from the customer’s perspective rather than solely from the company’s viewpoint. This is similar to test driving a new car before selling it. You want to know how it feels to be in the driver’s seat.
2. Customer Complaints
If your support inbox is becoming cluttered, you’re getting fewer reviews, or people don’t finish your experience, something is wrong—but where? That is the hard part. A consumer journey map allows you to really determine where the frustration is coming from.
Perhaps it is the onboarding flow, maybe your FAQ is hard to find, or it could be a confusing experience while trying to check out. After you outline each stage, you will see a pattern, and instead of fixing the symptoms, you will actually fix the real issue.
According to PWC, nearly one-third of customers would abandon a brand they once loved after just a single negative experience.
3. Improve Overall Service Experience
Just because customers are not loudly complaining doesn’t mean everything is okay. Sometimes, people are just walking away silently, and they can’t quite pinpoint why it just felt off. Maybe it took too long to get help, or maybe your customers didn’t know how to get started. Or maybe, simply after they pay, they feel as if their experience is forgotten.
Through a solid customer experience journey mapping, you will be able to identify those weak points and strengthen them into trust-building moments. This is a way of proactively designing a better overall experience, even if nothing feels obviously wrong.
4. Enhance Team Collaboration
Sales and marketing, product, and customer support often operate in silos. However, from the customer’s perspective, it is one journey. They don’t care who is responsible; they just want it to work smoothly. A journey map serves as a shared visual to get everyone on the same page.
It shows teams how their work connects to the work of others and where the handoff occurs. Alignment like this helps clear the confusion and enables quicker, more efficient decisions.
Ready to truly understand your customers?
See how ControlHippo helps you connect with them on a personal level, anticipate their needs, and make every interaction feel like a conversation.
5. Transparent View Of Customer Experience
Sometimes, companies mistakenly think they know what the customer thinks. Assumptions can be dangerous, and what you may think is happening may be completely different. By creating a customer journey map, you stop guessing and start learning. You will uncover insights, including:
- Where they get stuck
- What channels do they prefer
- What contributes to moving forward
- When they are most likely to drop out
This clarity will help you improve everything from marketing/design to service and support.
- Myth: Customer journey mapping is only for large enterprises.
- Myth: Journey mapping is a one-time project.
- Myth: It only benefits customer service teams.
Reality: Small businesses can use simplified journey maps to improve interactions and reduce friction.
Reality: It should be continuously updated as customer behavior evolves.
Reality: Marketing, sales, and product teams can all use journey maps for better decision-making.
Steps For Creating A Customer Journey Map
Creating a customer journey map involves a step-by-step approach to visualize how customers interact with your business and identify areas for improvement. According to Garnter, 30% of companies have created customer journey maps but find it challenging to utilize them efficiently.
So, I have talked about a few steps here that will help you create a customer journey map:
1. Define Your Objectives: Start with an easy question: what do you wish to learn or improve? Maybe you want to decrease cart abandonment or better onboarding. Your map should have a reason to exist, or it will simply be another chart that no one uses.
2. Assemble a Cross-Functional Team: Include people from marketing, support, product, and sales. Each of these people sees a part of the journey, and you’ll need their perspective to get a full picture.
3. Develop Customer Personas: If you don’t know who is walking the journey, you can’t map the journey. Create 2–3 sample customers using actual data. These customer personas should represent common behaviors, needs, and frustrations.
4. Identify Key Touchpoints And Channels: Identify each opportunity your customer connects with your business based on the starting point of your customer journey—social media, website, phone call, email, etc.—and write it down. When you’re done, you can now name these occurrences your customer touchpoints, and they represent the skeleton of your journey map.
5. Gather And Analyze Data: Have conversations with your customers. Read their reviews of your business. Look at web analytics and support tickets. This is how to turn a guess into a fact.
6. Map the Journey: Now, sketch it out. You don’t need anything fancy, but you should create a visual representation that illustrates the sequence of events and any high or low points of the journey. Where does it feel seamless? Where is the friction?
7. Innovate, Test, and Measure Impact: 6Now that you have a map, elevate your work with some innovation. Adopt small changes, track what works or doesn’t, and adjust based on the experience. You can also use customer engagement software to capture interactions, personalize prospects in outreach, and provide better service based upon the documented, actual experiences of your customers. Over time, evolve your map too, as you leverage the information on the actual experiences of your customers.
- Assumptions Over Data – Base decisions on real customer insights, not internal beliefs.
- Narrow Focus – Optimize the entire journey, not just one touchpoint.
- Lack of Collaboration – Involve teams across departments for a full perspective.
- Static Mapping – Regularly update based on feedback and market changes.
- No Action Taken - Use insights to drive real improvements.
Types of Customer Journey Maps
Before we talk about specific types, remember that not all customer journey maps will look the same. Some are very basic—a list of steps, the customer’s thoughts and feelings. Others are very rich in detail, complete with timelines, thoughts and feelings, touchpoints, and internal systems.
Choose the level of detail you need; if you’re simply dealing with a small problem, then an outline may suffice. However, if you are redesigning a total customer experience journey, you will need to go deeper. Here are the key types of customer journey maps:
1. Current State Map
A current state map is the most common and practical starting point. It shows how your customer is currently moving through the experience, from first contact to post-purchase. It illustrates what is happening, what is not, and where people are getting stuck. You may even notice broken processes, unclear messaging, or emotional drops in this experience map.
The current state map is the standard model for understanding the experience your customers are having today.
Example: You mapped the online shopping experience on your e-commerce site, and you noticed many users abandoned their carts at the payment screen. That is a gap worth addressing.
2. Day-in-the-Life Map
This type steps away from your business momentarily and begins to look at your customer as an entire human being. Mapping out what their day looks like, including what they think, feel, do, and use regardless of whether it really involves your product.
Why is this helpful? It helps you see the larger picture. You might realize that your app competes not just with other apps, but also with a busy morning routine, kids needing attention, or low phone storage.
Example: You are creating a meditation app. As your team is mapping out a customer’s day, they find that their only moment of quiet is during a quick lunch break. Now you know that your sessions will need to be short and easy to access.
This type of consumer journey map allows you to gather context you may not have otherwise gained. This is especially helpful content for marketing, product design, and timing promotions.
3. Future State Map
A future state map depicts the ideal customer journey you are aiming to create. Your current state map, customer feedback, or new goals for your business may inform it. Future state maps are not so much about fixing; they require you to dream and design. They give your team something to work towards, and they create alignment as you work toward improvements, smarter tools, and retention.
Example: You are trying to improve the onboarding experience for your SaaS product. Your current state map illustrates that your users are confused and unsure of what to do. So you make a future state map where onboarding is shorter, clearer, and includes a welcome video and live chat.
4. Service Blueprint
This kind of map takes things a step further. It begins with the customer experience – just like other maps – but then adds in everything your business does on the back end to create that experience, including the system, software, team roles, processes, policies, and even training.
It is incredibly valuable, especially when you are trying to keep your business smoother or deliver a better, more consistent experience across teams and locations.
Example: You map out the customer's journey, taking a support ticket. Then you add in what your agents are doing, what software they engaged with, where delays happen, etc. You uncover that outdated tools are significantly slowing the entire process down.
Now you know what to fix. The service blueprint allows you to see the relationships between the front-end experience and back-end experiences. This is great for businesses who want to improve their overall customer experience while also enhancing their efficiency.
- Gather Customer Feedback – Conduct surveys and interviews.
- Test Internally – Use mystery shopping or employee walkthroughs.
- Run Focus Groups – Validate assumptions with real customers.
- Analyze Behavior – Use analytics and heatmaps.
- A/B Implement small updates before full rollout.
Industry-Specific Examples
Each industry has a specific customer journey based on the type of service or product being sold. When developing a Customer Journey Map, you will want to create one that reflects the customer experience as it exists. Let’s look at what they are with some examples:
1. B2C Subscription Service
In a consumer journey map for a subscription service, the journey typically starts with interest. The customer sees an ad, clicks through, reads reviews, and decides to sign up. Then comes onboarding—what happens right after sign up—and how easy is it for the customer to get started? After onboarding, it is just the delivery or experience, the monthly renewals, and support if there are any issues.
Example: A customer signs up for a meal kit. But the first order was delivered late, and the instructions were not clear. You map that journey to address the delays, and that the welcome kit could be improved. Reducing the issues with that would help a customer stay engaged, reduce cancellations, and foster loyalty for months and years to come.
2. Financial Services
This space is based on trust. If someone opens a savings account, seeks a mortgage, or files an insurance claim, they want it with the least amount of stress, as simply as possible, and with clarity. A customer journey framework can let you highlight those small bumps that lead to big drop-offs.
Someone starts applying for a credit card online and gets distracted by a lengthy credit card application. Or perhaps, submitting a claim is just too many back and forth.
Example: A customer has a car accident, so they try to file a claim online, but the language is so technical, they feel like an expert might be reading it. Mapping the customer journey reveals that you should simplify and reinforce your support instructions with empathy.
3. E-commerce Platforms
While shopping online can seem straightforward, there are numerous small points of friction along the way—slow websites, vague return policies, hidden costs for shipping, or long waits. By mapping your customer experience journey for an e-commerce brand, you can discover where your shoppers are wavering or abandoning the transaction.
Example: A customer adds items to their cart but abandons the cart before checking out. Through your mapping tool, if you see shipping costs aren't displayed until the last page, you can address the frustration barrier and increase conversions accordingly.
In e-commerce, every click counts and thus mapping the journey can lead you to an easier, faster, and more enjoyable buying experience, which typically means more revenue for the organization.
4. B2B Solutions
Selling to companies is quite different from selling to individuals. It typically takes longer, involves many people in the decision-making process, and creates a lot of back-and-forth communication. A customer journey framework is helpful, especially for keeping marketing, sales teams, onboarding, and support teams aligned. It gives the necessary context of what potential customers are looking for and need to benefit from at each stage, from discovery to contract to renewal.
Example: You realize your trial users love the product but never hear from sales during the trial. By mapping the journey, you add a personal email halfway through—boosting conversions.
In B2B, it’s all about trying to make the decision-making process simpler and onboarding for the client more structured. A mapped journey makes that possible.
5. Travel and Hospitality
This is one of the most emotional industries. People are excited and often nervous and stressed when traveling, so each touchpoint matters. There is browsing, booking, the reminders, check-in, the actual traveling, and even the post-travel review of travel.
Example: A hotel realizes many guests ask about Wi-Fi when they arrive at check-in. A quick journey map shows that they could have just put this in the booking confirmation email- saving themselves time and enhancing guests' satisfaction.
Through customer experience journey mapping, you can identify those moments where they felt unclear or inconvenienced and replace those with clarity and delight.
Best Practices of Customer Service Mapping
Building a customer journey map is just the beginning. Applying that map properly—and acting on it—is where the impact lies. Here are four tips to keep your mapping relevant:
1. Keep It Real: Refrain from constructing your journey map on assumptions, or what you want the experience to be. Turn to real customer data: feedback, reviews, analytics, support tickets—the more rooted in reality, the better.
2. Update It Regularly: Your customers evolve. Your product evolves. The world evolves. Your journey map should evolve as well. Set a schedule—perhaps quarterly or every six months—to review and refresh it.
AI-powered customer support tools will help analyze real-time feedback and surface additional pain points. A stale map is just as bad as having no map at all; therefore, let AI-driven insights refresh and inform the journey mapping process.
3. Involve Everyone: Great journey maps aren’t created in a vacuum. Invite people from marketing, sales, support, product, and operations to participate. Each team sees a different dimension of the customer. As you start bringing in perspectives, it starts to fill in the picture a bit more.
4. Focus on Emotions: Customers don’t simply recall what happened — they recall the way it felt. Was signing up frustrating? Was working with support reassuring? Your flow can be technically perfect, but still, feel cold or counterintuitive to what people expect. You should design your map around these emotional highs and lows.
5. Don’t Stop at the Map: A journey map is not simply a nice visual. It serves as a mechanism for real change. Use the journey map to clarify messaging, redesign touchpoints, train your team, and make better business decisions. The journey map is your navigation tool — but the action is what changes the customer experience.
Conclusion
An effective customer journey map can break up the chaos. It tells you what works, what doesn’t, and what you could do better. Journey mapping is one of the easiest, but powerful tools available, regardless of whether you operate in the financial sector, e-commerce, B2B, or hospitality. Start simple, be curious, and let the customer’s experience help form the next big leap.
Updated : April 10, 2025
Jainy Patel is a content strategist who specializes in omnichannel communication solutions. She develops innovative marketing strategies that unify messaging across various channels, ensuring a consistent and engaging customer journey. Jainy is passionate about optimizing communication processes and crafting targeted content that resonates with audiences at every touchpoint.
Subscribe to our newsletter & never miss our latest news and promotions.
+21K people have already subscribed