journey map customer experience

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.

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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

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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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11 Best Practices for B2B Customer Experience

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

How to create a customer journey map

Lucid Content

Reading time: about 8 min

How to Make a Customer Journey Map

• Conduct persona research
• Define customer touchpoints
• Map current states
• Map future states

Steve Jobs, the genius behind Apple’s one-of-a-kind customer experience, said, “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.”

Nowadays, a clear vision and strategy for customer interactions is no longer an optional “nice-to-have”—it’s essential. As you refine your customer experience, a customer journey map is one of the most powerful ways to understand your current state and future state.

A customer journey map is a diagram that shows the process your customers go through in interacting with your business, such as an experience on the website, a brick and mortar experience, a service, a product, or a mix of those things.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s experience with your brand. These visuals tell a story about how a customer moves through each phase of interaction and experiences each phase. Your customer journey map should include touchpoints and moments of truth, but also potential customer feelings, such as frustration or confusion, and any actions you want the customer to take.

Customer journey maps are often based on a timeline of events, such as a customer’s first visit on your website and the way they progress towards their first in-product experience, then purchase, onboarding emails, cancellation, etc. 

Your customer journey maps may need to be tailored to your business or product, but the best way to identify and refine these phases is to actually talk to your customers. Research your target audiences to understand how they make decisions, decide to purchase, etc. Without an essential understanding of your customers and their needs, a customer map will not lead you to success. But, a well-constructed and researched customer journey map can give you the insights to drastically improve your business’s customer experience.

The benefits of customer journey mapping

Customer journey mapping is a powerful tool for uncovering insights into your customer experience, driving business goals, and building resilience in a changing market. In a 2022 report, Hanover Research found that 94% of businesses said their customer journey maps help them develop new products and services to match customer needs. Another 91% said their maps drove sales. 

But understanding a customer’s journey across your entire organization does so much more than increase your revenue. It enables you to discover how to be consistent when it comes to providing a positive customer experience and retaining customer loyalty. 

This was especially evident in recent years as top of improving marketing, customer journey maps emerged as a valuable way to understand evolving buyer behavior. In fact, 1 in 3 businesses used customer journey maps to help them navigate the changing landscape during the pandemic.

When done correctly, customer journey mapping helps to:

• Increase customer engagement through channel optimization.
• Identify and optimize moments of truth in the CX.
• Eliminate ineffective touchpoints.
• Shift from a company to a customer-focused perspective.
• Break down silos between departments and close interdepartmental gaps.
• Target specific customer personas with marketing campaigns relevant to their identity.
• Understand the circumstances that may have produced irregularities in existing quantitative data.
• Assign ownership of various customer touchpoints to increase employee accountability.
• Make it possible to assess the ROI of future UX/CX investments.

Following the process outlined above, customer mapping can put your organization on a new trajectory of success. Yet, according to Hanover Research, only 47% of companies currently have a process in place for mapping customer journeys. Making the investment to map your customer journey and solidify that process as part of your company’s DNA can result in significant advantages in your competitive landscape, making your solution the go-to option that customers love.

Customer journey maps can become complicated unless you keep them focused. Although you may target multiple personas, choose just one persona and one customer scenario to research and visualize at a time. If you aren’t sure what your personas or scenarios might be, gather some colleagues and try an  affinity diagram in Lucidchart to generate ideas.

1. Set goals

Without a goal, it will be difficult to determine whether your customer journey map will translate to a tangible impact on your customers and your business. You will likely need to identify existing—and future—buyers so you can set goals specifically for those audiences at each stage of their experience.

Consider gathering the key stakeholders within your company—many of whom likely touch different points of the customer experience. To set a logical and attainable goal, cross-functional teamwork is essential. Gather unique perspectives and insights about each part of the existing customer journey and where improvements are needed, and how those improvements will be measured.

Pro Tip : If you don’t already have them in place, create buyer personas to help you focus your customer journey map on the specific types of buyers you’re optimizing for.

2. Conduct persona research

Flesh out as much information as possible about the persona your customer journey map is based on. Depending on the maturity of your business, you may only have a handful of records, reports, or other pre-existing data about the target persona. You can compile your preliminary findings to draft what you think the customer journey may look like. However, the most insightful data you can collect is from real customers or prospective customers—those who have actually interacted with your brand. Gather meaningful customer data in any of the following ways:

• Conduct interviews.
• Talk to employees who regularly interact with customers.
• Email a survey to existing users.
• Scour customer support and complaint logs.
• Pull clips from recorded call center conversations.
• Monitor discussions about your company that occur on social media.
• Leverage web analytics.
• Gather Net Promoter Score (NPS) data.

Look for information that references:

• How customers initially found your brand
• When/if customers purchase or cancel
• How easy or difficult they found your website to use
• What problems your brand did or didn’t solve

Collecting both qualitative and quantitative information throughout your research process ensures your business makes data-driven decisions based on the voice of real customers. To assist when conducting persona research, use one of our user persona templates .

Discover more ways to understand the Voice of the Customer

3. Define customer touchpoints

Customer touchpoints make up the majority of your customer journey map. They are how and where customers interact with and experience your brand. As you research and plot your touchpoints, be sure to include information addressing elements of action, emotion, and potential challenges. 

The number and type of touchpoints on your customer journey map will depend on the type of business. For example, a customer’s journey with a SaaS company will be inherently different than that of a coffee shop experience. Simply choose the touchpoints which accurately reflect a customer’s journey with your brand.

After you define your touchpoints, you can then start arranging them on your customer journey map.

4. Map the current state

Create what you believe is your as-is state of the customer journey, the current customer experience. Use a visual workspace like Lucidchart, and start organizing your data and touchpoints. Prioritize the right content over aesthetics. Invite input from the stakeholders and build your customer journey map collaboratively to ensure accuracy. 

Again, there is no “correct” way to format your customer journey map, but for each phase along the journey timeline, include the touchpoints, actions, channels, and assigned ownership of a touchpoint (sales, customer service, marketing, etc.). Then, customize your diagram design with images, color, and shape variation to better visualize the different actions, emotions, transitions, etc. at a glance.

Mapping your current state will also help you start to identify gaps or red flags in the experience. Collaborators can comment directly on different parts of your diagram in Lucidchart, so it’s clear exactly where there’s room for improvement.

5. Map future states

Now that you’ve visualized the current state of the customer journey, your map will probably show some gaps in your CX, information overlap, poor transitions between stages, and significant pain points or obstacles for customers.

Use hotspots and layers in Lucidchart to easily map out potential solutions and quickly compare the current state of the customer journey with the ideal future state. Present your findings company-wide to bring everyone up to speed on the areas that need to be improved, with a clear roadmap for expected change and how their roles will play a part in improving the customer journey.

Customer journey map templates

You have all the right information for a customer journey map, but it can be difficult to know exactly how to start arranging the information in a digestible, visually appealing way. These customer journey mapping examples can help you get started and gain some inspiration about what—and how much—to include and where.

Don’t let the possibility of a bad customer journey keep you up at night. Know the current state of the customer journey with you business, and make the changes you need to attract and keep customers happy.

Customer journey mapping is easy with Lucidchart.

About Lucidchart

Lucidchart, a cloud-based intelligent diagramming application, is a core component of Lucid Software's Visual Collaboration Suite. This intuitive, cloud-based solution empowers teams to collaborate in real-time to build flowcharts, mockups, UML diagrams, customer journey maps, and more. Lucidchart propels teams forward to build the future faster. Lucid is proud to serve top businesses around the world, including customers such as Google, GE, and NBC Universal, and 99% of the Fortune 500. Lucid partners with industry leaders, including Google, Atlassian, and Microsoft. Since its founding, Lucid has received numerous awards for its products, business, and workplace culture. For more information, visit lucidchart.com.

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Customer Journey Mapping

Journey mapping helps you visualize how customers experience your product or service, and how they feel along the way. Scroll to step 6 for a real-life example from one of our product teams!

USE THIS PLAY TO...

Understand the customer journey from a specific persona's perspective so that you can design a better experience.

Running the play

Depending on how many touchpoints along the customer journey you're mapping, you might break the journey into stages and tackle each stage in pairs.

Sticky notes

Whiteboards.io Template

Define the map's scope (15 min)

Ideally, customer journey mapping focuses on the experience of a single persona  in a single scenario with a single goal. Else, the journey map will be too generic, and you'll miss out on opportunities for new insights and questions. You may need to pause creating a customer journey map until you have defined your customer personas . Your personas should be informed by  customer interviews , as well as data wherever possible.

Saying that, don't let perfect be the enemy of good! Sometimes a team just needs to get started, and you can agree to revisit with more rigor in  a few months' time. Once scope is agreed on, check your invite list to make sure you've got people who know the details of what customers experience when using your product or service.

Set the stage (5 min)

It's really important that your group understands the user  persona  and the goal driving their journey. Decide on or recap with your group the target persona and the scope of the journey being explored in your session. Make sure to pre-share required reading with the team at least a week ahead of your session to make sure everyone understands the persona, scope of the journey, and has a chance to delve deeper into research and data where needed. Even better- invite the team to run or attend the customer interviews to hear from customers first hand!

E.g. "We're going to focus on the Alana persona. Alana's role is project manager, and her goal is to find a scalable way for her team to share their knowledge so they spend less time explaining things over email. We're going to map out what it's like for Alana to evaluate Confluence for this purpose, from the point where she clicks that TRY button, to the point where she decides to buy it – or not."

Build a customer back-story (10 min)

Have the group use sticky notes to post up reasons why your target persona would be on this journey in the first place. Odds are, you'll get a range of responses: everything from high-level goals, to pain points, to requested features or services. Group similar ideas and groom the stickies so you can design a story from them.

These narratives should be inspired by actual customer interviews. But each team member will also bring a different perspective to the table that helps to broaden the lens.

Take a look at the example provided in the call out of this section. This back story starts with the pain points – the reasons why Alana would be wanting something like Confluence in the first place.

• E.g., "Her team's knowledge is in silos"

Then it basically has a list of requirements – what Alana is looking for in a product to solve the bottom pain points. This is essentially a mental shopping list for the group to refer to when mapping out the customer journey.

• E.g., "Provide structure"

Then it has the outcomes – goals that Alana wants to achieve by using the product

• E.g., "To keep my team focused on their work instead of distracted by unnecessary emails and shoulder-taps"

And finally the highest-level goal for her and her team.

• E.g., "Improve team efficiency"

Round off the back story by getting someone to say out loud what they think the overall story so far is, highlighting the main goals the customer has. This ensures a shared understanding that will inform the journey mapping, and improve the chances that your team will map it from the persona's point of view (not their own).

• E.g., "Alana and her team are frustrated by having to spend so much time explaining their work to each other, and to stakeholders. They want a way to share their knowledge, and organize it so it's easy for people outside their team to find, so they can focus more energy on the tasks at hand."

For example...

Here's a backstory the Confluence team created. 

Map what the customer thinks and feels (30-60 min)

With the target persona, back story, and destination in place, it's time to walk a mile in their shoes. Show participants how to get going by writing the first thing that the persona does on a sticky note. The whole group can then grab stickies and markers and continue plotting the journey one action at a time.

This can also include questions and decisions! If the journey branches based on the answers or choices, have one participant map out each path. Keep in mind that the purpose of this Play is to build empathy for, and a shared understanding of the customer for the team. In order to do this, we focus on mapping the  current state of one discrete end to end journey, and looking for opportunities for improvement.

To do a more comprehensive discovery and inform strategy, you will need to go deeper on researching and designing these journey maps, which will need to split up over multiple sessions. Take a look at the variation below for tipes on how to design a completely new customer journey.

Use different color sticky notes for actions, questions, decisions, etc. so it's easier to see each element when you look at the whole map.

For each action on the customer journey, capture which channels are used for the interactions. Depending on your context, channels might include a website, phone, email, postal mail, face-to-face, and/or social media.

It might also help to visually split the mapping area in zones, such as "frontstage" (what the customer experiences) versus "backstage" (what systems and processes are active in the background).

Journey mapping can open up rich discussion, but try to avoid delving into the wrong sort of detail. The idea is to explore the journey and mine it for opportunities to improve the experience instead of coming up with solutions on the spot. It's important not only to keep the conversation on track, but also to create an artefact that can be easily referenced in the future. Use expands or footnotes in the Confluence template to capture any additional context while keeping the overview stable.

Try to be the commentator, not the critic. And remember: you're there to call out what’s going on for the persona, not explain what’s going on with internal systems and processes.

To get more granular on the 'backstage' processes required to provide the 'frontstage' customer value, consider using Confluence Whiteboard's Service Blueprint template as a next step to follow up on this Play.

ANTI-PATTERN

Your map has heaps of branches and loops.

Your scope is probably too high-level. Map a specific journey that focuses on a specific task, rather than mapping how a customer might explore for the first time.

Map the pain points (10-30 min)

"Ok, show me where it hurts." Go back over the map and jot down pain points on sticky notes. Place them underneath the corresponding touchpoints on the journey. Where is there frustration? Errors? Bottlenecks? Things not working as expected?

For added value, talk about the impact of each pain point. Is it trivial, or is it likely to necessitate some kind of hack or work-around. Even worse: does it cause the persona to abandon their journey entirely?

Chart a sentiment line (15 min)

(Optional, but totally worth it.) Plot the persona's sentiment in an area under your journey map, so that you can see how their emotional experience changes with each touchpoint. Look for things like:

• Areas of sawtooth sentiment – going up and down a lot is pretty common, but that doesn't mean it's not exhausting for the persona.
• Rapid drops – this indicates large gaps in expectations, and frustration.
• Troughs – these indicate opportunities for lifting overall sentiments.
• Positive peaks – can you design an experience that lifts them even higher? Can you delight the persona and inspire them to recommend you?

Remember that pain points don't always cause immediate drops in customer sentiment. Sometimes some friction may even buold trust (consider requiring verification for example). A pain point early in the journey might also result in negative feelings later on, as experiences accumulate. 

Having customers in the session to help validate and challenge the journey map means you'll be more confident what comes out of this session. 

Analyse the big picture (15 min)

As a group, stand back from the journey map and discuss trends and patterns in the experience.

• Where are the areas of greatest confusion/frustration?
• Where is the journey falling short of expectations?
• Are there any new un-met needs that have come up for the user type?
• Are there areas in the process being needlessly complicated or duplicated? Are there lots of emails being sent that aren’t actually useful? 

Then, discuss areas of opportunity to improve the experience. E.g., are there areas in the process where seven steps could be reduced to three? Is that verification email actually needed?

You can use quantitative data to validate the impact of the various opportunity areas identified. A particular step may well be a customer experience that falls short, but how many of your customers are actually effected by that step? Might you be better off as a team focused on another higher impact opportunity?

Here's a user onboarding jouney map our Engaging First Impressions team created.

Be sure to run a full Health Monitor session or checkpoint with your team to see if you're improving.

MAP A FUTURE STATE

Instead of mapping the current experience, map out an experience you haven't delivered yet. You can map one that simply improves on existing pain points, or design an absolutely visionary amazeballs awesome experience!

Just make sure to always base your ideas on real customer interviews and data. When designing a totally new customer journey, it can also be interesting to map competitor or peer customer journeys to find inspiration. Working on a personalised service? How do they do it in grocery? What about fashion? Finance?

After the mapping session, create a stakeholder summary. What pain points have the highest impact to customers' evaluation, adoption and usage of our products? What opportunities are there, and which teams should know about them? What is your action plan to resolve these pain points? Keep it at a summary level for a fast share out of key takeaways.

For a broader audience, or to allow stakeholders to go deeper, you could also create a write-up of your analysis and recommendations you came up with, notes captured, photos of the group and the artefacts created on a Confluence page. A great way of sharing this information is in a video walk through of the journey map. Loom is a great tool for this as viewers can comment on specific stages of the journey. This can be a great way to inspire change in your organization and provide a model for customer-centric design practices.

KEEP IT REAL

Now that you have interviewed your customers and created your customer journey map, circle back to your customers and validate! And yes: you might learn that your entire map is invalid and have to start again from scratch. (Better to find that out now, versus after you've delivered the journey!) Major initiatives typically make multiple journey maps to capture the needs of multiple personas, and often iterate on each map. Remember not to set and forget. Journeys are rapidly disrupted, and keeping your finger on the pulse of your customer's reality will enable your team to pivot (and get results!) faster when needed.

Related Plays

     Customer Interview

     Project Poster

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Shared understanding

Different types of teams need to share an understanding of different things.

LEADERSHIP TEAMS

The team has a  shared vision  and collective  purpose  which they support, and  confidence  they have made the right strategic bets to achieve success.

Proof of concept

Project teams.

Some sort of demonstration has been created and tested, that demonstrates why this problem needs to be solved, and demonstrates its value.

Customer centricity

Service teams.

Team members are skilled at  understanding , empathizing and  resolving  requests with an effective customer feedback loop in place that drives improvements and builds trust to improve service offerings.

Learn / Guides / Customer journey mapping (CJM) guide

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How 5 businesses successfully mapped out the customer journey

Creating a customer journey map puts you in your customers’ shoes to help you understand the user experience—what your users think, feel, and do at each stage of their buying journey.

Last updated

Reading time.

We’ve put together a list of five brilliant customer journey mapping (CJM) examples to show you how it’s done, so you can learn how to improve the user experience (UX) for your customers. 

Want to know how customers really interact with your product?

Hotjar’s product experience insights tools let you see things through their eyes. 

5 great examples of customer journey mapping 

A good customer journey map identifies buyers’ actions, desires, and experiences at every key touchpoint—from when a customer lands on your webpage all the way to conversion, onboarding, and beyond.

Our list of customer journey examples breaks down the best B2B, B2C, ecommerce, and SaaS journey maps—and shows you how to understand your customers better to build your own.

1. Hotjar’s B2B customer journey map 

At Hotjar (👋), we make product experience (PX) insights tools to help businesses understand how their customers interact with their websites and digital products. And, of course, we’ve done some B2B customer journey mapping of our own to understand what our customers want, by tracking their interactions across key touchpoints. 

The result was the digital customer journey example shown above that maps our customers' experience when they use Hotjar tools for product testing. We visualized the key actions, questions, technical limitations, and opportunities of customers using our tools to get granular data to validate our product ideas and experiments. 

We started by identifying one specific customer journey, then used Google Analytics, Hotjar tools, and data from customer interactions with our brand to understand user actions, thoughts, and feelings. Then, we got UX, dev, engineering, and customer success teams to fill out empathy maps before mapping the journey. 

To increase empathy with our customers, we included two rows dedicated to pain points and happy moments—like the pain of finding patterns in complex customer data, and the ‘a-ha moment' when our users first realize value.  

We made our map flexible enough to be updated as customer needs change and new information becomes available, so we continually validate our assumptions against customers’ real-world experiences.

The benefits of customer journey mapping included helping us visualize customer motivations, drivers, and pain points, align cross-functional teams , eliminate silos, and clarify who owns each part of the buyer journey. 

How B2B companies selling self-serve digital products can create a similar map: 

1. Define the goal and scope of your customer journey map. We recommend starting with a narrow scope and only a few people involved. Focus on a specific problem you can break down into a few steps—like identifying where you’re losing users, and mapping out the pains, desires, and experiences of customers who exit your site.

Ask yourself: 

What do you want to achieve? 

Which customer journey touchpoints do you want to focus on? 

What KPIs do you want to measure? 

Where can you get the data you need? 

Which teams need to be involved?   

2. Use Google Analytics and Hotjar's Observe tools to collect user insights about online interactions:

Create Hotjar Heatmaps on key product pages to see where users are clicking and which parts of your page aren’t engaging users or working as intended. Then, improve UX and optimize the placement of on-page elements to boost conversions. 

Use Session Recordings to see how users scroll, click, and move around your site across an entire session. Focus on spotting bugs and blockers that cause them to bounce. 

3. Add qualitative user data from service chat logs, emails, or by asking customer support teams. 

4. Get key product and customer service teams to fill in an empathy map detailing what your buyers do, say, see, hear, think, and feel. Feel free to steal our free template below!

5. Map the journey with Post-its and pens before digitizing it and sharing it across the company. 

2. Rail Europe’s B2C journey map 

B2C ecommerce travel provider Rail Europe gives customers an easy way to book rail tickets online. Their on-site user interface (UI) is strong, but the company wanted to go deeper to understand the customer journey across all touchpoints. 

Mapping the customer journey produced a full spectrum customer experience map that illustrates the buyer's journey before, during, and after a purchase. It reminded their team that the buyer journey starts long before a customer lands on the website to book a ticket—and continues after the trip, through touchpoints like post-trip refunds, sharing recommendations, or publishing photos on social media. 

Rail Europe’s customer journey map also shows the transition between stages or channels to accurately visualize what is often a non-linear journey . For example, in the initial research, planning, and shopping phases, customers often move back and forth between comparison pages, checking timetables, and website chat and planning features.  

Mapping the journey like this helps Rail Europe understand different customers’ channel preferences, see which touchpoints aren’t working as they should, and which aspects of the user experience need more attention from design teams, marketing, and customer support. They visualized actions, thoughts, feelings, and experiences and rated the customer satisfaction of each stage, as well as the relevance and helpfulness of Rail Europe, to home in on areas for improvement.

The map doubles down on customer empathy by identifying travelers’ overall concerns and frustrations while on the trip, even those unrelated to their rail journey—the overall travel experience is still connected with the company brand in customers’ minds. 

This stand-alone map can be understood across teams without supporting materials, and there’s a focus on actionable insights—like the need to address customer frustrations over snail mail ticket delivery. 

Ecommerce website analysis like this is valuable for any company selling experiential products or services, like concert tickets, vacations, or tours. If that’s you, follow Rail Europe’s example and conduct customer journey map research by surveying current and potential customers to uncover exactly what they’re hoping for, thinking, and feeling as they engage with your brand.

Tips to map out the ecommerce customer journey:

1. Ask yourself: 

How can we access users who aren’t yet customers? 

What happens before the customer gets to our web page? How do they do research for a trip? What kinds of search keywords do they use online?  

Is the buyer journey non-linear? If not, how can we represent this? 

2. If your buyer journey has multiple touchpoints, group them into categories like 'research and planning', 'shopping', 'booking', etc. 

3. Match survey insights to touchpoints and map out the journey visually, adding qualitative insights about what the customer is thinking, feeling, and doing at each stage. 

💡 Pro tip: use Hotjar Surveys to collect real-time suggestions about your website or app from users to make data-driven decisions and validate assumptions that inform and elevate your customer journey map. 

Hotjar’s no-code UI makes it easy to create drag-and-drop surveys  

3. Rewind’s SaaS customer journey map 

Rewind makes backup & restoration software for SaaS platforms. Their team decided to map out the B2B SaaS customer journey when revenue fell short of expectations after the acquisition of a similar product. It also became clear that marketing efforts weren’t attracting the ideal customer.

Like many SaaS companies, Rewind relied on sales calls and customer relationship management (CRM) data to understand their users. But they were missing key insights about what happens before the customer lands on their website. 

To map the journey, the Rewind team defined their ideal customer profile (ICP) before conducting customer interviews to deeply understand buyer motivations and the decision-making process. They also used Google Analytics, Hubspot , and PX insights tools to understand users’ online behavior and how they were interacting with marketing materials. 

This showed them a short, high-intent, back-and-forth customer journey that happens almost exclusively online—since Rewind is installed in SaaS platforms, a lot of traffic is referred from their app marketplaces. 

The map showed event triggers and the customer’s thoughts and feelings as they moved through becoming aware of their problem (loss of important data), understanding the need for a solution, and doing online research—before arriving at Rewind.  

By mapping the full journey, the Rewind team discovered that customers often use professional forums or communities as part of solution research, and discovered a new buyer motivation and market segment: data compliance. 

According to Content Lift Founder Ryan Paul Gibson , who helped Rewind conduct customer interviews, the company also realized “potential buyers don’t want to speak with sales or ‘get a demo'. They want to research the product themselves and evaluate it. They also don’t want to enter a credit card to test it; they want to try it first and pay if it’s a good fit.” 

Rewind updated their go-to-market strategy, personas, product positioning , and marketing to complete these missing steps in the customer journey map.

The result? A two-fold increase in product installations, and better internal alignment on their ICP—which has improved their efficiency and helped them maximize resources. 

To create a great SaaS customer journey map: 

Set your research objectives

Create a list of topics that align with your ideal buyer journey. For example, in Rewind’s case, they were customers’ reasons for buying, details about their company and role, and what caused them to start searching for a solution. 

Create questions to ask customers during interviews, but leave flexibility for discussion.

Run in-depth customer interviews to capture the exact order of events in the buyer journey and make sure you understand every customer action and touchpoint—from users identifying a problem to making a purchase.

Bucket interview insights into user priorities, pains, and anxieties—what happened to trigger a search; which research channels the customer uses; how they evaluate solutions.

4. Spotify’s B2C customer journey map 

When music streaming app Spotify mapped the user journey, their team focused on tracking touchpoints for one specific feature: sharing playlists via third-party apps.  

Their map zeroes in on clearly defined user personas and identifies key areas of customer engagement with a focus on users’ emotions and thoughts at each stage.

The team’s journey mapping research revealed a key customer pain point—fear of being judged for their music taste—that can hold users back from sharing music. They also identified an awareness gap to address: some users didn’t know the feature existed. 

By mapping the user journey, Spotify improved their UI and in-app flows to streamline the customer experience and make every touchpoint relevant to how real customers use the product.  

Mapping user flows is key for digital B2C brands with a product that lives and dies by good usability—and a business model that relies on customer loyalty. 

To map the user journey before improving or launching a feature:  

Conduct market research based on direct and indirect competitors to understand how people use similar features, and what they expect from yours. 

In user interviews , focus on the specific feature or stage of the journey. Why aren’t customers using it as you’d like? What are the barriers to product adoption? Dig deep into what motivates users to complete a specific action—and what blocks them.  

Using interview data, create a buyer persona and include their key needs and motivations. What can you do to bring this feature to their attention and boost adoption? 

Create a customer journey map combining stages in the user’s interaction with the feature, and break down the actions they take and the thoughts and emotions they have at each stage. 

Use these insights to remove friction and improve user flows, validating your design with real users. 

Pro tip : use Hotjar's Observe tools to study Session Recordings and Heatmaps and get insights into the product experience of real or test users at every point in the customer journey.

Heatmaps show you an intuitive aggregated view of which parts of your site are attracting attention and which aren’t to help you make changes that improve UX

5. Emirates Airline’s multi-channel customer journey map 

To reflect their customers’ multi-channel journey, flag carrier Emirates created a CJM that covers reservations, check-in, and onboarding experiences. 

As well as digital channels, the map includes call center interactions, which provide context for interactive voice response (IRV) technology and human service agents. It also sheds light on customer desires, broken down into categories like ‘comfort’, ‘safety’, ‘confidence’, and ‘freedom & control’, shown in the corners of the map.

With a global brand like Emirates, customers expect the same experience at all touchpoints, in all countries. This exercise helped the Emirates team understand customers’ main interactions and expectations to better coordinate service touchpoints and provide a consistent, high-quality experience across each one.  

For example, they set up a single, virtual contact center platform to increase efficiency and ensure consistent interactions across every channel. It’s not just the customer who benefits: the Emirates team now better understands exactly how to meet user needs across several channels and countries.

This map is ideal for businesses whose customer journey combines online and offline touchpoints, especially companies looking to differentiate themselves through the quality of their service. 

How to implement a multi-channel customer journey map: 

Define your key goals for producing the map.

Conduct thorough market research and customer interviews to reduce your assumptions and understand every single interaction and channel customers experience.

Interview customer experience and support staff members at all touchpoints and in all regions.

Use analytics tools and product experience insights software to understand how buyers interact with your digital marketing, website, and chat functions across channels and locations.  

Use AI to analyze customer call recordings for tone and sentiment.

Pro tip: use Hotjar Feedback widgets to get in-context insights about what users really think about your app or website. You can filter feedback by region or channel to better understand your global customer touchpoints.

Hotjar's non-invasive Feedback widgets allow customers to give their opinions of your website or product as they experience it.

You’ve reached your destination: a truly valuable customer journey map  

Customers interact with your brand over a variety of channels and touchpoints, and their journeys aren’t always linear. But understanding their journey is key to improving your product and boosting customer acquisition, adoption, and retention. 

Follow these customer journey mapping examples to experience key touchpoints from your users’ point of view and grasp their pains, needs, and frustrations so you can build a journey your customers will love.

Want to know how customers really interact with your brand?

Frequently asked questions about customer journey mapping, what are the stages of the customer's journey.

Buyer journeys can typically be broken down into three steps or stages: 

Awareness of a problem or pain

Consideration (researching and evaluating solutions)

Making a decision

What does a strong customer journey map look like?

A good customer journey map includes all the touchpoints where a customer interacts with your brand. It should include the various stages of the marketing and sales cycle, customer touchpoints across your product and website, and map out customers’ actions, thoughts, and feelings at each stage, as well as KPIs.

For example, Rail Europe’s customer journey map tracks all the stages of research, planning, and shopping, through to booking, travel, and post-travel. At each stage, it maps out customer questions, concerns, and feelings, as well as the helpfulness and relevance of Rail Europe.

What are the stages of customer journey mapping?

Customer journey map stages are: 

Collecting data and conducting customer interviews or surveys 

Mapping the customer journey in a workshop

Extracting insights and producing a report

CJM tools: features and how to choose

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World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience

When and how to create customer journey maps.

July 31, 2016 2016-07-31

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In This Article:

What is a customer journey map, deconstruction of a customer journey map, why do you need a journey map and when should you have one, key elements of customer journey maps, rules for creating successful journey maps.

In its most basic form, journey mapping starts by compiling a series of user goals and actions into a timeline skeleton. Next, the skeleton is fleshed out with user thoughts and emotions in order to create a narrative. Finally, that narrative is condensed into a visualization used to communicate insights that will inform design processes.

Storytelling and visualization are essential facets of journey mapping because they are effective mechanisms for conveying information in a way that is memorable, concise and that creates a shared vision. Fragmented understanding is chronic in organizations where KPIs are assigned and measured per individual department or group because many organizations do not ever piece together the entire experience from the user’s standpoint. This shared vision is a critical aim of journey mapping, because without it, agreement on how to improve customer experience would never take place.

Journey mapping creates a holistic view of customer experience, and it’s this process of bringing together and visualizing disparate data points that can engage otherwise disinterested stakeholders from across groups and spur collaborative conversation and change.

Zone A: The lens provides constraints for the map by assigning (1) a persona (“who”) and (2) the scenario to be examined (“what”).

Zone B: The heart of the map is the visualized experience, usually aligned across (3) chunkable phases of the journey. The (4) actions, (5) thoughts, and (6) emotional experience of the user has throughout the journey can be supplemented with quotes or videos from research.

Zone C: The output should vary based on the business goal the map supports, but it could describe the insights and pain points discovered, and the (7) opportunities to focus on going forward, as well as (8) internal ownership.

Journey maps should always be created to support a known business goal. Maps that do not align to a business goal will not result in applicable insight. The goal could be an external issue, such as learning about a specific persona’s purchasing behaviors, or an internal issue, such as addressing lack of ownership over certain parts of the customer experience. Some potential business goals that journey mapping could be applied toward are listed below.

Shift a company’s perspective from inside-out to outside-in. If an organization lets internal processes and systems drive decisions that affect customer experience, a journey map could help turn the culture of that organization by refocusing on the thoughts, actions and emotions of customers. Journey mapping sheds light on real human experiences that often organizations know very little about.

Break down silos to create one shared, organization-wide vision. Because journey maps create a vision of the entire customer journey, they become a tool for creating cross-department conversation and collaboration. Journey mapping could be the first step in building an organization-wide plan of action to invest in customer experience, as it helps answer the question, “Where do we start?” by highlighting areas of friction.

Assign ownership of key touchpoints to internal departments. Often, areas of inconsistencies and glitches in customer journeys exist simply because no internal team has been tasked with ownership of that element. Journey maps can create clarity around alignment of departments or groups with different stages or key touchpoints in the journey that need addressing.

Target specific customers. Journey maps can help teams focus in on specific personas or customers, whether that means understanding differences or similarities across the journeys of multiple personas, prioritizing a high-value persona or exploring ways to target a new type of customer.

Understand quantitative data. If you are aware through analytics or other quantitative data that something specific is happening—maybe online sales are plateauing or an online tool is being underutilized—journey mapping can help you find out why.

While journey maps can (and should) take a wide variety of forms, certain elements are generally included:

Point of view. First and foremost, choose the “actor” of the story. Who is this journey map about? For example, a university might choose either students or faculty members, both of which would result in very different journeys. “Actors” usually aligns with personas, if they exist. As a guideline, when creating a basic journey map, use one point of view per map in order to provide a strong, clear narrative.

Scenario. Next, determine the specific experience to map. This could be an existing journey, where mapping will uncover positive and negative moments within that current experience, or a “to-be” experience, where the mapper is designing a journey for a product or service that doesn’t exist yet. Make sure to clarify the user’s goal during this experience. Journey maps are best for scenarios that describe a sequence of events, such as purchasing behavior or taking a trip.

Actions, mindsets, and emotions. At the heart of a journey map’s narrative is what the user is doing, thinking, and feeling during the journey. These data points should be based on qualitative research, such as field studies, contextual inquiry, and diary studies . The granularity of representation can vary based on the purpose of the map. Is the purpose to evaluate or design an entire, broad purchasing cycle or a contained system?

Touchpoints and channels. The map should align touchpoints (times when the actor in the map actually interacts with the company) and channels (methods of communication or service delivery, such as the website or physical store) with user goals and actions. These elements deserve a special emphasis because they are often where brand inconsistencies and disconnected experiences are uncovered.

Insights and ownership. The entire point of the journey-mapping process is to uncover gaps in the user experience (which are particularly common in omnichannel journeys), and then take action to optimize the experience. Insights and ownership are critical elements that are often overlooked. Any insights that emerge from journey mapping should be explicitly listed. If politically possible, also assign ownership for different parts of the journey map, so that it’s clear who’s in charge of what aspect of the customer journey. Without ownership, no one has responsibility or empowerment to change anything.

Even with all the above critical elements included, two journey maps could look completely different, yet both be perfectly suitable for the context in which they were designed.Tradeoffs in scope, focus, and breadth vs. depth are required when deciding on what elements to include. To make informed decisions on those tradeoffs, consider the following:

• What level of detail is needed in order to tell the complete story?
• What elements (such as device, channel, encountered content) are also necessary in order to provide the most truthful narrative?
• Is the purpose of this journey map to diagnose issues with a current experience or to design a new experience?
• What’s the balance between external actions (on the customer side) and internal actions (on the organization side)?
• Who will be using this journey map?

Successful journey maps require more than just the inclusion of the “right” elements. Journey mapping should be a collaborative process informed by well-defined goals, and built from research. It requires hard work to keep the process on the right track and to build the buy-in needed to evangelize the insights it provides. Below are some tips for making sure that the process starts and stays in the right direction:

Establish the “why" and the “what.”  First, identify the business goal that the journey map will support. Make sure there are clear answers to these basic key questions before you begin the process:

• What business goal does this journey map support?
• Who will use it?
• Who is it about and what experience does it address?
• How will it be shared?

Base it on truth. Journey maps should result in truthful narratives, not fairy tales. Start with gathering any existing research, but additional journey-based research is also needed to fill in the gaps that the existing research won’t cover. This is a qualitative-research process. While quantitative data can help support or validate (or aid in convincing stakeholders who may view qualitative data as “fuzzy”), quantitative data alone cannot build a story .

Collaborate with others. The activity of journey mapping (not the output itself) is often the most valuable part of the process, so involve others. Pull back the curtain and invite stakeholders from various groups to be a part of compiling the data and building the map.

Don’t jump to visualization. The temptation to create an aesthetic graphic or jump to design can lead to beautiful yet flawed journey maps. Make sure the synthesis of your data is complete and well-understood before moving to creating the visual.

Engage others with the end product. Don’t expect to get “buy-in” and foster interest in your journey map by simply sending a lovely graphic as an email attachment. Make it a living interactive document that people can be a part of. Bring up your story in meetings and conversations to promote a narrative that others believe in and begin to reference. One idea is to create a journey-mapping showroom where anyone not on the direct team can come experience the process and resulting artifacts.

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Collaborative customer journey mapping tools

Gain a deep understanding of customer needs and business priorities

Ready-made customer journey map templates.

Design transformative customer journeys with templates for persona building, touchpoint maps, service blueprints, and more. Help your team quickly visualize, collaborate, and iterate on your customer experience, bringing in data and research to make the best-informed decisions.

Create a shared understanding, faster

Build highly visual and accurate maps that bring a customer’s humanity and experience to life with dynamically populated input, feedback, and data from various sources, like Amplitude, Looker, Blossom, Loom, and UserTesting. Record interactive walkthroughs with Talktrack so everyone can engage on their own time, with all the context on the board.

Easy to share and change

Give your team easy access to customer journey maps so they can leave feedback, ask questions, and make immediate changes as needed. Keep customer-centricity top of mind by embedding it everywhere your teams work (like Confluence) and it’ll always be synced to the latest version, or export your customer journey map as an image or PDF file for presentations.

Watch how Product Designer Maureen designs and uses customer journey maps in Miro

Why people love Miro for customer journey mapping

Uncover possibilities.

Miro’s infinite canvas gives you the ability to collaborate across product teams and cross-functional stakeholders on customer journeys. It serves as a team hub for mapping and research, where you can plot your customer’s paths, visualize their journey, and gather insights all in one tool.

Empathy made easy

Make sure all voices are heard and tap into your team’s collective imagination to identify customer pain points, cultivate empathy, wireframe solutions, and ship innovative products — all with Miro’s customer journey map tools.

Be the voice of the customer

Map your user journey step-by-step and truly understand the people using your product. Bring your team with you in this process and share your customer journey map across your organization. Become the customer advocate and ensure you add value to your product.

Quickly get started

Miro’s customer journey map tool helps accelerate your team’s processes by clearly visualizing journeys, touchpoints, personas, and more. Save time by crafting your customer journey map using one of our pre-made frameworks, or build one from scratch with our many editing tools.

Deliver better results

Make better-informed decisions by getting instant feedback and craft experiences that people will remember. Tag team members, receive comments, and gain more insights with Miro’s collaborative customer journey mapping tool.

Share it with everyone

Share your insights and be proactive by running customer workshops inside your organization. Use Miro’s collaborative features, such as the timer and voting, to help lead interactive sessions and engage your team. Offer the space and tools needed for blue-sky thinking.

Related pages

Research and design.

Strategic planning

Product management

Content and data visualization

Related templates

Customer Journey Map Template

Customer Touchpoint Map Template

Service Blueprint Template

5E Service Blueprint

Customer Journey Map Workshop

Experience Mapping Template

Hyperact's Service Blueprint Template

How to create a customer journey map with miro.

1. Define personas

Determine which specific customer segments or personas you want to focus on. Collect data and insights about their needs, behaviors, and preferences.

2. Identify touchpoints

Identify key stages of the customer journey listing the touchpoints. Detail the specific actions, emotions, and pain points customers experience at each stage.

3. Add context and insights

Integrate data from customer surveys, interviews, analytics, and other sources to enrich your understanding of customer behaviors and preferences.

4. Share and find opportunities

Identify opportunities to improve the customer experience. When ready, share with stakeholders for feedback and collaboratively draft an action plan to implement the findings.

5. Iterate and update

Embed the map where teams and stakeholders can easily find it. Regularly review and evolve the customer journey map as you gain more data, insights, and feedback.

Customer journey mapping tools FAQs

What makes a good customer journey?

To create a good customer journey map, make sure you add all the stages your user goes through by mapping every customer touchpoint and the phases they belong to. After you map out your customer journey, to know more about who they are, you can create a storyboard or dig deeper with an empathy map. Miro’s customer journey mapping software makes it easy to add other artifacts and maps to your board, so you can have a great overview of your customer journey and what influences your customer's experiences. It can get messy, and it’s ok! Once you have all the information you need in one shared space, it’s easier to craft your customer journey or create a new user journey map.

What are the components of a customer journey map?

In Miro’s customer journey mapping tool, you have the flexibility to add as many components as you’d like. In our template, we use the following: actions, touchpoints, customer thoughts, customer feelings, process ownership, and opportunities. Each component belongs to a customer journey stage and is added to the board. Some folks also add user research data and other tools, such as empathy maps or timelines.

Can I download or share my customer journey map?

Yes, you can download your customer journey map as an image or PDF file or share your board link with others. Embed the map everywhere your teams work, like Confluence or Notion and it'll always be synced to the latest version. The customer journey map can be treated as a living document, evolving according to your product evolution and need.

The ultimate list of templates for understanding your customers

What is a customer journey map, 3 steps to go from customer interviews to a customer journey map, the difference between a service blueprint and a journey map, get on board in seconds, plans and pricing.

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.

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.

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.

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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Using Customer Journey Maps to Improve Customer Experience

• Adam Richardson

Following on the first article on defining customer experience, this second installment looks at the first essential step of improving the experience you deliver, which is mapping out your customer journey. A customer journey map is a very simple idea: a diagram that illustrates the steps your customer(s) go through in engaging with your company, […]

Following on the first article on defining customer experience , this second installment looks at the first essential step of improving the experience you deliver, which is mapping out your customer journey.

• Adam Richardson is a creative director at the global innovation firm frog design and the author of Innovation X: Why a Company’s Toughest Problems Are Its Greatest Advantage . His background combines experience in product development, product strategy, and customer research.

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Customer Journey Maps: The Top 10 Requirements

It’s hard to believe it’s been seven years since I launched my customer experience consultancy, Heart of the Customer, way back when CX was still in its infancy.

At that time, when I first wrote  Customer Journey Maps – the Top 10 Requirements , I didn’t know the post would be viewed hundreds of thousands of times, and reposted around the world. But I did know that customer experience as a discipline – given its proven ability to boost customer loyalty and company results – was here to stay.

I enjoyed revisiting and updating the post back in 2015, but in the intervening years, the world has changed , the CX industry has evolved , research methodology has gotten more nimble, and technology has advanced . (And yet, somehow, none of us has aged a day – it’s uncanny!)

So it’s time once again to refresh the content. I am proud that the underlying philosophy and framework remains solid and consistent, but I’ve tweaked some terminology, techniques, guidelines, and examples.

In short, it’s an oldie, but a goodie, and I hope that regardless of whether you’re rereading it or encountering it for the first time, you will come away with something new and helpful.

Understanding your customer experience is the key to improving it…and to reaping the financial rewards that go hand in hand with increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty. And the best way to find out what customers do, think, and feel while interacting with your company is to create a customer journey map.

These visual representations show how a customer uses your product or service, or the decision-making process that turns a potential user into a customer. Undertaking the journey mapping process carries benefits that go way beyond the creation of a singular document, but here we will focus only on the maps themselves.

Guidelines are valuable because there is no “standard” map, since there is no “standard” customer experience. But not all journey maps are created equal. The best maps are highly customized, documenting your  customer’s journey, as it is today, through your customer’s eyes. This allows you to easily identify where to focus your resources in the future, and the most cost-effective initiatives to implement to generate the greatest return on your investment (ROI) and the largest increase in customer loyalty.

The visual appeal of the document is extremely important, but the specific style is less so. You can build a map following high-quality design principles or use smiley faces. You can make it an engaging work of art or scribbles on a napkin. Ultimately, what is going to matter most is the content, and the integrity of the process used to compile it.

In this post, I’ll detail the criteria used to design and build the customer experiences and journey maps that can accelerate your customer experience program, focusing on the 10 critical components all great customer journey maps share. The examples we’ve peppered throughout the post show actual Heart of the Customer journey maps that incorporate these criteria.

Here’s what you need to include for an effective, actionable, customer-focused journey map:

Here are the top 10 requirements for creating a successful customer journey map

1. represent your customer’s perspective.

Customer’s Viewpoint

A great customer journey map must represent the experience as your customer sees it, not the way you think they see it. That means it will often include aspects out of your direct control, such as social media influences, web searches, and steps your customers take before you even enter the picture.

B2B Software Example

For example, while studying the software purchase process for a large B2B client, Heart of the Customer – much to our client’s surprise – discovered that the vast majority of clients and prospects relied extensively on their own networks to create their list of vendors, ignoring conference trade shows, Google searches, and other more traditional forms of marketing.

While those channels were employed later in the purchase process, our discovery revealed that if the company didn’t win at “ word of mouth ,” they lost before they even knew they were in the running. This invaluable insight allowed the company to avoid wasting resources on programs that weren’t really impacting their results – or their bottom line – and instead concentrate on more effective relationship-building efforts.

2. Do Your Research

Use Several Different Research Methods

You can’t rely on internal staff to build an accurate customer journey map. (Unless you employ a lot of mind-readers , in which case, go right ahead!) Depending on the scope of the customer journey map example, you’ll need interviews, ethnographies, surveys , and/or other types of customer research to figure out what’s really going on . Start with qualitative research, as your customer touchpoints often involve interactions and emotional responses that will be a surprise. We always begin there, then for some projects, follow up with quantitative surveys to confirm the results.

Talk to Customers

Talk to your customers. There is no substitute for having conversations with customers. Producing a map without talking to customers is what we call a hypothesis map. It is based on the hypotheses of the internal employees.

When I was at a large HSA company running the customer experience program, we led the nation in sales, but we also led the nation in churn. When I asked around, I found out that none of the people making decisions about the HSA product had ever talked to a customer to validate the customer’s journey. They said, “We are customers, so we do not have to talk with anyone else.” They were the strangest customers ever. They thought about HSAs all day, every day. No real customer experience matches that. When we talked to customers about their top pain points, we found the biggest driver of dissatisfaction was the inability to log in to the site. The internal group would never have considered this, as logging in was easy for them.

COCREATE WITH CUSTOMERS

Some companies bring in customers to work hand in hand with employees to build the customer journey map, but care must be taken in that scenario to avoid the bias that results from a small or tainted sample. This approach typically works best with B2B companies that want to focus on a specific journey, such as customer support. In most cases, it’s best to do customer research first, then build on the information gathered.

3. Recognize and Represent Customer Personas

The images show customer journey map examples

Health Insurance Example

Different customers have very different customer journeys. For instance, while mapping how consumers purchase health insurance, we found that while one segment of customers spent only a couple of hours on research, another invested six weeks and used completely different tools. A great customer journey map doesn’t lump those two segments together because the result wouldn’t accurately reflect the experience of either.

Retail Example

When doing customer journey mapping for a large retailer, we found that customers were segmented by need rather than by demographics. The average customer, coming in on the way back from work to grab a few things for the evening had unique needs and a different customer experience than one who had a sick child at home and needed medicine late at night. Other customers came each week to hunt for deals for their necessities. Each customer needed different things from their customer journey. To design the future state, you must uncover the differences so you can design to meet the specific customer needs.

Naming Drives Empathy

The solution is to identify the qualities and journey experiences of customers within a segment, and then use that data to build out a persona that represents that segment and brings their experiences to life. Naming the persona or personas allows employees to connect with their customer’s needs. Here are some examples of some personas, see if you can relate to any of them.

VP Vince — VP of Technology and Operations. He is tasked with implementing software that will transform the company’s business. He is focused on aggressive growth, modernization, automation, and innovation.

Cautious Carter — A buyer new to the Florida real estate market, relocating for a job and family. His goals are to find a realtor that is an expert in the Florida market to enable him to make a wise investment in the right property.

Security Driver Faye — A married woman in her 30s looking to purchase the right employee benefits. She wants to achieve peace of mind even if it costs a little more.

If you have already identified segments, use those in your research. If you haven’t, use your qualitative research to uncover different personas, which you can refine in the quantitative phase.

4. Include Customer Goals

Healthcare Customer journey goals

A great customer journey map illustrates what your customers are trying to accomplish at each stage of their experience and reflects whether those goals evolve as the journey progresses.

For example, when studying a healthcare journey for a hospital, we found that in the early stages, one persona focused extensively on understanding everything involved with the journey, whereas a different persona was just focused on getting through the process as quickly as possible. That revelation made designing cost-effective initiatives to meet the personas’ needs much easier.

Jobs to be done (JTBD) in a customer journey

The “jobs to be done” (JTBD) concept is a framework that helps businesses understand the underlying motivations and goals of customers when they “hire” a product or service to fulfill a specific job or task. It focuses on the progress a customer wants to achieve rather than the specific product or solution they are using. When applied to a customer journey map, the JTBD concept can provide valuable insights into understanding the customers’ goals at different stages of their journey.

5. Focus on Emotions

It’s impossible to overstate the importance emotions play in any customer experience, whether B2B or B2C, because emotions are the key motivator behind every decision we make. Even when it comes to the largest organizations, ultimately, every decision is still made by a human being.

The Science of customer emotions

In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman identified that the overwhelming majority of decisions are made automatically, based on an emotional reaction.

This includes customers’ decisions to renew or abandon their ScoreSense® subscription. Those with a positive emotional experience are typically more likely to renew — and pay for — programs than those with a neutral or negative experience.

Qualtrics’ XM Institute reports that when an emotional experience is positive, 90% of customers are promoters, whereas when it is negative or neutral, only 22% survey customers are.

More importantly, when problems occur, 74% of those with a positive emotional experience will forgive you, whereas only 19% of those with a negative or neutral experience will.

Spotlight the emotions

Great customer journey maps spotlight these emotions. I’m not a fan of using the smiley and frowning emojis prevalent in many existing customer journey maps, but the information does need to be conveyed somehow. Heart of the Customer always uses professional designers , but there are now so many graphic tools and options readily accessible to anyone with an internet connection that using smiley faces seems needlessly inadequate and, frankly, a little lazy.

SAAS Software Customer Journey Design by Emotions

In our work with a large SAAS software company, we noticed a set of eight emotions customers kept expressing about their experiences. These included emotions such as pride, confidence, frustration, and exhaustion. These were laid out on the customer’s experience journey map at the different phases.

We helped the company tie these emotions to some specific customer behaviors. Customers that expressed confidence were 50% more likely to purchase additional modules. For customers that expressed exhaustion during the later stages of implementation, the likelihood of purchasing went to almost zero.

This software company redesigned the future state so that when customers expressed confidence, a sales rep would reach out to see how best to get the next sale. When a customer expressed exhaustion, the company provided ‘free’ professional services resources to help reduce the exhaustion and in-service of the customer purchasing more in the future.

Take advantage of color, style, and graphic elements to put viewers of your map in the shoes of your customer and convey how customers feel throughout the journey.

6. Indicate Touchpoints

One reason many clients choose to create a customer journey map is to better understand the order and type of each and every touchpoint – those times when your customer and your company interact – including those over which you have little direct control, such as the online research or referral from a friend that might lead a customer to your website early in their shopping journey.

“External” touchpoints are often some of the most important parts of the customer journey and are key to understanding the friction that occurs.

Types of Touchpoints

Advertising touchpoints : These include various channels such as TV commercials, radio ads, online banner ads, print ads, social media ads, and sponsored content.

Website touchpoints : Interactions that occur on the company’s website, such as landing pages, product pages, checkout process, customer support chat, and user account pages.

Social media touchpoints : Engagements that happen on social media platforms, such as Facebook posts, tweets, Instagram stories, YouTube videos, and customer comments or messages.

Physical store touchpoints : For businesses with physical locations, these touchpoints include in-store interactions, such as browsing products, talking to sales associates, making a purchase, or participating in events.

Customer service touchpoints : These touchpoints encompass interactions with the customer service team through support channels, including phone calls, live chat, email support, self-service portals, and support tickets.

Mobile app touchpoints : If the company has a mobile app, interactions within the app, such as signing up, navigating the app, making purchases, receiving push notifications, and using app-specific features.

Email touchpoints : Communication that occurs through email, including welcome emails, newsletters, transactional emails (order confirmations, shipping updates), and personalized offers.

Offline touchpoints : Any touchpoints that happen outside of digital channels, such as direct mail, brochures, catalogs, physical events or conferences, and product packaging. 60% of all customer touchpoints often occur in this group.

Word-of-mouth touchpoints : These include recommendations or referrals from friends, family, or colleagues, as well as online reviews and ratings on platforms like Yelp or Google.

Post-purchase touchpoints : Touchpoints occur after the customer purchases, such as post-purchase emails, product usage instructions, customer surveys, and loyalty programs.

Talk to Customers to get it right

Internal journey mapping done without capturing the voice of the customer is unlikely to take these customer steps into account – and therefore unlikely to be able to address and improve them – yet another reason involving real customers in your mapping efforts is so important.

7. Highlight Moments of Truth

Just as not all maps are created equal, not all interactions in the customer journey are equally important. Great journey maps reveal those Moments of Truth that have a disproportionate impact on a customer’s overall perception of the journey, and in doing so, pinpoint the key opportunities where your improvement efforts will provide the greatest return.

The outcome of these critical interactions might well determine whether a customer stops doing business with you or is so delighted they recommend you to their friends, family, and social media connections.

Healthcare Example

For one healthcare client, Heart of the Customer’s research revealed that problems during the hospital check-in process tainted the entire patient experience, even for patients that were otherwise quite satisfied with the care they subsequently received. In that circumstance, directly putting resources toward providing better care – a seemingly obvious way to improve customer satisfaction – would have little impact on loyalty. Removing the initial friction during the check-in process, however, increased customer loyalty and care ratings (for the same level of care) because it changed customers’ perception of the care received.

Manufacturing Example

Here is a two-part Moment of Truth from a manufacturing company. First, the customer changes the delivery date or quantity, thinking, “Things have changed. I need to adjust the quantity.” The customer is feeling anxious. Second, the manufacturer changes the delivery date. The customer is now thinking, “Not again! Why does the manufacturer keep changing the date?” The customer is feeling powerless. One or both could happen.

We had measures to show the first scenario, where the customer changed the date, occurred 25% of the time. The second scenario, where the manufacturer changed the delivery date, occurred 20% of the time. Do you think we needed to improve the journey around those experiences? I’ll give you a hint…they were both far below the emotion line.

The moments resonated with employees, but the data created urgency.

For the first moment, we obviously needed to be nimble with the shifting customer needs. But for the second moment, we were REALLY negative impacting customer satisfaction with unreliable delivery. (By the way, showing up early with shipments is almost just as bad as showing up late.)

8. Evaluate Your Brand Promise

Done right, journey mapping can reveal how your brand promise aligns with the actual customer experience you’re providing, as well as how to fix issues if you’re falling short.

Do you sell your process as being effortless ? Highly personalized? Affordable? A great customer journey map will show whether your customers believe you’re delivering – and if they think you’re not, how much their disappointment might be costing you in lost sales or increased expenses.

9. Measure Time

The length of a customer experience provides important context. Does a typical call last 30 seconds or 10 minutes? Did shoppers take an hour or a week to decide on a purchase? A great journey map recognizes that this information is essential and is built around it.

Financial Services Example

We mapped a journey for a financial services company. We mapped the onboarding journey for someone opening one of five different types of financial accounts.

The timing for each stage of the customer journey was important, like how the time between creating the account and signing the paperwork was negatively affected by the fact that 60% of customers needed to call customer service. The most crucial time was time to fund the account. If it took more than four days to fund the new account, the chance of funding went down by 75%. This outcome was bad for both the customer and the company.

10. Ditch the PowerPoint

The overarching themes of the story told by a journey map should be immediately obvious. But a great journey map is designed to be pored over and studied, with the nuances revealed in the details. Too many journey maps are created only for presentation on a screen, communicating basic information through concise bullet points. A great customer journey map defies those limitations.

Desktop Publishing Software

Use a desktop publishing application and a professional designer to create your own customer journey map, so you can dive deeper and more freely and effectively convey the richness of the customer experience. These tools allow each customer journey map to be bespoke and not rely on a generalized customer journey map template.

Customer Journey Mapping Software

The last few years have shown an explosion of software tools to help with customer journey map creation and customer journey management. Tools like Inspire Journey from Quadient and SuiteCX walk the line between being able to tell a story with powerful visualization and the need for advanced desktop publishing skills.

A Customer journey map template IS A no-go

Each journey is unique and has its own touchpoints, phases, and Moments of Truth. When you start with a customer journey map template, you lock in your expectations and often will miss a touchpoint because it does not fit the template being used.

Conclusion of the Top 10 Customer Journey Map Requirements

There you have it, as promised: 10 points that highlight the critical components of any great customer journey map. But we customer experience pros recognize the benefits of going above and beyond in our efforts to delight, right?

Four “bonus” criteria that you’ll also want to consider:

Break the experience into phases.

In longer journeys, customers are trying to accomplish different things, at different times, and in different ways. Document their mindset throughout, so you can tailor your customer experience to meet customer needs at every stage .

For example, it’s typical for preliminary steps in a shopping journey to revolve around finding out what questions to ask, but later steps in the journey are more transactional. Keep tabs on what your customer wants from you, and when they want it.

Weave in Their Words

Including customer quotes – what they’re actually saying during and about the experience – isn’t strictly necessary, but I’ve found it really adds dimension to the experience and helps employees relate to what the customer is going through.

3. Include Non-Customers

A pre-sales customer journey map should always include “the ones that got away,” i.e., the people who chose not to do business with you. Finding out where their experience differed from the people you successfully converted into customers is likely to shed a lot of light on the reasoning and emotions behind their decision-making process – and therefore illustrate where you should target your interventions .

For example, one Heart of the Customer journey map revealed that our client’s “non-customers” were typically people who relied on in-person meetings when making purchasing decisions – something our client didn’t offer at the time. That realization was critical to their improvement efforts, and yielded corresponding financial benefits.

Incorporate Your Other Voice of the Customer Components

Journey maps shouldn’t stand alone. Just as your maps can explain the findings from other methods of customer feedback, other methods of research can add richness to your journey maps.

Factor in operational data , such as the length of the journey, error rates, or the number of support calls, to add explanatory power and context to your journey maps, especially when presenting to executives.

Last Thoughts on Customer Journey Mapping

Keeping these 10 (plus four) components in mind during your customer journey mapping process will ensure you create a rich document that provides a solid foundation for your customer experience efforts. But make sure they don’t just gather dust on a shelf!  Use what you’ve learned to drive action, manage your journey , and improve your business outcomes .

Our blog offers many more examples of how we apply these principles to benefit our clients . For additional details about our proprietary journey mapping process , download our journey mapping  toolkit , watch our webinars , and peruse our authoritative journey mapping guidebook, How Hard Is It to Be Your Customer?

You might also find our recent white papers of interest:

CX for Skeptics: Showing the ROI of CX

Driving Change Through Journey Maps

FAQs about Customer Journey Mapping

At Heart of the Customer, we understand that the key to an exceptional Customer Experience (CX) is understanding the customer’s journey. In this FAQ, we’ll dive into the essentials of customer journey mapping to help you improve your CX strategy.

1. What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the entire experience a customer has with your company, from initial contact to long-term engagement. It’s designed to showcase the customer’s interactions, emotions, expectations, and pain points at each stage of their journey. By creating a customer journey map, you gain valuable insights into customer needs and preferences, helping you tailor your products, services, and communication to create the best possible CX.

2. What is the purpose of a customer journey map?

The primary goal of a customer journey map is to understand the customer’s perspective better, allowing you to improve the overall CX. It can help you identify areas of friction or dissatisfaction, discover opportunities for innovation, and streamline your processes. Ultimately, an effective customer journey map enables your organization to make more informed decisions, enhance customer satisfaction, and drive business growth.

3. How do you structure a customer journey map?

Customer journey maps can vary in format and complexity, but they generally include these key components:

• Customer persona: This represents the target customer, including their demographics, goals, preferences, and motivations.
• Journey stages: The main phases a customer goes through when interacting with your business, such as awareness, consideration, purchase, and retention.
• Touchpoints: Specific moments of interaction between the customer and your company, like browsing your website, contacting support, or using your product.
• Emotions and sentiments: Indicate how the customer feels during each stage, revealing potential pain points and areas for improvement.
• Opportunities and actions: Identify areas where your organization can enhance the CX and outline the steps needed to implement these changes.

4. What are the three journey mapping techniques?

There are several methods for creating a customer journey map, but these three techniques are particularly popular:

– Workshop-based mapping: Involves collaborative brainstorming sessions with cross-functional teams, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of the entire customer journey from multiple perspectives.

– Data-driven mapping of the buyer journey: Leverages quantitative and qualitative data (e.g., surveys, analytics, customer feedback) to build an evidence-based map of the customer’s journey.

– Diary study mapping: Customers record their experiences with your company over a certain period, providing first-hand insights into their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors.

By understanding the fundamentals of customer journey mapping, you’re better equipped to unlock the full potential of your CX strategy. Remember, a well-crafted customer journey map can illuminate opportunities for improvement and help drive your organization’s success. Happy mapping!

Keep reading .

The Secrets to AGCO’s CX Success

By Jared Tincher

From Vision to Execution: Building Your Customer Experience Dream Team

A Positive Emotional Experience = Good for Customers, Profitable for You

By Jim Tincher

Navigating Customer Experience Maturity: The Road to Success

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How to improve customer experience (cx).

11 min read Businesses are increasingly recognising the power of customer experience when it comes to growing loyalty, lowering operational costs and securing long-term growth. But how exactly do you make your CX better?

Improving customer experience (CX) – the business case

Why should you improve  customer experience ? Why does CX matter?

Improving your customer experience (CX) could have a major impact on your bottom line. In fact, a moderate increase in customer experience generates an average revenue increase of £823 million over three years for a company with £1 billion in annual revenues, according to the Temkin Group .

An investment in CX can also reduce operational costs such as the cost to serve, according to  Harvard Business Review . Unhappy customers are expensive, after all.

Check out the 10 tips below on how to improve the customer experience:

1. Empower your employees

This may seem backwards, but companies that win at CX start with their employees.

There’s an important connection between empowered employees and happy customers. Think about it – you’ve been speaking to a  customer service  agent for 10 minutes and you ask for a discount. The agent wants to resolve your issue, but they need to approve it with their manager. You’re already tired and just want to be finished with the conversation. It would be much easier if the agent could use their judgment, approve the discount (or take other appropriate action) and solve your issue on the spot.

Take action :

Find out what’s blocking your employees from delivering a great customer experience. Use an  employee pulse survey  to uncover any common pain points in the employee experience, and use those insights to review systematic processes such as contact center protocols and CRM software.

Consider your  company culture , too. Are leaders, managers and employees all on the same page, with clearly understood shared values that support  good customer experiences ? Can you do more to  build a customer-centric culture in your organisation?

2. Value employee ideas

Employees who are on the frontlines interacting with customers are in a unique position. They’re the rubber meets the road when it comes to delivering on your brand promises, and they’re equally pivotal when it comes to perceiving and communicating customer expectations, mood and perceptions.

So when that crucial connection suffers, so does your understanding of your customers, and their perception of you. Employees who feel valued are more engaged at work and more willing to help customers.

According to our latest employee engagement trends research survey, employees are two times as likely to be actively disengaged if they think their manager ignores them, so it’s important to let them know they’re valued by listening to their opinions and ideas.

As well as running regular pulse surveys to collect employee experience data, consider setting up an  employee suggestion box  to create a channel for ad hoc feedback. Giving employees a voice can offer valuable insight.

Even more importantly, take action on the feedback your employees provide. Making a clear connection between what they give you and what you’re able to do as a result will underline how important they are to you.

3. Use tech to create breakthrough customer experiences

AI and machine learning are tailor-made for CX experiences . From chatbots that are there for customers 24/7, to natural language processing that allows you to understand what people mean in free-form text messages, the latest digital technology has made time-to-insights faster and new levels of personalisation and service both scalable and affordable.

The value of these technologies are reflected by the increasing numbers of big businesses using them. For example, Dominos lets customers order pizza through the Domino’s Facebook Messenger chatbot, and eBay helps customers search the entire eBay marketplace for the best deals out there just like a personal shopper. There’s no doubt AI and related tech can make life easier for your customers and allow you to get creative with your products.

Take action:

Explore the possibilities with AI and machine learning tools designed for experience management. Take a look at our  listening tools  and see how digital technology powers contact center performance .

4. Embrace an omnichannel mindset

Gone are the days of sitting down at a desktop computer to connect with a brand. With more than 50% of web traffic coming from  mobile  devices, multi-device digital journeys are now the standard.

But it’s not just about maintaining a consistent journey across different devices. Today’s CX leaders understand that customers use a range of offline and online channels to connect with brands, often switching multiple times, and that every part of the journey – however meandering and unpredictable – needs to be seamlessly joined-up and consistent.

Embracing omnichannel is one of the most important shifts you’ll make in your business thinking, and it’s one that goes hand in hand with prioritising CX.

Find out how to  develop an omnichannel approach

5. Personalise, personalise, personalise!

Customers today want personalised interactions. In fact, research by Epsilon found that 80% of consumers were more likely to make a purchase when brands offered CX , and 81% of consumers want brands to understand them better and know when and when not to approach them, according to  Accenture .

Personalisation, where the experience adapts based on what you know about the customer, makes customer journeys smoother and strengthens the bond between brand and customer. If you’ve ever received a marketing email filled with recommendations and vouchers based on your purchase history, or been able to set up which content you see on a website from your user profile, you’ve experienced the power of personalisation.

Here are some ways you can use personalisation:

• Use data to personalize  survey questions
• Use geolocation technology to personalize based on location
• Offer recommendations based on past purchases
• Personally follow-up with survey responses
• Adapt your website to offer dynamic content based on user preferences

6. Adopt a top-down approach

The best customer-centric organizations start at the top. CX and company leaders should model the importance of customer-centricity and set an example employees can follow with confidence.

Take Walt Disney, for example, who used to walk around Disneyland Park, observing and fine-tuning the experience by stepping into his customer’s shoes. Today, the Disney brand is customer-focused because the leaders model it.

Leadership exemplars are part of developing a customer-first culture. Starting from the top, values and behaviours need to be consistently adopted and acted on at every level of the organisation, from C-suite to shop floor.

Use our tips to understand the value and impact of a customer-centric culture and allocate resources to make the customer a priority.

7. Use customer journey mapping

Customer journey mapping visually illustrates customers’ processes, needs, and perceptions throughout their interaction and relationship with your brand.

By cross-referencing journey maps with core metrics, you can get a better understanding of your CX and where there are issues and opportunities. You can use journey maps to improve customer experience now,  envision your future customer experience , or drive organisational change.

Learn how to plan, execute and improve your customer journey maps with our  ultimate guide to customer journey mapping

8. Include open-text feedback in surveys

Customer experiences are especially powerful when they are expressed in a customer’s own words. By hearing directly from customers, for example through open-text responses on surveys, you can  understand the thoughts and sentiments  behind their actions and make more informed CX decisions as a result.

But although in an ideal world you’d have a 1:1 conversation with every customer, asking everyone what they think of your brand and listening to their answers would simply take forever. Until recently, businesses have been limited in how much natural language feedback they can process and use.

Fortunately, technology has provided a way to take open-text feedback from customer surveys and analyse it at scale, so that you can massively increase your capacity to listen. Tools like Text iQ use natural language processing  to sift large volumes of written feedback and identify the big-picture patterns you need to know about. It can even make future predictions based on your data.

Take action :  Discover Text iQ

9. Improve your customer service

Customer service  is the backbone of a great customer experience, and can be a powerful differentiator in the eyes of your customers. People don’t just buy from you because your product meets their needs – they buy because they feel confident they’ll get support when they need it. The data show that time and again, customers who experience great service buy more and stay loyal to brands for longer. For instance, American Express found that  customers were willing to pay 17% more  with a business that offered great customer service.

Delivering great customer service relies on a few different things. Your employees need to be hired, trained, coached, and supported with a view to growing customer service skills and behaviours. Your business culture needs to promote delivering on quality, not just on speed and efficiency. And the infrastructure your business runs on, including CRM tools and experience management platform , needs to be flexible, scalable, and easy to use.

Some ways to improve your customer service include:

• Offering multiple channels for support – part of your omnichannel approach
• Optimising wait and response times – which could mean a strategy that mixes digital and in-person support
• Closing the loop  with customers – turning every experience into a positive outcome
• Using benchmark metrics like  CSAT ,  CES , and  NPS  to make sure you are continually improving

10. Implement Voice of the Customer programs

Voice of the Customer  (VoC) is feedback about customers’ experiences with you and their expectations of your products or services. It focuses on customer  needs , expectations, understanding, and product improvement.

Creating a program for capturing feedback and acting on those insights will help you understand your customer’s needs, create better products, and attract and retain customers. This is crucial for the success of any CX program.

A VoC program needs to be closely aligned to your organisational goals and what business outcomes you want to achieve from listening to customers. Find out more about planning and executing a VoC program

Learn how Qualtrics CustomerXM can help you design and improve CX at your company

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Journey Mapping the Customer Experience: A USA.gov Case Study

Journey maps are a visual representation of a customer’s end to end journey with your product or service. They are a powerful tool for exploring key interactions and experiences with your organization, programs, and/or services.

Journey maps describe a customer’s entire journey, even the parts that occur before and after contact with your organization. They typically contain elements such as the customer’s attitudes, emotions, and needs.

We recently updated USA.gov’s personas and used them as the backbone for our journey maps. We updated our personas to help inform our Web design, content, and contact center services.

We have a lot of data that we regularly analyze, and it tells us a lot about our customers’ journeys within a channel, but we knew we needed to better understand our customers’ journeys across channels. This is a best practice to better understand what a customer experiences, where there are disconnects in information, and where improvements can be made to your website, contact center interactive voice response recordings, or service delivery on any channel.

Preparation is Key

We used information in the CX Journey Mapping Toolkit to plan the sessions and our approach. We invited subject matter experts, managers, and other stakeholders to participate in the mapping sessions and designated facilitators to lead the sessions and keep us on track.

One of the most important preparation activities is creating the behavior line. This is the path your customer takes and the journey you’re going to map.

One of USA.gov’s personas, Linda, wants to browse information or learn more on a general topic. We selected “searching for financial assistance from the government” as the topic of Linda’s journey because it’s consistently one of the top reasons customers visit USA.gov or call 1-844-USA-GOV1 , and it falls within the persona category.

To create Linda’s behavior line, we looked at:

• USA.gov Web analytics, including demographics, devices, common paths, popular pages, outbound links, and onsite searches
• Web analytics specifically for our Government Benefits, Grants, and Loans content
• USA.gov customer satisfaction survey data
• Searches on Google that led customers to USA.gov
• Contact center content usage
• Web analytics for other government websites available through the Digital Analytics Program
• General search trends on Google

Once the behavior line was created, we printed each step on one piece of paper. We taped the steps to the wall, with accompanying images, and the facilitators walked the participants through a series of exercises to explore the journey, which includes:

• Employees and systems the customer interacts with personally
• Behind-the-scenes employees and systems that support the direct interactions
• Customer’s attitudes, emotions, and needs
• The highs and lows of the journey

After adding multiple rounds of sticky notes and stickers to mark these different factors, we picked the greatest pain points in the journey and brainstormed ways to improve them.

The four journey mapping sessions generated a total of 110 ideas. Of those ideas, 58 were broad, and many were repeated in each session. Clear themes emerged around areas such as:

• Partnerships
• Contact center operations

The journey mapping process and results helped us clearly see the pain points and gaps in the customer’s experience, including channel, content, and device gaps. It also helped to build empathy and increase understanding with our employees.

Next Steps and Key Takeaways

While the process of journey mapping is enlightening, it doesn’t end with a map. Follow-up and planning for improvement are key. We’ve incorporated many outcomes from our journey maps into our customer experience (CX) improvement queue. We’ve prioritized several projects into our fourth quarter objectives and key results across our content, user experience, performance measurement, and contact center teams.

Some specific priorities in our CX improvement queue:

• Improve our contact center interactive voice response (IVR) menu
• Engage partner agency customers in journey mapping exercises that cross our programs
• Share our data; make better linkages in results that impact our programs (e.g., search results impact on user experience, content usage on Web and in contact center)
• Improve reporting of key results throughout our organization and to senior leadership
• Improve customer understanding by using personas and journey maps as a standard process that we incorporate into the beginning of any new project or product
• Establish a Customer Advisory Council that includes our agency customers; engage them in our USA.gov transformation efforts and problem solving

Journey mapping isn’t a one-and-done project. We are continuing to analyze our results and prioritize areas for improvement, and we’ll continue to map future state journeys to help define desired experiences, keeping the customer at the center of our efforts.

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Home Library The Ultimate Guide to Journey Orchestration

The Ultimate Guide to Journey Orchestration

• Mar 13, 2024
• 13 min read

Customer journey orchestration is more than a trend or a fleeting phase in the ever-changing world of martech. 

It’s a shift in the way businesses view their relationships with their audience, and it’s a viewpoint you need to adopt to keep up with customer expectations.

Journey orchestration lets each customer take an active role in defining their personal experience with your brand, like a choose-your-own-adventure book. And as a business, you are the author. You give them the choices and guide the way, steering them towards the perfect products and enticing them to purchase. 

You are expected to build, adapt, and orchestrate their customer journey. Here’s everything you need to know to make that happen.

What Is Customer Journey Orchestration?

At its core, journey orchestration is a simple equation: customer behavior + omnichannel communication.

Journey orchestration is the process of understanding customer behavior across all channels and applying that data to map out personalized campaigns that best engage with your audience.

It all hinges on your ability to connect your customers to the touchpoints they have with your brand, which reveals so much about their preferences and inclinations for engagement — whether they favor a promotional email first thing in the morning, a website visit on their lunch break, or a social media ad instead of an SMS message.

With that vital information, you can craft truly personalized campaigns. And the more up to date your data is, the better your marketing efforts will be. 

That’s why real-time data is an essential component of journey orchestration . You need to know how, where, and when your customers interact with your brand, and you need to know the moment it happens. Because to orchestrate the ideal customer journey for every customer, each step needs to inform the next one.

For instance, if a customer clicks on an email, visits your website, and completes a purchase, they need to be reengaged and remarketed accordingly. If they don’t interact with that email, they need a completely different approach for reengagement . 

To offer the best customer experience, their choice has to dictate the marketing they receive. That’s the level of personalization that true journey orchestration offers.  

Why Do Businesses Need Journey Orchestration?

The degree of one-to-one personalization that journey orchestration offers is awe-inspiring. But do modern businesses really need this targeted approach to reach their customers?

Absolutely. In the age of digital commerce , journey orchestration is far from a supplemental feature for your marketing strategy. It needs to be a fundamental pillar in your business plan.

Your Customers Deserve a Personalized Experience

Think about your own experience as a customer. Do you use multiple devices regularly throughout your day? When you shop, do you expect businesses to incorporate the preferences you identified into your shopping experience? 

The answers to these questions are likely yes because ecommerce personalization is now the standard for modern business. Your customers are using multiple channels at any given moment, and your brand needs to be ready to engage with them where it matters most. 

The Best Experiences Are Built Through Communication

Your audience doesn’t just expect you to serve them promotion after promotion until one entices them to make a purchase. They expect your brand to listen to them. When they willingly provide their data to you, whether it’s zero-party data or through other sources, they presume you will use it to make their experience more personalized.

The best way to give your audience the experience they deserve and connect with them on the channels that matter is through journey orchestration. It turns your marketing efforts into a dialogue, incorporating the learnings and insights you gain from every interaction to inform the next one.

Personalization Is a Must For Modern Marketers

Personalization isn’t just a goal for the future. It’s a necessity for today’s brands who want to thrive in the modern market, providing a competitive advantage in today’s crowded digital marketplace. 

Customers are continually being bombarded with marketing messages throughout their day, and the companies that stand out are the ones that deliver tailored experiences. By orchestrating each step of the customer journey to fit a shopper’s unique needs, brands can create a customer experience that differentiates them from competitors. It’s the best way to improve customer relationship metrics across the board, from brand recognition to customer loyalty.

The Essential Steps To Map Out Customer Journeys

Every marketer knows the five basic steps of the customer journey:

The brand awareness phase , where the goal is to become a brand that customers trust.

The consideration phase , where customers are weighing their options between brands.

The decision phase , where they choose their brand and complete a purchase.

The retention phase , where remarketing efforts try to keep them engaged. 

The advocacy phase , where the customer becomes a champion of your brand.

But this is far from a detailed road map that businesses can use to engage with their ideal audience. These big, broad phases don’t address the nuance of a customer’s experience. They are a great place to start, but there is so much more to map out if you want a successful customer journey.

Here are the three main steps you need to take if you want to orchestrate a great customer experience.

Step One: Collect the Right Data

Data is the fuel you need to craft a great customer journey, so collecting it correctly is incredibly important. A consistent customer experience across channels, appropriate product recommendations , tailored communications — they all rely on data.

And there are a lot of sources, types, and data sets you need to tap into to get the data you need, including:

Events: behavioral data from a user’s actions in a session on a website, in an app, or on a mobile browser.

Customer Attributes: names, addresses, contact details, birthdays, etc. for your customers. 

Transactional Data: purchases, returns, and other info from ecommerce or POS systems.

Customer Service Data: live chat data, the number and length of interactions, frequency, NPS scores, and other data from CRM systems.

A  customer data platform can help you gather and organize all this transactional, demographic, and behavioral data and get a holistic view of individual customers. It’s a daunting amount of information, but with the right tools, you can make it work to your business’ advantage.

Step Two: Create Omnichannel Campaigns

Without an omnichannel approach to commerce, your customer journey mapping is bound to hit bumps in the road and dead ends. 

Omnichannel commerce is a multichannel approach to sales that focuses on providing a seamless customer experience . It aims to connect all your channels and give your audience the same quality and service, whether the client is shopping online from a mobile device, on a laptop, or in a brick-and-mortar store. 

A seamless experience is paramount for customer journey orchestration. You need to engage customers where and when it is convenient for them, and each channel needs to reflect the experience they expect from your company. 

Step Three: Analyze, Report, and Optimize

Customer journey orchestration relies on the activation of real-time data, which means your insights and analysis needs to be just as efficient — and just as comprehensive. 

To make omnichannel campaigns that personalize marketing efforts on an individual level, run-of-the-mill analysis doesn’t cut it. Your insights have to help you connect the dots for campaigns instantaneously, and help you predict future customer intent.

Which content types lead to shopping sessions? Which channels are they more likely to engage with next? Which CTA has historically led to a purchase? Your reporting needs to determine the best action, channel, message, and time to execute your customer’s entire experience.

What Is a Journey Orchestration Engine and Does Your Business Need One?

A  journey orchestration engine is a technology platform built to help you map out your customer journey with customer analytics and omnichannel campaign orchestration. 

Once it has the data it needs, a traditional journey orchestration engine can help marketers manage and curate the customer journey in one place, rather than building campaigns and executing them individually across different channels.

There is a diverse array of journey orchestration platforms available on the market, each with their own strengths and features. But Bloomreach Engagement is the only marketing platform that offers the powerful capabilities of a CDP, dynamic and thorough analytics with machine learning capabilities, and omnichannel flows that natively integrate every marketing channel — all within a single solution.

No other software gives you such complete control over every aspect of the customer journey, which in turn allows you to build unique experiences across all channels and devices.

What Tools Do You Need for Effective Journey Orchestration?

To effectively compose a customer’s ideal experience, you need a few key tools and capabilities to put the philosophy of journey orchestration into practice:

A data collection tool . Without a customer data platform or advanced data collection capabilities to gather the data you need, your customer journey orchestration efforts will fall short from the start. 

A single customer view . You need a unified profile for each customer’s information, also known as a single customer view , to be able to activate your data with personalized touchpoints across the customer journey. 

Real-time customer journey analytics . Capturing insights in real time is essential. You need holistic reporting with a high-level overview, as well as deep analyses with customizable metrics and dashboards.

Omnichannel orchestration . Delivering unified experiences across all your digital touchpoints, and integrating those channels into one cohesive strategy, is one of the fundamentals for customer journey orchestration.

A/B testing capabilities . Adjusting campaigns in the moment is a crucial feature. You need to be able to react to insights and reports and make changes based on real-time campaign performance, anytime you need.

Marketing automation . Creating adaptive campaigns and implementing them in real time requires an automated omnichannel experience — one that is easy to set up for multiple segments and conditions.

What Does an Orchestrated Customer Experience Look Like?

Customer journey orchestration can take your marketing efforts from good to great, but it doesn’t need to be a complex ordeal.

If you’re looking to introduce customer journey orchestration to your business strategy, a great place to start is at the beginning of your relationship with a customer: the onboarding process. And one of the easiest ways to orchestrate their experience is to create an automated welcome email series like the one outlined below. 

With a plan like this, you can guide the customer journey while keeping every touchpoint reactive to each choice your customer makes.

The first email is a generic email that introduces your company, explaining what they can expect from your emails. The second, sent a day later, spotlights your brand’s best attributes and encourages the user to move to the next stage in the lifecycle journey.

The next step in the series depends entirely on the recipient’s interaction with your emails so far. 

If they already made a purchase, you can automatically trigger a message to that customer segment , encouraging them to connect with your social media or install your app. 

If they haven’t yet acted on the previous emails, you can set up a trigger that incentivizes this segment to do so through a special deal or discount, and then follow up with a suggestion to connect on other platforms. 

Even with a simple, straightforward level of personalization like this series, you can demonstrate that your marketing is paying attention to your customers’ needs. It just takes a few triggers, customer segments, and conditions put in place to get things going.

And from here, there’s no limit to what your customer journey orchestration efforts can become. There are plenty of ways to fine-tune your campaign — you can incorporate further channels, A/B test all the timelines and touchpoints, and build off insights to reach your most high-valued customers. 

What Are the Most Significant Customer Journey Orchestration Metrics?

With a variety of channels, data points, and goals that can be attached to an orchestrated customer experience, it’s hard to pin down any one metric as the most important. It really depends on what your campaign is trying to accomplish at any given stage in the audience’s entire journey.

But one important aspect to keep in mind while evaluating your campaigns is the technique you use to measure results. Multi-touch attribution — a method designed to understand all of the channels that contribute to a conversion instead of just the first or last — will help you truly understand how your multichannel journeys are performing.

Other methods, such as first-touch or last-touch attribution models, don’t tell the full story of your orchestrated journey. They give all the credit to the beginning or the end of a campaign respectively. 

But with multi-touch attribution, you can recognize the strengths and weaknesses at each stage of the customer experience. This is vital for your campaign reporting, customer journey analytics, and optimization.

As for specific KPIs to keep an eye on, there are some recommendations that align with best practices no matter what your customer journey looks like. Churn rate, retention rate, and especially customer lifetime value are all good KPIs to monitor and weigh your campaigns against. 

Business Benefits of Customer Journey Orchestration

There are dozens of benefits for brands that incorporate customer journey orchestration into their business strategy, from better ROI and average order values to increased engagement and customer loyalty.

But the major advantage that any business gains when they adopt journey orchestration is the fundamental shift their marketing takes on. That’s because customer journey orchestration is the future of ecommerce — it’s the new, vital model of engaging with your audience.

As Forrester has noted , one of the biggest benefits of journey orchestration is the adaptability it affords brands, as well as the scale at which they can adjust accordingly. Customer journey orchestration is designed to respond to changing customer behavior in real time, and if the last decade has taught businesses anything, it’s that change is a constant. 

This adaptability is at the heart of the customer-led transformation going on in ecommerce. The customer now has a direct, real-time influence on your marketing strategy as opposed to the reactive, wait-and-see results that marketers previously had to rely on.

Without customer journey orchestration, strategies are too far removed from the individual decisions of customers. No matter which channel your business uses to engage with your audience, each one is an island unto itself. This channel-centric approach inevitably leaves you with siloed and inflexible channels.

With a more customer-centric approach — one that allows a customer’s unique behavior to interact with campaigns and trigger unique experiences based on their engagement — your campaigns consistently resonate with your audience. And your audience’s real-time input has a direct role in the adjustments your campaigns make, so you’re guaranteed to delight them with the next step in their experience. 

Bloomreach Engagement: A Customer Journey Engine and So Much More

For an all-in-one platform that offers CDP capabilities, seamless omnichannel flows, and real-time journey orchestration, look no further than Bloomreach Engagement .

Our powerful solution provides a single marketing view of real-time customer data, campaign automation across 13 channels, and analytics that make it easy to grow your brand and your revenue with dynamic, personalized marketing . 

Plus, our intuitive drag-and-drop scenario builder allows you to orchestrate effective customer journeys with just a few clicks . You can easily manage complex campaigns, trigger automated experiences, and make any adjustments on the fly with A/B testing. 

It’s the perfect marketing platform for all your business’ needs, and it’s designed to scale with your most ambitious goals. 

Ready to see what Bloomreach can do for you? Watch the video below to learn more about what our powerful platform can do for yo or  schedule a demo today .

Marketing Automation

Ian Donnelly

Ian has years of copywriting and digital marketing experience that he brings to his role as Content Marketing Manager at Bloomreach. With a keen eye for fresh angles and new perspectives, he aims to highlight the endless possibilities available to savvy businesses with cutting-edge digital commerce. Read more from Ian here .

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Unlocking the Power of Ecommerce Customer Data and Analytics

In the ever-evolving landscape of online commerce, understanding your customers is paramount. This is where ecommerce customer data and analytics come into play, offering a transformative lens into customer behavior, preferences, and, ultimately, the key to unlocking business growth. By harnessing the power of customer data, businesses can gain invaluable insights into the customer journey, from initial discovery to purchase and beyond. This knowledge enables the creation of personalized marketing campaigns, enhanced customer experiences, and increased customer retention, leading to a significant competitive advantage.

By the end of this guide, you’ll be equipped with the knowledge to leverage the power of ecommerce customer data and analytics, driving your business toward sustainable growth and success.

Understanding Ecommerce Customer Data

Ecommerce customer data is the lifeblood of any successful online business. It provides a comprehensive picture of your customers, their preferences, and their interactions with your brand, enabling you to make informed decisions that drive growth and success.

Types of customer data

There are four main types of customer data that can be incredibly valuable in understanding your audience:

• Demographic data: This includes basic information like age, gender, location, and income level. It helps you understand the overall makeup of your customer base and tailor your offerings accordingly.
• Behavioral data: This tracks how customers interact with your website and products. It includes page views, clicks, search queries, and purchase history, revealing customer interests and purchasing patterns.
• Transactional data: This records all customer transactions, including purchase amounts, product categories, and payment methods. By analyzing this data, you can identify best-selling items, high-value customers, and potential upselling opportunities.
• Psychographic data: This delves deeper into customer preferences, values, and lifestyles. It can be gathered through surveys, social media activity, and customer reviews, providing insights into their motivations and decision-making processes.

Sources of customer data

A wealth of customer data can be collected from various sources:

• Website analytics tools: Platforms like Google Analytics track website traffic, user behavior, and conversions, revealing valuable insights into customer journeys and engagement.
• Social media platforms: Social media engagement data reveals customer preferences, brand sentiment, and potential influencers within your target audience.
• Email marketing campaigns: By tracking email open rates, click-through rates, and purchase conversions from email campaigns, you can understand customer interest in specific products and promotions.

By leveraging these diverse data sources, you can gain an understanding of your customers, enabling you to implement effective ecommerce customer experience analytics and strategies, ultimately driving business growth and customer satisfaction.

The Importance of Ecommerce Customer Data and Analytics

Understanding your customers is the key to success. This is where ecommerce customer data and analytics come into play, offering a powerful lens into customer behavior, preferences, and, ultimately, the path to sustainable growth. Leveraging customer data unlocks a wealth of benefits:

Enhanced personalization

Ecommerce customer data and analytics empower businesses to deliver highly personalized experiences, which are crucial in today’s competitive market. By leveraging insights from demographic, behavioral, transactional, and psychographic data, companies can tailor their marketing efforts to meet individual customer preferences. This can be done by:

User-friendly website design : Utilize customer data to redesign your website layout, making it intuitive and easy to navigate. Analyze user behavior to identify pain points and optimize the user interface for a smoother browsing experience.

Personalized product recommendations : Leverage behavioral data to offer personalized product suggestions based on past purchases, browsing history, and preferences. Implement recommendation engines that dynamically display related items or complementary products to enhance the shopping experience.

Streamlined checkout process : Analyze transactional data to identify bottlenecks in the checkout process and streamline it for faster and more convenient purchases. Simplify forms, offer guest checkout options, and optimize loading times to reduce friction and increase conversion rates.

Responsive mobile experience : With the proliferation of mobile shopping, ensure your website is fully optimized for mobile devices. Analyze device-specific data to tailor the mobile experience, optimizing page load times, and implementing mobile-friendly navigation and checkout processes.

Here are some statistics showing how shoppers are impacted by personalization:

• A study by  Segment found that 71% of consumers express some level of frustration when their shopping experience is impersonal. Additionally, 49% of shoppers have purchased a product they did not initially intend to buy after receiving a personalized recommendation.
• According to  Epsilon , 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences.

Customer journey mapping

Customer journey mapping is significantly improved through the application of ecommerce customer experience analytics. By tracking and analyzing customer interactions across multiple touchpoints, businesses can gain a comprehensive understanding of the customer journey. This includes identifying key moments of engagement and potential drop-off points. Improved journey mapping allows for the creation of more seamless and intuitive customer experiences. For example, by understanding where customers abandon their carts, businesses can implement targeted strategies such as follow-up emails with personalized offers, ultimately reducing cart abandonment rates and enhancing the overall customer journey.

Amazon is a prime example of a business that has successfully leveraged ecommerce customer data and analytics to enhance its operations and customer experience. By collecting vast amounts of data on customer browsing and purchase history, Amazon uses sophisticated algorithms and machine learning to provide personalized product recommendations, improving the shopping experience and boosting sales. Additionally, Amazon tracks user interactions on its website and app to optimize the user interface and layout, making it more intuitive and user-friendly, which further enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Here’s the data that shows the importance of addressing cart abandonment:

• Baymard Institute reports that the average cart abandonment rate across all industries is about 70.19%. This highlights the importance of addressing cart abandonment through strategies like follow-up emails and personalized offers.
• Flowium research indicates that cart abandonment emails have an average open rate of 41.18% and the average click rate is 9.5%.

Increased automation in marketing and sales

The integration of advanced analytics tools and techniques facilitates increased automation in both marketing and sales processes. Ecommerce customer analytics provides valuable insights that can be used to automate various aspects of customer engagement, from personalized email marketing campaigns to dynamic pricing strategies. Automation driven by predictive analytics helps anticipate customer needs and behaviors, allowing businesses to proactively address them. This not only improves efficiency but also ensures a more responsive and timely interaction with customers. For example, automated chatbots powered by customer data can provide instant support and personalized recommendations, enhancing the customer experience while reducing the burden on human customer service teams.

Numerous ecommerce businesses have achieved remarkable success by taking advantage of ecommerce customer data and analytics in this way. By investing in ecommerce customer experience analytics, you can gain even deeper insights into how customers interact with your brand and website.

Key Metrics in Ecommerce Customer Analytics

Understanding your customers is crucial in the competitive world of ecommerce. By tracking and analyzing key metrics, you can gain valuable insights into their behavior and preferences, ultimately driving business growth. Here are some essential metrics to consider:

• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Measures the total revenue a customer generates throughout their relationship with your brand. It helps you understand the long-term value of your customers and prioritize retention efforts.
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): This metric reveals the average cost of acquiring a new customer. Analyzing CAC allows you to optimize your marketing and acquisition strategies for better ROI.
• Churn Rate: The percentage of customers who stop doing business with you over a specific period. Understanding your churn rate helps you identify areas for improvement and implement strategies to retain valuable customers.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS):

Here are simple equations to calculate each of these metrics:

1. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV):

Equation:  CLV = Average Order Value (AOV) x Purchase Frequency (PF) x Average Customer Lifespan (ACL)

Explanation:

• AOV: This is the average amount a customer spends per order.
• PF: This is how often a customer makes a purchase within a specific timeframe (e.g., monthly, yearly).
• ACL: This is the average time a customer remains a loyal customer (in months or years).

2. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC):

Equation:  CAC = Total Marketing & Sales Spend / Number of Customers Acquired

This is a straightforward calculation. You simply take all your marketing and sales expenses for a period (e.g., month,quarter) and divide it by the number of new customers acquired during that same period.

3. Churn Rate:

Subscription Example:

Equation:  Churn Rate = (Number of Churned Customers / Total Number of Customers at Start of Period) x 100

• Churned Customers: These are the customers who stopped subscribing during the period.
• Total Customers: This is the total number of customers you had at the beginning of the period.

Loyalty Program Example:

Explanation:  While there’s no exact equation for loyalty program churn, you can track:

• Member Drop-Off: This is the percentage of members who haven’t engaged with the program (e.g., made a purchase using points) in a set timeframe.
• Redemption Rate: This is the percentage of points or rewards redeemed by members. A low rate can indicate declining engagement.

4. Net Promoter Score (NPS):

NPS is a survey-based metric, not an equation. You ask customers a single question: “How likely are you to recommend our brand to a friend or colleague?” based on a scale (usually 0-10).

• Promoters (Score 9-10): These are your most loyal customers and brand advocates.
• Passives (Score 7-8): These are neutral customers.
• Detractors (Score 0-6): These are unhappy customers who may spread negative word-of-mouth.

Calculating NPS:

NPS = (% Promoters) – (% Detractors)

Tools for NPS:

You don’t need to develop your own survey. You can use free or paid options like Google Forms ,  SurveyMonkey , or dedicated NPS services.

Actionable Insights from Ecommerce Customer Analytics

The potential of ecommerce customer analytics lies in its ability to transform vast amounts of customer data into actionable insights that drive strategic business decisions. Effective use of ecommerce customer data and analytics allows businesses to identify trends, predict future behaviors, and implement strategies that enhance customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

Turning data into insights

Turning data into actionable insights begins with robust data analysis techniques. Utilizing tools such as predictive analytics, businesses can forecast customer behaviors and preferences, allowing them to anticipate needs and tailor their offerings accordingly. By identifying trends and patterns within the data, companies can uncover valuable insights about customer purchasing behaviors, peak shopping times, and product preferences. For instance, a surge in demand for a particular product line during a specific season can inform inventory management and marketing strategies.

Product offerings

Enhancing product offerings is another critical area where actionable insights can be leveraged. By analyzing customer feedback and purchase data, businesses can identify gaps in their product lines and opportunities for new product development. This approach ensures that product offerings are continuously aligned with customer demands, fostering greater satisfaction and loyalty.

Customer support

Optimizing customer support is equally important in leveraging ecommerce customer analytics. Insights derived from customer interaction data can help identify common pain points and areas where the customer journey can be improved. For example, if data reveals frequent customer inquiries about a particular product feature, businesses can proactively address these concerns through detailed product descriptions, FAQs, or enhanced customer service training.

Future trends in ecommerce customer analytics

The future of ecommerce customer analytics is already going through significant transformation – those that do it well have a considerable competitive advantage. One of the most prominent trends is the increasing utilization of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). The key here is the speed with which these can translate into actionable insights. AI and ML algorithms can predict customer behavior with remarkable accuracy, allowing for highly personalized marketing strategies that enhance customer engagement and drive sales.

Predictive analytics have been around a very long time. What’s getting much better is the modeling that drives it, improvements coming from real time data, AI and ML inputs. Prescriptive analytics goes a step further by not only predicting outcomes but also recommending specific actions to achieve desired results. This proactive approach ensures that ecommerce businesses can swiftly adapt to changing market dynamics and customer preferences, maintaining a competitive edge.

Another critical trend is the shift toward real-time data processing. In the world of ecommerce, the ability to access and analyze data in real time is invaluable. Real-time analytics provides immediate insights into customer behavior, enabling businesses to make swift, informed decisions. This capability is particularly beneficial for dynamic pricing strategies, personalized marketing campaigns, and improving the overall customer experience. The integration of ecommerce customer analytics with real-time data ensures that businesses can respond to customer needs instantaneously, fostering loyalty and driving repeat purchases.

Key Takeaways

Ecommerce customer data and analytics have emerged as critical tools in the competitive landscape of online commerce, offering profound insights into customer behavior and preferences. By leveraging ecommerce customer data and analytics, businesses can develop personalized marketing strategies, enhance customer experiences, and increase customer retention, leading to significant growth and a competitive edge. This comprehensive guide highlights the importance of various types of customer data, such as demographic, behavioral, transactional, and psychographic data, and underscores the benefits of integrating data from multiple sources like website analytics tools, CRM systems, and social media platforms.

Ready to unlock the power of ecommerce customer data and analytics?   Digital River’s solutions can elevate your customer experience and propel your business forward. Get started with our team of experts to kickstart your ecommerce growth journey. Reach out today to explore how our specialized knowledge can revolutionize your ecommerce strategy and pave the way for long-term success.

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Crafting an effective customer experience strategy

Your customer experience (CX) is a direct reflection of your brand. And with today’s hyper-competitive market, a strong customer experience strategy is no longer just a nice-to-have. It’s a necessity. In fact, research shows that organisations that prioritise their CX are likely to achieve a growth in revenue of 4-8% higher than market averages. But crafting a successful CX strategy requires setting clear objectives, understanding customer needs (thoroughly!) and continuously refining the experience – a task which can be quite daunting at times.

This article will guide you through creating an effective CX strategy , leveraging user feedback along the way, and learning from real-world successes to ensure your brand stands out. Want to quickly scan through to a certain section of the blog? Go ahead!

Why a strong customer experience strategy matters

Steps to creating a customer experience strategy, the role of user feedback software in cx, case studies: successful customer experience strategies.

As with every strategy, defining your customer experience strategy should start with setting your objectives.

1. Set clear objectives

Identify what you want to achieve with your CX strategy. Questions to ask yourself might include:

• Do you want to create a digital strategy or an omnichannel strategy?
• What does the current customer service process look like? (A lot of times this is a good starting point for understanding what you organisation excels and where you might be able to improve)
• Are there certain aspects of the customer experience you want to focus on?
• What do you want to know / learn about your customers?
• How do you hope you learn more about these customers?

Once you’ve laid out all of your goals, it’s time to get crackin’ .

2. Understand your customers

A good understanding of what your customers expect from your brand is crucial. So you need to explore your options when it comes to getting closer to your customers. How can you learn more about them and really understand what makes them tick? There are many different ways to do this. However, if you want to get to the source of your customers’ frustrations, then gathering customer insights is a great place to start. After all, you can base all of your decisions on assumptions but if your customers can guide you, then why not give them a voice? A few ways to gather customer insights include:

• (Digital) user feedback (e.g. surveys)
• Interviews (e.g. one-on-ones or focus groups)
• User testing (e.g. A/B testing)
• Customer panels
• Social listening
• Behavioural data (e.g. heatmaps or clickstream data)

As you can see, there are a lot of ways to get in touch with your customers and get the input you need to craft a beautiful customer experience. So once you’ve defined how you’re going to listen to the voice of the customer (with your objectives in mind), it’s time to start creating.

Want to learn how to develop a product your users will love?

Watch our webisode and get tips and tricks on how to create the ultimate user experience in your product.

3. Design the customer experience

Designing and implementing a good customer experience starts with mapping. Mapping out personas and mapping out the journey. Let’s have a look at how you can do this.

Map out your buyer personas

Persona mapping is a great way of encompassing your ideal customer’s characteristics, goals, needs and much more. Start with some high-level segmenting, e.g. demographics, geographic and/or technographics. And then dive deeper into the details of these users. Look at, for example:

• Which demographics do you customers fall under?
• What problem are they looking to solve?
• What kind of information are they seeking?
• What motivates them to make a purchase?
• What are their biggest needs?

This kind of information will help you target your customers appropriately and effectively map out your journeys.

Map out customer journey(s)

Journey mapping will then help you visualise the online experience from your customer’s perspective. In this phase – using the personas from above – you will identify key touchpoints along the way and pinpoint different emotions and interactions across each stage of your journey. Not sure where to start? Here are the top customer journey mapping tools that can help facilitate the process. Note: your initial journey maps need to be based on reality, well researched and underlined with data .

Customer Experience Map versus Customer Journey Map

Do you know the difference? Find out here.

Collect user insights

To support your customer journey mapping efforts, it’s therefore important to gather user insights. These will strengthen your approach and help you get down to the root cause of the frustrations and struggles your customers experience across your channels. Using your chosen methodology, whether that’s user feedback, interviews, or collecting behavioural data (or ideally, all of the above!), start actively collecting insights from your users. This will fuel your customer experience strategy and give you guidance on how to improve your customer experience.

Monitor and improve

Using the insights you now have at your fingertips, you can make meaningful changes to the customer experience. These changes will not only help satisfy your customers but also contribute to a great customer experience for future customers. But don’t stop there! Your CX flow will change constantly, meaning you need to keep a pulse on expectations and satisfaction with the experience. That means monitoring your customer experience regularly and continuously iterating. That’s right, the job is never done!

As you can see, there are many ways to listen to your customers. In fact, in an ideal scenario, you would marry all of these data types together for a clear and overarching understanding of your customers. However, there is one method that stands out from the rest. Digital user feedback is crucial for supporting a robust digital customer experience strategy because it provides direct, real-time insights from the users themselves. Unlike other types of customer data, such as heatmaps or even user interviews, user feedback solutions like Mopinion capture the subjective experiences, preferences, and pain points of customers as they interact with your brand on digital platforms. This qualitative data is unique because it reveals the ‘why’ behind user behaviours, enabling organisations to understand customer intentions and frustrations in context. The benefits of incorporating digital user feedback include the ability to make informed, customer-centric improvements, enhance user satisfaction and loyalty, quickly identify and address issues, and continuously optimise the digital experience to meet evolving customer needs. If it’s effectively prioritised, organisations can actually create a more personalised experience and environment for customers that fosters improved engagement.

Need proof of what kind of results a good strategy can achieve? Read more about how these organisations give their customer experience a boost.

Away’s Story

• Understand customer needs better,
• Streamline internal discussions, and
• Make informed decisions to improve the overall customer experience.

The feedback collected also helps refine their digital operations, optimise product information delivery, and address specific customer pain points, such as the need for clearer lock instructions. Read Away’s full story here.

Etos’ Story

A winning CX strategy isn’t created in a day

Equipped with the right tools and advice for crafting a successful customer experience strategy, you’re ready to get started. But remember, creating a truly effective CX strategy isn’t done in a day. It takes time to gather your thoughts and craft a feedback program that helps you collect meaningful customer insights. It’s also a continuous process that must be looked after carefully and consistently. Good luck!

Ready to see Mopinion in action?

Want to learn more about Mopinion’s all-in-1 user feedback platform? Don’t be shy and take our software for a spin! Do you prefer it a bit more personal? Just book a demo. One of our feedback pro’s will guide you through the software and answer any questions you may have.

Previous article

45 ecommerce survey questions to optimise your online experience, related articles.

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• An Overview of the Best Website Feedback Tools
• A Comparison of Voice of the Customer (VoC) software
• The Best Feedback Form Templates for Your Website
• Building Mobile App Feedback Surveys with SDKs
• The State of Customer Experience (CX)

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• How it works

5 ways to improve the client experience

Whether you’re an independent accountant, run an advertising agency, or have a career as a real estate agent, you’re probably always thinking of ways to be competitive in your market. A key way to stand out is to improve your client experience.

In this post, we’ll go over why the client experience matters so much and share a few ideas to help you improve different aspects of the customer journey to delight your clients. By following these strategies, you can expect to earn yourself a stellar reputation that will help you attract more leads. 

Let’s explore!

What is the customer experience, exactly?

The client experience (or customer experience / CX) encompasses every step of the customer journey that the client goes through when they engage with your business. That includes all their interactions from the first time they connect with you, fill out a form, participate in demos, make a payment, or cancel their subscription. 

Why does the client experience matter so much? 

This might be stating the obvious, but just consider your own experiences as a customer: a positive experience makes you want to come back for more, while a negative one can quickly send you searching for alternatives.

If you’re more of a stats person, then these stats make their case:

• 52% of clients will switch to a competitor if they have a single negative impression.
• Clients that rate companies with a high customer experience score spend 140% more and remain loyal for up to 6 years.
• 73% of customers now say CX is the number one thing they consider when deciding whether to purchase from a company.
• Customer-centric brands report profits that are 60% higher than those that fail to focus on CX. 

All of this proves that investing in CX is worthwhile, no matter what industry you’re operating in or the size of your business.

How to improve the client experience 

1. personalize your communications  .

The more time you take to get to know your clients, the better you can speak to them and support their needs through every stage of the customer journey. Plus, no client wants to feel like just a number. Take some time to figure out your different buyer personas. You can then tailor your communications and content to each client depending on their preferences and motivations. 

For example, you might want to give them customized offers based on the services they last purchased. If you’re a graphic designer who has designed a logo for a happy client, you can present them with a special offer to design an icon pack for them as well.

If you’re a real estate agent who works with first-time homebuyers as well as property investors, you can tailor the content of your email newsletters according to the topics that are of most interest to them. 

By personalizing how you communicate with your clients, you demonstrate that you understand them on a personal level. This inevitably leads to better client engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty. 

Here’s one example of a personalized email based on order history:

2. Make things easy for your clients

We get so caught up with optimizing processes to help our business run more smoothly that we often forget about what the client experiences on their side. 

How easy is it for the client when it comes to paying their invoices, changing their plan, or signing contracts to work with you? If you keep running into delays or hear repeatedly from clients about their frustrations, it’s time to start using some intuitive tools that make working with you easy.

Let’s take client onboarding for example. If you’re a tax professional who needs to collect a new client’s financial information, bank statements, and identification documents, what does that process look like for the client? 

If you expect them to go back and forth with you over email, you’re already doing yourself a disservice. Switching over to a dedicated data-collection tool can make the whole process much simpler for your client. All they have to do is answer your form and upload documents all in one place.  

There are plenty of form builder tools you can choose from for client onboarding, but the best ones are built with lots of consideration for the client experience. Content Snare, for example, automatically saves client progress as they fill out their forms and lets them exit and re-enter the form easily should they need to step away to gather information. It also doesn’t require the client to have a Content Snare account to use it, making it barrier-free. 

All of these little features make a difference to the client onboarding experience. Our advice is to examine every step of the user journey to find more places you can incorporate some thoughtful tools. 

Related: 3 modern client communication tools that put email to shame

Make life easy for your clients 

Content Snare simplifies the way you gather information from your clients so you can work together more effectively. A breeze to use for both you and your clients!

3. Offer a self-serve client portal 

Nowadays, clients prefer to do things themselves rather than relying on you to make the changes they need. To cater to this self-service need, offering a client portal is another way to improve client satisfaction. 

Self-serve client portals give your clients a secure online workspace they can access to upload documents, make adjustments to their subscriptions, make their payments, and more. This can feel very empowering and convenient for the client while it also speeds up processes for you as well.

The best client portals differ depending on your industry, but a few examples of popular client portals are Clio , OneHub , Moxo , and HoneyBook.  

• Why you need a document upload portal — and the best tools for the job
• 8 useful client portals for accountants

4. Enhance your customer service team with AI tools

Implementing tools like AI chatbots can help you speed up your customer service and make it possible to offer around-the-clock support. Popular tools can even adjust responses to give very personalized and accurate answers (just like we suggested in tip #1). You can even measure which responses perform best so you can truly optimize how customers receive support. 

Related: Getting started with AI in accounting

5. Collect customer feedback regularly  

A key way to improve the client experience is to ask your clients directly what improvements they’d like to see from you. Although it’s typical to send out a feedback survey once you’ve completed a project, don’t limit yourself to gathering feedback then. You can always find opportunities to ask for feedback earlier on, perhaps every time you move into a new project phase. 

By analyzing client feedback, you can identify areas for improvement and make the best decisions on how you can enhance the client experience.

Related : The top 8 design feedback tools

Start by mapping out your customer journey  

Enhancing the client experience is not just about implementing a few isolated strategies; it's about continuously refining and optimizing every touchpoint along the customer journey. The key to delivering an exceptional client experience lies in meticulously mapping out the customer journey, identifying common customer pain points, and looking for ways to improve their experience at every step. By committing to this ongoing process of refinement, you can help your business stand out among others for exceptional service. 

Drazen Vujovic

Dražen Vujović is a journalist and content writer. More importantly, he is a father of two and a long-distance runner.