Mapping customer journeys

Use journey map artifacts to visualize and analyze the end-to-end experience of customers as they interact with your organization. Business analysts and process owners can build rich, multi-layered journey maps that reveal pain points, link supporting processes, and communicate the full customer experience to stakeholders.

A journey map is a structured artifact that represents the steps and experiences that a customer goes through when engaging with your organization. Unlike a process blueprint, which focuses on internal operational steps, a journey map captures the customer's perspective, including their emotions, pain points, and interactions across multiple touchpoints.

Journey maps are organized into phases, which represent the high-level stages of the experience, and steps, which represent individual customer interactions within each phase. You can enrich each step with configurable rows to build a complete, multi-layered view of the customer experience.

For example, a financial services team mapping an account-opening journey can add a Pain points row to each phase, attach screenshots of the application screens a customer encounters, and link the underlying onboarding process blueprints directly from each step. Stakeholders can then see both the customer experience and its operational detail in a single view.

Customer journey artifacts are designed for teams that need to understand, communicate, or improve the experience they deliver to customers. Typical users include:
  • Business analysts who model current-state experiences and identify improvement opportunities.
  • Process owners and operations managers who need to connect customer-facing touchpoints to the processes that support them.
  • Customer experience (CX) and service design teams who communicate journey maps to leadership, product managers, and front-line staff.
  • Compliance and governance teams who must document regulated or fraud-sensitive journeys, such as know-your-customer (KYC) workflows or insurance claims.

Journey maps help organizations move beyond process documentation to understand the human experience behind those processes.

Figure 1. Example of a journey map for a banking organization
example of a banking customer journey map

Creating journey maps

  1. From your space, click Create > Journey map.
  2. Enter a name for the journey map.
  3. Optional: Select one of the available templates to start from a predefined structure.

    Your journey map is created in your space. This artifact is available only in the Blueworks Live modernized user interface.

  4. If you are in View mode, switch to Edit mode.
  5. Add phases to represent the high-level stages of the experience, for example: Awareness, Onboarding, and Resolution.
  6. Under each phase, add steps to represent individual customer interactions or activities. A step is represented as a column within a phase.
  7. To add contextual rows to the journey map, click Add row and select a row type:
    • Text: Add plain text cards for providing qualitative information such as notes, descriptions, customer quotes, or observations.
    • Rich text: Add descriptive cards for in-depth content with rich text formatting options, such as research notes, or design rationale.
    • Images: Add one or more images to a row by uploading a PNG, JPG/JPEG, or GIF file (maximum 10 MB) or by pasting an image URL. Images are inserted as thumbnails into your journey step.
      Note: Uploaded files consume available account storage. For more information, see Monitoring file storage.
    • Touchpoints: Select an icon among the list to provide information about the type of interaction that the user has with the product at this point in the customer journey. For example, a digital interaction through a mobile phone, or a physical interaction in a store. Customize the icon labels according to the specific meaning you want to provide for this touchpoint.
    • Emotional journey: Add a sentiment chart across phases to visualize how customer emotion changes throughout the journey.
    • Linked artifacts: Link one or more process blueprints, decisions, policies, or journey maps to a step. For each linked item, you can set a dependency type such as relates to, automates, supports, and derived from. Click a linked artifact to open it directly.
    • Line of visibility: Use this visual divider to separate the customer's direct experience from internal processes. Rows that are above this line correspond to everything the customer sees and interacts with. Rows that are below this line represent backstage actions and systems.
  8. Optionally, at any point during your mapping process, you can use the following options to customize your journey map:
    • Drag and drop phases, steps, and rows to reorganize the journey map.
    • Right-click a phase, step, or row header and select a color to apply to this element. For overlapping elements, color precedence applies as follows: row color, then step color, and finally phase color.
    • Select Show/Hide numbering in the canvas toolbar to get visual indicators of your phases and steps counts.

To delete a phase, step, or row, right-click the header and select Delete. Deleted elements cannot be recovered.

Exporting journey maps

You can export a customer journey as a PDF file that you can share with stakeholders.
  1. Open the journey map that you want to export.
  2. In the canvas toolbar, click Actions > Print PDF.
  3. Configure the display settings of your PDF: page format, orientation, how you want to organize rows and columns, zooming options, and the visibility of labels, headers, and page position markers.
  4. Click Print PDF.