A customer journey map is a visual representation of every experience that a customer has with a brand, product or service. Ideally, a customer journey map captures the customer experience from the consumer perspective, visualizing the touchpoints, emotions and potential pain points they encounter during their relationship with a brand.
Businesses use customer journey maps to identify areas for improvement, optimize processes and create seamless customer-centric experiences. A customer journey map captures the entire customer experience through the stages of awareness, research, purchase and postpurchase. Other maps might focus on specific aspects of the customer-company interaction, such as the research phase or the customer journey toward purchasing a specific product.
Customer journey maps have become a critical tool in customer experience design and analysis. As customer interactions often span multiple departments—such as sales, marketing, product development and support—these visual representations foster collaboration across teams, providing a unified view of complex interactions. They also help organizations center the consumer in business decisions by emphasizing customer needs, motivations and experiences.
By creating detailed customer journey maps, brands gain valuable insights into how each customer touchpoint functions and, where there are pain points, how it can be improved.
While buyer journey maps and customer journey maps can include similar customer data points, they differ in scope. A buyer journey map visualizes the steps that a customer goes through specifically as they come to a purchasing decision. Customer journey maps, by contrast, address a broader range of the customer lifecycle including postpurchase interactions like brand advocacy.
As digital technologies have transformed customer experience, customer journey mapping has become more complex. Until the advent of digital commerce, a customer might complete only one or two steps before deciding on a purchase, browsing in a brick-and-mortar store or speaking with a sales professional. The idea of a single sales funnel, a methodical and linear progression from brand awareness to purchase, was the dominant way to map a customer journey.
Today, a customer journey map might include a vast number of touchpoints including websites, apps, chatbots, support centers and stores. Before deciding to purchase from a brand, most potential customers consult friends or extensively research online reviews, adding layers of complexity to their journey map. In the late 2000s, the business management consultancy McKinsey noted a change.
They argued that the consumer journey resembled a continuous cycle where active evaluation occurs simultaneously with postpurchase experiences. This ideally facilitates what McKinsey termed an ongoing "loyalty loop."1 Today, customer journey mapping resembles this loop and includes an array of customer actions and user experiences, some of which happen concurrently.
Customer journey maps, whether they focus on a single set of interactions or visualize the entire brand-to-consumer relationship, can provide actionable insights about an organization’s sales funnel and customer support practices. In today’s always-on, omnichannel commercial landscape, such tools can be critical: A good customer experience can generate on average as much as three times in returns to shareholders.2 Some of the major benefits of a methodical, customer-focused map include:
Improving customer experience: A customer journey map helps brands discover where the customer experience might be optimized. Doing so reduces friction, enhances consumer satisfaction and increases brand loyalty.
Increasing customer retention: Identifying pain points in the postpurchase or support phase of the customer journey allows businesses to identify problems that might otherwise lead to customer churn, increasing customer retention.
Better alignment between teams: Visualizations of the customer journey can act as a unifying tool for various departments, providing a precise and clear collective understanding of the customer experience.
Iteration and enhanced product development: Insights from customer journeys can inform new product features and improvements, making them more aligned with customer needs.
More effective marketing: By better understanding the customer journey, businesses can create targeted campaigns that meet customers where they are, increasing engagement and conversion from marketing effforts.
Understanding customer psychology: A customer journey map provides deeper insight into how customers think, feel and behave throughout their journey with a brand. By mapping emotional responses at various stages, organizations can better understand consumer motivations, pain points and decision-making processes. These insights enable companies to create more empathetic and targeted experiences that resonate with customers.
Identifying touchpoints that matter: A customer journey map helps businesses identify which touchpoints have the most significant impact on customer decisions and satisfaction. This helps them to prioritize resources, eliminate unnecessary steps and optimize high-impact touchpoints to improve the overall customer experience.
Increasing competitive advantage: A well-run customer journey map has the potential to give businesses a strategic edge by facilitating superior customer experiences. An organization might use a customer journey map to identify where competitors fall short, create less generic customer journey experiences or design targeted communications specific to their ideal customer base.
There are various ways to design a customer journey map, depending on the particular demographic and user journey an organization wants to focus on. Common types of customer journey maps include:
Current state map: This is the most common type of customer journey map, and portrays customer behavior as it presently exists. This can be helpful for diagnosing current challenges and identifying areas for improvement.
Future state map: A future state map projects the ideal customer journey based on the wanted customer experience. It can help for planning strategic changes and setting benchmarks for improvement.
Day-in-the-life map: This type of customer journey map focuses on the customer’s broader daily life, and how the product or service fits into it. The day-in-the-life map can be useful for understanding the broader context of customer expectations and challenges.
Service blueprint: Service blueprints are more detailed that standard customer journey maps, and include the behind-the-scenes workflows. They might outline internal processes, staff interactions and technical systems that support a customer’s journey. They’re most effectively used to identify the root causes of an inadequate customer journey.
A customer journey map is typically created through a combination of solicited and unsolicited data. Solicited data might include a net promotor score (NPS) created by collecting customer feedback, the results of customer satisfaction surveys, or other information offered by consumers. This is typically combined with various forms of unsolicited data, the information an organization captures through its day-to-day interactions with customers and leads. This might include metrics like purchase histories, churn rates, time spent on a webpage or transcripts from chats and calls.
Though customer journey maps differ based on their scope and intended use, the common components of a customer journey map include:
Whether they’re occurring individually or in tandem, there are some distinct phases a customer goes through during their relationship with a brand, from initial awareness to postpurchase engagement. These different stages will typically be outlined in a customer experience map. Common stages might include:
Customer personas are fictional, data-driven profiles representing different segments of a target audience. These personas are designed to capture the specific demographics, behaviors, goals and pain points for a group. These personas are often included in customer journey maps to identify and analyze the customer journey from the point of view of specific segments. This allows organizations to create more relevant customer journeys for specific audiences with individual needs.
Customer expectations are the standards and assumptions customers have when interacting with a brand. These expectations generally vary across different stages of the customer journey. They are shaped by several factors including prior experience, industry norms and competitors’ offerings. A customer journey map might include these expectations to deliver touchpoint-specific experiences and help ensure the most pressing customer goals are being met.
Touchpoints are the specific interactions between the customer and the business during each stage of the customer journey. They might include visiting a website, reading an online review, contacting customer service or receiving a product in the mail. A customer journey map outlines each of these specific touchpoints, identifying potential roadblocks or unsatisfying experiences.
These are the behaviors and decisions that a customer takes at each stage. For instance, at the consideration stage a customer might read a product review or compare features on different websites. At the purchase stage, they might buy other service agreements or opt for expedited shipping. These potential actions are typically outlined on a customer journey map.
Mapping out the customer’s emotional experience helps businesses understand how customers feel, and thus are likely to act, at various stages in the customer journey. A customer journey map might take advantage of both solicited and unsolicited data to highlight moments of frustration, confusion or satisfaction to identify customer pain points and instances of customer success.
The platforms and mediums through which customer interactions take place are also outlined on a customer journey map. For most businesses, several channels are in play at a given moment. Channels outlined might include social media, web, phone and chat interactions with a brand’s team members, and visits to a physical store. They might also involve engagement with a mobile app or clicking on an email newsletter.
These are the insights derived from the map that outline silos, highlight missed connections and present opportunities for improvement. For example, if customers consistently express frustration at the checkout process, streamlining that stage can reduce cart abandonment. If customers feel it is difficult to find product information, an organization might opt to focus on simplifying that process.
While customer journey maps differ depending on an organization's specific needs and business goals, common steps in the customer journey mapping process include:
Set clear objectives: Before creating a map, an organization typically establishes precisely what it hopes to achieve. Sales, marketing and product leaders might initially brainstorm which processes they would like to improve. Areas of focus might include optimizing the purchasing process, understanding why customers abandon a service or creating better onboarding processes to improve customer loyalty. During this phase, an organization might introduce specific KPIs it is hoping to improve.
Gather customer data: To build an accurate map, an organization typically collects data from multiple sources including customer feedback, surveys, interviews, chat transcripts, support logs and web analytics. This helps the brand to see the decision-making process from the customer’s point of view.
Create customer personas: Buyer personas are fictional, yet data-driven, representations of different customer types. They highlight customer demographics, motivations and behaviors to provide context for the customer journey. With advanced customer analytics and automation, customer personas have become more precise, allowing organizations to segment customers based on more granular behaviors and locations. Using these personas, a brand might choose to focus a customer journey map on a specific target audience it hopes to capture.
Identify key stages: During this step, an organization defines the critical stages in its customer journey. This might span from awareness to postpurchase, focus solely on the postpurchase follow-up stage, or include any journey specific to a product or feature.
Determine touchpoints and channels: During this phase, an organization identifies where and how customers interact with its brand. This might include advertisements, email campaigns, social media, customer support or a mobile app.
Highlight emotions and pain points: During this step, an organization analyzes customer data to understand the emotional highs and lows customers experience at each stage. For example, frustration during onboarding or satisfaction after resolving an issue can provide valuable insights.
Validate the journey: Once the map is created, an organization might validate it with real-life customers or through testing. This can help confirm that the customer experience map accurately represents the customer experience.
Act on insights: Once a map is validated, an organization can use it to drive improvements. At this stage, a brand might opt to enhance communication at critical touchpoints, shift resources to postpurchase experiences or invest in new technology to make the journey smoother.
To accurately map the customer journey, an organization typically needs a large swath of accurate data about its users’ purchases and sentiments. To properly represent real-life conditions, data must typically be clean, error-free and trustworthy. An organization might opt to use multiple data sources—including customer surveys, interviews, web analytics and social media interactions—to gain a more comprehensive view of the customer journey. By regularly auditing data sources and tools, brands can help ensure that customer journey maps are always accurate and up-to-date.
Customer journeys in today’s real-time, omnichannel commercial landscape can be complex. If an organization simplifies the journey too much, a map might miss key pain points or emotional moments that are essential to improving the experience. To avoid such oversimplification, an organization might consider building multiple maps for individual personas or creating maps with multiple layers and datapoints.
A customer journey map is only as good as the business reforms that it can inspire. If an organization focuses solely on the customer journey without considering internal processes, it risks overlooking bottlenecks and inefficiencies that could be negatively impacting customer experiences. An organization might create a service blueprint to focus on internal processes or collaborate with internal teams to understand key dependencies and workflows.
Without cross-departmental collaboration and a strong methodology, a customer journey map might miss key insights from different areas of the business. This might lead to a less accurate or useful representation of the customer experience. Setting shared KPIs, by using collaborative tools and fostering cross-departmental collaboration, can avoid fragmented mapping initiatives.
1 The consumer decision journey, McKinsey, 1 June 2009 (link resides outside IBM.com)
2 What is CX?, McKinsey, 17 August 2022 (link resides outside IBM.com)
IBM at Dreamforce 2024
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