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7 ways to analyze a customer-journey map.

March 22, 2020 2020-03-22

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A customer-journey map is an infographic visualization of the process that a persona segment goes through in order to accomplish a goal. Journey maps are useful in communicating the general narratives and themes uncovered by longitudinal research done to understand how a customer works toward a goal over time.  

This journey map includes all the information necessary for understanding and analyzing the user experience of shopping for a new car. In this illustration, we have intentionally left out one key piece of the map —  the insights and opportunities gleaned from the map. This section is often found at the bottom of a customer-journey map and highlights how the organization can optimize and improve the customer journey.

In this article we will demonstrate how to analyze a journey map and, thus, how to identify the insights and opportunities for improvement.

In This Article:

Analyzing the journey map.

Longitudinal research and analysis is necessary to create a map like this.

Every journey map will look different because the research insights and the resulting visual depend entirely on the context of the journey, its underlying activities, and the persona completing it. That said, there are 7 common elements you can and should look for when analyzing a customer journey.

1. Look for points in the journey where expectations are not met.

Users go into an interaction with an organization with certain expectations. When the interaction does not meet their expectations, you see pain points in a customer journey. To identify these instances, first reflect on who the persona is. Ask yourself; what is important to this persona, where did she come from before this journey, what has she seen and what does she know already? Putting yourself in the user’s mind space will allow you to understand which interactions conflict with user’s prior ideas and expectations.

Of course, you should look for places where users verbalized their concerns, but also use your logic to assess interactions with no explicit complaints or negative comments.

Sometimes people bring their expectations into the journey from other experiences. For example, users expect that when they pull up to a hotel, the bellman will open the door, because that’s what always happens when you pull up to a hotel with a bellman — it’s the mental model that they have formed for that situation. Some organizations set inaccurate expectations early in the customer journey. Others don’t set expectations at all, forcing users to make assumptions and possibly be disappointed if those assumptions prove wrong.

Find the trouble spot and work backward to identify the triggering factor and how the expectations were (or were not) set. Work to resolve the conflict between expectations and reality.

In the car-buying journey map, there were two clear points where Eric’s expectations weren’t met. These instances are annotated using red numbered circles.

2. Identify any unnecessary touchpoints or interactions.

Are there any steps in the customer journey that could be eliminated in order to streamline the total experience? Look for logical ways to optimize the process to reduce total interaction cost . That may mean removing an existing step that is no longer needed or adding something to the experience that bring efficiency to the overall journey.

3. Identify the low points or points of friction.

When you step back and look at the whole journey, you should be able to see where the user experiences the most pain or friction. These points are usually represented visually as dips in the journey diagram. See where the journey reaches its lowest point and compare it to other low points in the journey. These should be on your shortlist of optimizations. That said, not all fixes are created equal: there can be dependencies and constraints involved. Work with your team to decide which low points should be addressed first and which can come later. (Because of the peak-end rule , the lowest point in a journey will have a particularly ruinous impact on the branding effect of the user experience.)

4. Pinpoint high-friction channel transitions.

Many journeys take place across devices or channels . A lot of times the journey breaks down and friction appears when users change channels. For example, a user receives a newsletter about a specific offering from a company. She’s interested in the offering and clicks the call to action in the newsletter. However, instead of being taken to a landing page detailing that particular offer, the user lands on the company’s homepage. At this point, she has to put in effort to find the offer.  Or, another user may begin filling out a form on the mobile phone, but wants to complete it on the laptop when it becomes too laborious. Doing so means losing work and starting over. These channel-transition pain points should be identified and streamlined. Think outside of the box: rather than forcing users to work hard, build a bridge for them to get to the other side easily.

5. Evaluate time spent. In your journey map, provide time durations for the major stages of the journey.

This information gives you another lens for analyzing the experience.  Assess how long it takes users to achieve the underlying substeps. Are these times appropriate? Time spent often correlates to the amount of user effort. Call out areas of the journey where time and effort are problematic.

6. Look for moments of truth.

Some points in the journey are so important that the rest of the experience might hinge on them. Think about the personas’ attitudes, needs, and priorities. Is there a make–or–break moment in the journey for that persona? This moment may be where your research shows a lot of emotion or where you see a strong divergence between the paths different users take. If this moment goes well, it can save the experience. For example, think of the first time a car-insurance customer files a claim. She’s been paying her policy responsibly, and now she needs her insurance to come through seamlessly for her. The first interaction in the claim experience might be a moment of truth for this persona. If it goes wrong, the user may move to a competitor. Be sure to look for moments of truth and to call attention to them when you find them.

7. Identify high points or points where expectations are met or exceeded.

Good UX practitioners should always balance their analysis by pointing out things that are working well in any experience. Look at the high points in the journey — the interactions that users are happy with. Where do they express positive thoughts and emotions? These insights are also valuable. You may be able to amplify them or recreate similar experiences elsewhere in the journey.

Whether you’re evaluating journey research for the creation of a map or digesting a map created by another party, it’s important to know what to look for. As the creator of the map, you’ll want to identify and call attention to these important elements through visual emphasis and storytelling. As a consumer of the visualization, apply this checklist like lenses through which to view the map in order to find the most actionable insights.

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The 7 best research methods for customer journey mapping

Getting authentic insights from customers is essential to effectively map out their journey. And understanding how users really interact with your product is the best way to provide tailored experiences that fit your customers’ diverse needs.

But it’s often hard to know where to begin the customer journey mapping research process and which methods to use.

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This article outlines the seven most effective research methods for customer journey mapping. Use our guide to prioritize the right qualitative and quantitative research processes for your needs—and implement them right away.

Use product experience insights to map your customer journey

Hotjar helps you understand your users by combining observational data with voice-of-the-customer (VoC) insights

7 effective customer journey mapping research methods

A customer journey map is a visual representation of how your users engage with your brand, from initial discovery—like searching online for a solution to their problem—to browsing your site, trying out your product, making a purchase—and beyond. 

Make sure your customer journey maps are informed by user-centric research rather than assumptions and guesswork.

Carry out both qualitative and quantitative research using the methods below to create a map that accurately represents your users' product experience (PX):

Qualitative research methods

Quantitative research methods are essential for effective customer journey mapping: they provide hard data that’s easy to track and compare over time. But qualitative methods uncover the how and the why behind the numbers, helping you deeply understand your customers' experience.

Hotjar Product Designer Iga Gawronska stresses the importance of diving into customer emotions in research:

"I think it’s important to map out the actions, and also the emotions and thoughts of the people that perform the actions, your users."

Use the following four qualitative research methods to get an in-depth understanding of how customers engage with your brand online.

1. Customer interviews

Customer interviews are one-on-one conversations with people who actually use your product or service. Conducting them in-person often yields the best results because it’s easier to pick up on non-verbal cues and the interview can flow more naturally—but video conferencing with tools like Zoom is a good secondary option.

By engaging in an open-ended conversation with customers, you’ll get unexpected insights and granular details about your customer’s journey, which helps you empathize with the user experience (UX).

Structuring your user interviews in different stages can help get the conversation going. Start with a warm-up that establishes trust and builds rapport, then home in on your core questions, and end with more informal, concluding thoughts from both parties.

Input your results into a user research repository as you go, so you don’t get overwhelmed at the end of the interview process. Some researchers make simple spreadsheets in Google Sheets or Excel, while others use dedicated tools like EnjoyHQ or Dovetail .

Once you’ve aggregated your interview data, you’ll start to notice trends and commonalities between interviewees and understand how they’re engaging with key touchpoints in your customer journey and what’s most important to them.

Pro tip : use a transcription tool like Otter.ai to stay focused on conducting your interview without having to take detailed notes. Having a written record of interviews at your fingertips also speeds up your data organization and analysis later.

2. Remote observation

Remote observation lets researchers see how users are behaving using online tools like video calling and screen recordings.

Remote research is convenient for both researchers and participants—neither party has to leave the comfort of their home or workspace and they can do what they need to do when it suits their schedule. Using remote research gives you insights into how your customers interact with key touchpoints on the customer journey in their everyday environment and context.

Here are two effective ways to observe your customers’ journey remotely:

Use a video conferencing tool like Zoom or Google Meet and ask users to share their screen with you while they’re interacting with your site, app, or product. Draw on the data you gather to inform your customer journey map.

Use a product experience insights tool like Hotjar Session Recordings and watch playbacks of real users interacting with your site or product across an entire session, as you observe how they scroll, what attracts attention, and where they backtrack or bounce.

Recordings are particularly valuable tools to understand the customer journey because they let researchers observe users remotely without them feeling ‘watched’ and behaving differently than usual.  

Filter your Hotjar Recordings to show certain user sessions based on referrer URL, the landing page they visited, whether they’re a new or returning customer, their session, the specific action they take, their location, and u-turns. This helps you spot trends, understand behavior patterns for different user personas , and dig deeper into the customer journey.

3. Lab observation

In lab observation, the researcher observes the participant in person, either in a formal ‘lab’ setting or another professional, controlled environment.

Lab observation can be complicated to carry out because of the cost and logistics involved, and it’s often more time-consuming than remote methods. But it’s a valuable research technique, with a reduced risk of technical difficulties and a great opportunity to build a friendly rapport with participants.

If you op for lab observation, record your conversations with participants or use a note-taking tool like Notion or Evernote to write down your observations while the participant is interacting with the site or product, so it’s easy to find the data later. As the participant explores key customer journey touchpoints , take the opportunity to ask follow-up questions to understand why your test customers are making certain choices.

4. Qualitative surveys

Qualitative surveys usually involve asking open-ended questions that prompt detailed, long-form user responses. They give you great customer insights to inform your journey map, are easy to put together, inexpensive, and work well with large numbers of participants.

The success of your survey depends on the UX research questions you ask . 

It’s important not to (knowingly or unknowingly) ask leading questions, as you’ll likely get biased responses from your participants, which won’t help you in accurately mapping out your customers’ journey. Let’s imagine you ask a research participant the following survey question:

“Did our ‘sign up for a free trial’ button catch your attention on our homepage? Why?”

This doesn’t work because the participant can’t really answer your question freely: you’re implying that your homepage CTA button should have caught their attention, so they’re more likely to answer ‘yes.’ 

Instead, you should ask:

“What site element attracts your attention most on our homepage? Why?”

Or, if they’ve already converted:

“What made you decide to click the ‘sign up for a free trial’ button on the homepage?’

Here, you’re letting the research participant fill in the blanks on their own, which will get you a more accurate picture of their user experience.

Pro tip: use Hotjar’s Survey tool and s urvey templates to quickly and easily create your own qualitative surveys and get all the details about your customers’ journey—in their own words. Filter responses and set up automations for your team to receive alerts when you get certain survey responses to uncover trends in your user data all in one place.

Use Hotjar Surveys to connect with customers and hear about all the stages in their journey with your brand.

Quantitative research methods to complement qualitative data

While qualitative research is the best way to build empathy with your customers and get a holistic view of their product experience, you also need quantitative data to get an objective, granular understanding of key moments in the customer journey.

Use these three quantitative research methods to gather precise information about your customers’ digital journey with your product:

5. Website analytics

Because website analytics show you hard data about how people are interacting with your site, they’re a great resource for customer journey mapping research. Investigate these key metrics to better understand how your users move across touchpoints:

Traffic source: are customers searching for your site on Google, clicking on a landing page, or visiting from a social media channel?

Bounce rate : do visitors arrive on your site and navigate away soon after? Or do they stay for a while, browse, and take a conversion action, like making a purchase?

New vs. returning customers: how many users are new leads and how many are existing customers?

Session duration: how long do customers spend engaging with your site on average?

While website analytics don’t explain why your users are taking certain actions, they clearly show what customers are doing on your site —and how they got there .

For best results, use a PX insights platform like Hotjar to fill in the gaps between the numbers with rich qualitative insights.

Matthew Nixon, managing director of  Molzana , illustrates how teams can combine website analytics and qualitative research tools for optimal customer journey mapping:

"Using tools like Hotjar adds color to our quantitative analysis. Before, events like button clicks, scroll rate, and video plays might not have been tagged. This is where Hotjar comes in; click and scroll maps allow us to quantify user behavior in a much more granular way, which complements the trend data we collect from web analytics."

Google Analytics is a great option for quantitative website or app data: it’s both powerful and relatively easy to set up and navigate. Use Hotjar’s Google Analytics integration to go deeper and gather both qualitative and quantitative insights to inform your customer journey map .

6. Quantitative surveys

Quantitative surveys ask customers closed-ended questions that can be answered quickly—by checking yes or no, typing in one word, or selecting a multiple-choice answer.

Quantitative surveys can take a bit longer to put together, but they’re quick and easy for customers to fill out. With Hotjar, you can quickly create quantitative surveys by modifying questions from our question bank, and build surveys your users can address in a click or two, without disrupting their experience. 

While quantitative surveys don’t give you the same level of in-depth information as qualitative, open-ended questions, they’re helpful to get a statistical overview on the customer journey, or if you’ve already identified a potential problem and want to better understand the issue.

Imagine you've discovered, through qualitative research, that several customers report difficulties browsing your website. Place a quantitative survey on key web or product pages to get more details about the exact issues they’re experiencing with questions like:

Did you experience friction when browsing our website?

What was the biggest problem you experienced when browsing our website:

Difficult to navigate on mobile

Bugs or glitches

Confusing navigation menu

Pages loaded slowly or incorrectly

I had trouble finding what I wanted

Collecting enough responses to quantitative questions helps you prioritize the most important elements of the customer experience to map out an improved user journey.

7. Customer satisfaction scores

Measuring customer satisfaction is important to understand which touchpoints are working well for your users, and which you need to improve. In particular, Net Promoter Score® (NPS) is a great indicator of overall customer loyalty and satisfaction. 

Researchers calculate this metric by asking existing customers how likely they are to recommend your product to their network on a scale of 1 to 10. Their ratings help you understand overall customer satisfaction levels, and also split users up into specific groups:

Promoters (9-10): your biggest fans. They’re highly likely to stay loyal to your company and recommend you far and wide.

Passives (7-8): middle of the road. These customers are more or less satisfied with your brand but would consider jumping ship to a competitor who meets their needs better.

Detractors (0-6): these users may have had a negative experience with your company that’s made them unlikely to return—they may even write negative reviews or testimonials about your product or services. However, negative feedback is also useful as it helps you understand which parts of your customer journey you need to focus on and fix.

While NPS scores give you an idea of how well your brand is serving your customers, they don’t tell you why customers are so loyal they regularly recommend your company. That’s why it’s a good idea to ask a couple of quick follow-up questions in your NPS survey , like “What can we do to improve your score?”

Use Hotjar’s non-intrusive Feedback widgets and Survey tools to get NPS survey responses from customers while they’re navigating your site.

Once you’ve calculated your NPS score, use your findings to identify how you can improve the customer experience and where the customer journey needs updating. For example, if many customers complained about friction in the checkout process, that’s a good indication you should focus on optimizing that part of your on-site customer journey.

Deep customer knowledge makes for easy journey mapping

Thorough research is the best way to build a customer journey map that lets you truly understand your customers and their user experience. It’s essential to use a mix of qualitative and quantitative research methods to dig deep into how customers are behaving on your site and understand why and how they’re carrying out certain actions.

Combine these methods to understand your customers’ experiences from different perspectives and prioritize creating a stellar user journey.

Hotjar helps you understand your users by combining observational data with voice-of-the-customer (VoC) insights.

FAQs about customer journey mapping research

Why is customer journey mapping research important.

Customer journey mapping is important because it helps teams understand how customers interact with their brand in the wild. Customer journey mapping research makes sure your maps are based on accurate user data rather than guesswork and assumptions. By doing research, teams dig deep into the customer experience, uncover the touchpoints that are most impactful, and optimize their products or services accordingly.

What methods are good for customer journey mapping research?

Use a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to get a full picture of how customers experience brand touchpoints and engage in strong customer journey mapping research. Here’s what we recommend:

Qualitative methods: customer interviews, remote observation, lab observation, and qualitative surveys

Quantitative methods: website analytics, customer satisfaction scores like Net Promoter Scores®, and quantitative surveys

Is quantitative or qualitative research better for customer journey mapping?

Neither quantitative nor qualitative research is better for customer journey mapping—both approaches complement each other and should be used together to get a full picture of how customers are behaving—and why they’re behaving that way. While qualitative research excels in uncovering genuine customer feelings and emotions, quantitative research is valuable because it gives research teams hard data that’s easily measurable and useful for analytics and spotting trends.

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What is Customer Journey Analytics

Published: June 28, 2023

A customer doesn’t just mindlessly purchase a product or service. They go through an entire journey, from discovering your brand, to purchasing your product or service, to sometimes recommending it to someone else. 

To make sense of your customer’s journey, you’ll need to leverage customer journey analytics.

Every business, startup or enterprise — in any industry — needs to understand how customers interact with their brand. Insights gathered from customer journey analytics can help, while leading to increased customer lifetime value, customer loyalty, and revenue growth. 

In this blog post, we cover the following:

What is customer journey analytics?

• Customer Journey Stages
• Customer Journey Analytics Benefits

Customer Journey Analytics Software

• Customer Journey Analytics vs. Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey analytics is a collection of data that helps you to understand how your prospects or customers behave, engage, and convert along the customer journey. 

Customer journey analytics often begins with a customer journey map , which is a visual representation of every step the customer goes through with your business. Then, it applies data on how your customer behaves throughout different phases of that map,  to help you assess the effect your customers’ journey has on your business, or what’s holding customer’s back from completing that journey and purchasing a product

Customer Journey Analytics Steps

1. outline a customer journey map..

Create your customer journey map using HubSpot’s template

The first step to customer journey analytics is creating a customer journey map. A typical customer journey map includes the following: the buying process, user actions, emotions, pain points, and solutions. The customer journey map is the foundation for further analysis.

2. Identify the right analytics tools.

To accurately conduct customer journey analysis, you'll need the right tools. 

A good customer journey analytics tool will monitor, track, and analyze data like website data, conversion data, and detail data across multiple channels.

Customer data platforms (CDPs) also play a role in supporting customer journey analytics. The platforms assign unique IDs to your website and app to build single customer views, which can include information such as location, browser, device type, operating system, historical transactions, and visitor logs.

3. Collect your data.

A robust analytics platform should enable you to collect data on customer behavior. Data can be broken down into two main buckets: user data and interaction data. 

• User data: Provides context on a user and their traits. Data can include email, age, industry, and occupation.
• Interaction data: Gives information about how a user interacts with your product or service.

4. Analyze data.

Data in itself is not meaningful without analysis. The purpose of customer journey analytics is to make sense of the data and extract insights that can inform your business strategy. 

For example, an e-commerce company might identify, through analysis, that requiring customers to create an account to complete a purchase leads to the customer not completing the purchase — a solution could be implementing a guest checkout option.

5. Update customer journey map.

Using the insights you’ve gained, you can now update the customer journey map accordingly. For example, you might add additional pain points uncovered through data analysis, like requiring customers to create accounts to complete a purchase.

6. Use customer journey analytics to test new strategies.

The next step is to figure out how to enhance the customer journey experience. Testing new strategies like adding a guest checkout option, making the account creation process faster with fewer steps, and sending abandoned cart emails are all examples.

Benefits of Customer Journey Analytics

By leveraging customer journey analytics, you'll be able to improve your customer’s experience with actionable insights, while unlocking benefits like:

Better Understanding Customers

By gathering and synthesizing data, you will better understand what aspects of the buyer’s journey lead them to purchase a product or service, or not. For example, an e-commerce company might learn that customers that come from a specific social media platform are more likely to buy, or discover that certain audience demographics or affinities are more likely to become leads.

Pinpointing Where You’re Losing Customers

Not all customers follow through, and unless they fill out a survey, it can be difficult to figure out why they churn. By leveraging customer journey analytics, you can pinpoint where you’re losing potential customers. 

For example, a business can lose potential customers during channel or device transitions. A prospect  might start filling out a form on a mobile device but choose to complete it on a laptop. If information entered is lost, the potential customer might not take the time to complete the signup process.

Optimizing and Solving for Prospects

With a better understanding of customers’ pain points and the reasons behind them, you'll be able to figure out how to improve and strategize around an accurate customer journey.

Improve ROI

Are your investments in customer experience worth it? By using customer journey analytics, you’ll be able to measure ROI for customer experience initiatives. From there, you can streamline, remove, or cost cut initiatives that don’t benefit your bottom line, or double down on the aspects of the buyer’s journey that do.

For instance, if you run an incredibly expensive advertising campaign that doesn’t yield the same level of new customers or purchase page visits as unpaid or more in-house content, you can aim to save money on ads and focus on the more affordable strategies that actually earn you money.

1. HubSpot Marketing Hub: Advanced Marketing Reporting

Get started with customer journey analytics

HubSpot Marketing Hub is equipped with robust customer journey analytics capabilities and tools, which can map data around conversions, leads, deals, and website engagements around different stages of the customer journey. 

The Advanced Marketing Reporting tool also enables you to  attribute every customer interaction to revenue, analyze conversion rates and time between nurturing path steps, and provides further data to help you build informed strategies that can improve ROI and purchase rates.

2. Content Square

Content Square captures UX, performance and product, and content data throughout the customer journey. The platform also enables you to visualize metrics so that they are easily digestible. You will be able to get insights like bounce rate and number of lost conversions, and dig deeper to pinpoint why.

3. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a widely used website analytics software that enables you to track user behavior on different platforms, including mobile applications. Features like daily traffic reporting give you insight into what visitors are engaging with. Plus, its Analytics Amplifier can combine Google Analytics and HubSpot data .

Customer Journey Mapping vs. Customer Journey Analytics

Customer journey analytics and customer journey mapping are often confused with each other. Although they’re complementary,  customer journey mapping visually presents customer journey stages from start to finish, while customer journey analytics offers data about a  customers’ interactions in each stage.

Customer journey maps often include the following:

• The buying process: By pulling data from places like CMS and prospecting tools, you will be able to figure out what goes into a customer’s purchasing process. 
• User actions: This part of the customer journey map details the actions the customer takes throughout their journey.
• Emotions: Emotions help color your understanding of how your customer is feeling and reacting as they go through their journey with your business.
• Pain points: Adding pain points to your customer journey map gives you a comprehensive picture of the challenges your customer may experience.
• Solutions: Figuring out solutions can help your customers experience fewer pain points. The data and insights you’ve gathered can help inform your solutions.

Customer journey analytics delves deeper. The customer journey map is the “what” and customer journey analytics is the “why” because it organizes customer or prospect data around each stage.  

Here’s an example of how customer journey analytics works in HubSpot Marketing Hub:

HubSpot’s Advanced Marketing Reporting Tool  

Customer Journey Map vs. Analytics Example: Let’s say your business offers CMS tools and your ideal customer, a graphic design firm, finds you through a targeted Instagram ad.

In the customer journey map you’ve built , your target customer considers using your CMS tools to build a new website that showcases their strengths. They schedule a demo before trying the free version and are initially excited, but become frustrated with the limited design elements offered by the free version. Their biggest pain point quickly becomes lack of versatility. They then look into purchasing the paid version or go to a cheaper competitor.

With customer journey analytics, you’ll apply real-time data to that map: From journey mapping, you’ve identified the steps your customer often takes  and their common pain points. A strong customer journey analytics tool can then collect, aggregate, synthesize, and visualize data to help you make sense of your customer’s actions and see if your mapping and journey-based strategies work. 

For example, data might show how your customer is interacting with your product. 

A good Customer Journey Analytics platform combines data like user data, survey results, and website analytics, you can gain a comprehensive view of why your customer is experiencing those pain points and consequently address their concerns.

Cultivate an Impactful Customer Journey

In order to remain competitive, it is important to understand and create strategies to enhance the customer’s journey. Customer Journey Analytics is just one component. Other key steps include creating buyer personas , mapping out the customer journey , and continuously updating strategies based on data.

To get started with improving the customer journey, learn more about HubSpot’s marketing solution Marketing Hub .

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Customer Journey Analytics: Definition, Tools, & Examples

Learn how customer journey analytics helps you measure the ROI on your customer experience initiatives. Use it to boost revenue, reduce churn, and improve CX.

Customer journey analytics (CJA) is the process of analyzing the entire customer journey through customer data points, then strategizing ways to improve the overall customer experience (CX) . Customer journey analytics is a holistic process that makes customer journeys measurable and helps you identify insights and actions to delight and retain your customers.

Key takeaways

• Customer journey analytics is the process of examining critical data pertaining to user journeys to make informed decisions on improving the customer experience.
• Some of the benefits of customer journey analytics include the ability to measure the ROI on CX initiatives and improve the customer experience through the insights it provides, as well as reduce churn and boost revenue.
• Measuring customer journeys is a process that involves creating user journey maps, determining and collecting data pertaining to those journeys, and defining success metrics and milestones along the way.

What is customer journey analytics (CJA)?

Customer journey analytics is the gathering and analyzing of data that pertains to customer behavior to improve the customer experience. Analysis happens over multiple customer touchpoints and channels over a period of time and measures the impact of behavior on business outcomes.

While gathering customer data, you can collect all user actions in one central database with an associated timestamp. Information is collected through a unique identifier on what the user is doing and who the user is.

Using this information, it’s possible to map out customer journeys and then analyze the customer engagement levels for each journey to understand what’s going well and where customers might be getting stuck. The analysis helps to optimize these customer journeys and also measures the performance of your CX initiatives.

Example insights from customer journey analytics

Customer journey analytics provides deep insights to improve the customer experience. Some examples include:

• Customer journey analytics makes it possible to analyze the path customers take to resolve customer queries. Some insights derived from this analysis might include what types of issues can be resolved by self-service channels and which ones need human interference. This information makes it possible to optimize self-service channels, improve the operational efficiency of resolving customer queries, and enable customer support staff to focus on more complex customer issues.
• For ecommerce companies, customer journey analytics makes it possible to view the steps a customer takes while completing a purchase, which can help identify any barriers to completing the transaction. You might find, for example, that a common frustration while completing a purchase is having to create a user account. You can then use this insight to A/B test a guest checkout option and see if it removes the friction.
• Customer journey analytics can help you identify channel-specific insights to improve the customer experience. For example, you might find that users on your mobile app drop off at a higher rate than users on your website. This insight could indicate that you need to rethink parts of your mobile experience.

Benefits of customer journey analytics

There are several benefits of customer journey analytics, including:

Measuring the ROI on CX initiatives

In a CX survey, 20% of respondents said that measuring customer experience initiatives was one of the key challenges being faced by organizations in the U.S. Customer journey analytics solves this problem by making it possible to measure the ROI on CX initiatives.

Product managers and CX designers can use customer journey analytics to connect data and numbers to customer journeys. For instance, CJA can compare the revenue generated from two user journeys to figure out which user journey leads to more revenue for the business, making it possible to shift to the journey that’s most beneficial.

Customer journey analytics makes it possible to understand how the customer interacts with the product, how their behavior changes when modifications are made to the customer journey, and how your product metrics are impacted because of this changed user behavior.

Improving the customer experience

By visualizing user journeys built by customer journey analytics tools, it’s possible to identify bottlenecks people might face in your product, minimize them, and make smart product suggestions based on their past behavior.

For example, with customer journey analytics, it’s possible to diagnose that users of an ecommerce app fail to make a purchase during the last step of the transaction, especially when using the app for the second time. They might be getting stuck since they don’t remember what they bought the last time, so CJA makes it possible to autosuggest items based on what the customer purchased on their last visit. Reminding customers about their past transactions can improve the overall shopping experience by helping users purchase with ease.

Customer journey analytics tracks data in real time. This enables you to analyze customer behavior while the customer interacts with your website or product, build user journeys around that behavior, then find opportunities to make improvements to the customer experience.

Reducing customer churn

Since customer journey analytics helps predict customer behavior based on their past actions, it can also identify customers at risk of leaving the product or website, enabling you to take action to retain at-risk customers.

Upon identifying at-risk customers, it’s possible to use CJA to personalize interactions with them and help them feel more positive about the brand, so they’ll change their minds about leaving. In a CX study, 58% of respondents stated that their organization had seen significant increases in customer retention as a result of using customer analytics.

Boosting revenue

By helping you identify the customer journeys that result in a purchase, it’s possible to boost revenue using customer journey analytics. You can further optimize these journeys by reaching out to customers in real time with relevant communication like upsell and cross-sell offers.

CJA can also help identify your best-performing channels by monitoring customer behavior across different touchpoints. So if your website is performing better than your app, you can focus on optimizing the revenue from your website while making improvements to your mobile app.

Steps for measuring customer journeys

Step 1: create or capture user journey maps.

Before you start measuring a customer journey, it’s important to first create a user journey map. You can create this journey map using prototyping tools or Post-it Notes based on the actions users take. For example, if you want to measure the journey of playing a song on a music app like Spotify, you need to create the entire journey map so you can visualize it.

In this example, the user journey might consist of the following steps: going to the Spotify website, downloading the app, creating a login, searching for a song, and then playing the song. You’d need to write these steps out in the form of a “journey” or use a tool that captures these user actions and creates the journey maps for you.

The goal, in this example, is to play a song on the app. And the journey to that goal consists of several steps along the way. You need to view the journey across different channels since, at the end of the day, your user is trying to accomplish a goal and it doesn’t matter whether they do it via your mobile app or your website.

Step 2: Determine the data you need to collect at each step of the customer journey

To measure a customer journey, you need to define the critical data points you need to measure for that journey. For instance, in our Spotify example, here are some data points that might be relevant to help quantify the journey:

• Number of attempts to download the app
• Time it takes to download the Spotify app
• Time it takes to create a user login
• Number of attempts to play a song

Collecting all of the data in one centralized place makes it easy to access it and pick the relevant bits of data needed along with their timestamps. The data required will depend on the journey you decide to measure.

For every part of the customer journey, there’s an action that your brand wants the user to complete. Every journey has a goal, and there are milestones to achieving that goal. It’s important to define both the goal and the milestones along the way, so you know what to measure and what success looks like.

With the example of playing a song on Spotify, some success metrics or milestones would be:

• Downloading the Spotify app
• Creating a user login
• Playing the first song
• Subscribing to the Spotify service
• Sharing the first playlist
• Renewing the subscription

Think of milestones as critically important steps in the process of achieving a goal. Make a list of these steps, so you can have clearly defined milestones.

Step 3: Analyze the customer data

The next step is to identify your data sources and capture behavioral customer data across the customer journey. Once you’ve collected data, you can start analyzing it and measuring key metrics along critical flows of the journey. You’ll be able to gauge where customers are spending their time, what’s causing them frustration, and which behaviors lead to revenue-generating outcomes. Using this information, you’ll be able to measure the customer journey effectively and figure out how to improve it.

Customer journey analytics tools

Using the Journeys feature on Amplitude , it’s possible to discover what’s making users convert or drop off. With Journeys, you can:

• View step-by-step breakdowns of the paths taken by converted and dropped-off users.
• Uncover the paths most likely to accelerate conversion.
• Identify what your users do if they don’t convert.
• Understand the friction points in your customer experience and develop a strategy to fix them.

By defining the start and endpoints of the journey, the Journeys feature within Amplitude helps you see what percentage of paths converted and what percentage dropped off.

There is a range of other customer journey analytics tools available, including:

• Acoustic Analytics
• Adobe Analytics
• Google Analytics
• Salesforce Journey Builder
• Webex Experiment Management

Learn more about each of these customer journey analytics tools on a review site like G2 .

• What are the biggest challenges currently being faced by your organization in terms of customer experience? Statista
• Performance enhancements resulting from the use of customer analytics in the United States as of March 2018 . Statista

See what customer journey analytics looks like in our self-service demo , or get started with journeys using your own data in a free Amplitude account .

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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.

Uncover trends for crucial digital KPIs with the 2024 Digital Experience Benchmark Report → Access the benchmarks

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How to use customer journey mapping to improve your business

Katie Leask

May 17, 2021 | 6 min read

Last Updated: Jun 7, 2023

Table of Contents

Mapping the customer journey

• What is a customer journey map?
• What is customer journey mapping?

The customer journey mapping process

How to create a customer journey map, example customer journey maps, take away the hassle of digital customer journey mapping with contentsquare.

What exactly is customer journey mapping and why is it so important for success? In this post, we’ll cover what a customer journey map is and how to create one, plus share examples of customer journey maps to inspire you.

At Contentsquare, we’re committed to creating better digital experiences for all. Our advanced customer journey analysis shows you exactly how visitors progress through your site from entry to exit. So you can discover your biggest opportunities and frustrations within minutes.

A few decades ago, the customer journey was pretty straightforward.

A customer may see an ad in a magazine or on television, and then head out to buy your product from a local shop. For marketers, life was relatively simple.

But thanks to social media and advancements in digital marketing, the way we shop has changed. What may have once been a three- or four-touchpoint journey from awareness to purchase, can now be influenced by hundreds of messages coming from a broad range of channels.

Display ads, WhatsApp, social media promotion, Amazon Alexa, email marketing ; in 2021, the available touchpoints for you to get in front of your customer are almost endless.

This means customer journey mapping is a necessity if you want to make sure you’re getting the right message, to the right person, at the right time.

Why? Because the key to success is making sure your customer’s path to purchase is as smooth and frictionless as possible. And customer journey mapping will help you do just that.

What is a customer journey map ?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of every touchpoint a customer has with your company, from the awareness stage right through to the purchase and then the advocacy stage.

An in-depth customer journey map can help you understand your customers better by uncovering common pain points in their path to purchase.

In eCommerce, for example, marketers will use a customer journey map to identify which stages of the buying journey are causing problems with their target audience.

Then, by mapping out the content you have against each stage of your customer’s journey, you’re able to pinpoint gaps in your content marketing strategy . 

Maybe you don’t have enough case studies to help get bottom-of-the-funnel prospects over the line? Perhaps customers are losing interest in your site because you don’t have buyer’s guides for those in the consideration phase?

One of the main benefits of a customer journey map is being able to ensure you have content ready for each stage of your buyer’s journey to help progress them down the funnel, entirely friction-free.

What is customer journey mapping ?

Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a customer journey map . This is a super important process and, while it may take some time and energy to complete, will be worth it in the long run.

It means getting to know your customers as best you can; where they hang out online, what problems they’re trying to solve, what their budgets are, what content they like to consume and how they like to consume it.

Now you know why you need a customer journey map, how do you create one? 

A basic customer journey map is relatively straightforward to build, but it will take some time to research and populate with great content.

You’ll also need to keep it updated in line with a fast-paced marketing environment and be prepared to adjust and optimize it as you go.

Step 1: Persona research 

The first step is finding out as much about your customers as possible. 

Remember, effective research relies on more than just current customer interviews. So you’ll want to find out why people didn’t choose you too.

Speak to your sales team about opportunities that you’ve lost historically and what issues were sighted most commonly. Why did people choose to go elsewhere? What might have persuaded them to stay?

Take a look at your web analytics to see what content your customers are engaging with and what impact these touchpoints have on moving people down the funnel. 

Speak to your customers and ask them directly what made them choose you over competitors.

• What do they like most about you?
• What improvements have they seen since choosing you?

Step 2: Define touchpoints

Once you know who your customers are and what they need, you can start plotting the touchpoints they have with your business. 

These touchpoints will depend on what industry you work in and how your specific customers interact with your brand. 

For example, the first few touchpoints for a coffee shop might look like this: 

• The customer sees a geo-targeted ad
• The customer visits your shop
• The customer buys coffee
• The customer follows your brand on Twitter

Whereas for a clothing company, it might look like this: 

• The customer sees a social media promotion
• The customer clicks on your website
• The customer browses your site
• The customer adds an item to their basket

The stages of the customer journey are different for everyone, but here are the most commonly used stages to get you started:

Awareness > Consideration > Purchase > Retention > Advocacy

And here are some examples of the types of content you’ll need for each stage: 

• Awareness: Social media ad, PPC 
• Consideration : Blog content, buying guides
• Purchase : PLP, PDP
• Retention : Email nurture
• Advocacy: Co-creation, social media posts

Step 3: Choose your tools

Once you know your customer and what their touchpoints look like, it’s time to plot these onto a customer journey map . 

A Google Sheet is a great place to start. It’s easily editable and shareable with dropdown functionality and conditional formatting to keep everything organized.

Step 4: Populate your customer journey map

Next up, add columns for each stage of the buying process that you defined earlier. These don’t have to be too granular to start with, though you may want to expand them later on down the line to create super personalized content.

Add in details about how your customers are feeling at each stage of their journey, plus what pain points they might have. The more detail you can add here, the easier it will be to create the right content .

Step 5: Create kickass content

Once mapped, it’s time to make sure you have kickass content for every stage of your customer journey map. Your map will inform your content strategy; such as creating more upper-funnel content (such as PR stories and SEO-focused blog content) or better optimizing your bottom of funnel content (such as Product Listing Pages and Product Detail Pages).

Next up: Layer your audiences

If you want to go one step further, you can layer more specific audiences to ensure your content consistently hits the right spot with different audiences.

For example, you may want to create customer journey maps for different job roles or industries to make sure you’re delivering the right messages to them at the right time.

Whether you decide to segment your audience by most common pain points, job title, or industry, your customer journey map will help you spot points of friction and content gaps to ensure a smooth customer experience for everyone.

What does a customer journey map look like in practice? Here are two examples of customer journey map layouts that you may want to use for inspiration.

Example 1: NN Group

NN Group has defined their buying stages based on their customer’s very specific buying cycle. Consider, explore, compare, test, and negotiate. They’ve also included quotes from customers at various stages to better understand their pain points and feelings.

Example 2: UX Hints

This second example from UX Hints uses a grid format to map out what their customers are thinking, feeling, and doing at each stage of the buying process. Using emojis is a quick and engaging way to share feelings, something you may want to emulate in your customer journey map.

Once a customer lands on your site, our customer journey analysis software tells you everything you need to know about their digital journey.

From uncovering their most common pain points in seconds to understanding where unexpected drop-offs occur and what optimizations will increase engagement on your website, we can help you get as close to your customers as possible.

What’s more, our signature sunburst visualizes aggregated data from every single one of your customer journeys, allowing you to make quantitative and qualitative decisions about which website optimizations will have the most positive impact.

If you’re interested to know more about your customers and how they interact with your site, get in touch with us today.

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Katie is Contentsquare’s Global Content Manager. With five years of content experience both agency and client-side, she knows a thing or two about creating content that drives traffic and converts. She enjoys reading, red wine, and going to bed early. She’s also pretty fond of rooftops and is rarely seen without freshly painted nails.

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What is a Product Journey Map and How to Build One?

11 min read

A product journey map is a key part of the product development and design process as it serves as a peek into how your users see and experience your product or service.

It also enhances the overall product experience and improves chances of customers reaching the activation then retention stages.

In this article, we’ll cover what a product journey map is, why you need it, and how to build one.

Let’s get started!

• Product journey maps are a representation of customer interactions with your product or service.
• It’s not the same as creating customer journey maps which are a representation of the customer journey and interactions with your business across each stage of the buying process.
• Journey mapping is important because it helps to identify customer pain points, gives you a feel of the customer’s state while using your product, and lets you uncover unique perspectives and potential solutions to improving it.
• There are 6 types of journey maps: current state, future state maps, day in the life, service blueprint, empty, and experience maps.
• You can build user journey maps using tools such as Miro, Lucidcharts, Smaply, etc.

What is a product journey map?

A product journey map is a blueprint of a user’s interactions within your product. It is a visual representation of every behavior and possible step or action the user takes while using your product.

It consists of everything a user does in the app. From signing up to activation, to how they experience and navigate your entire product and use specific features.

Product journey map vs customer journey map

A product map (also called a user journey map) covers all interactions a user has with your product and is used in UX and product development, while a customer journey map covers all interaction a user has with your brand and product across multiple channels, and platforms, even before the purchase, and is mostly used in marketing and sales.

With that being said, customer journey maps include your marketing efforts and MQLs and leads, while the former focuses on current users already using your product.

Before you can create a customer journey map, you have to decide on your company goal for the finished map. This will then determine which type of journey map you need to build to get the best results.

Here are the six types of journey maps product managers use to identify opportunities and create a better user experience.

Current state maps

Current state maps are the most common types of journey maps. They take a look at how your current users interact with your product right now. This map shows you what’s working today and what’s not in your product so you know what to improve.

Future state maps

Future state maps are an assumption or expectation of how users will navigate through and interact with your product in the future. This is built after the errors/blocks in your current state map have been fixed.

The future state map can also be used to set and track goals you hope to achieve with your improved product.

Service blueprint

A service blueprint template tracks customers’ experience with employees and other parts of your company. This helps improve the interaction between the business and customers.

Day in the life

Day in the life maps is a bigger picture of your user as a whole person, not just as a user of your tool. This looks into the customer’s emotions, behaviors, activities, and other things that make them who they are.

While this type of journey mapping may not directly involve your product, it helps you get into your user personas’ heads and design products and experiences that fit into their lifestyles.

Empathy maps

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person, in this case, the user. It’s an important skill for building products people love.

An empathy map, therefore, is a visual representation of how the user sees your product from their point of view. It doesn’t just map product interactions, it takes into consideration their feelings and struggles while using it. Empathy maps are built by running user research or interviews, and are usually divided into four parts to record:

• What the user says about your product and their experience with it
• What the user thinks when using the product.
• What they feel when using it
• What they do and actions/behaviors they display while using it

Each section gives you a better understanding of the user, what’s a problem to them, and exactly how to improve their experience.

Experience maps

A good or bad experience isn’t just a function of your product design or features. Every member of your product team is a part of the customer’s experience . So, experience maps are a visual slate of users’ experience with the different parts or touchpoints of your product during a given period.

To draw up an accurate experience map, you must first acknowledge the goal of the user then look at the paths taken to achieve that and their experience all through. Did it take longer than expected? How easy was it for them to get support? How many attempts did it take for them to get a task completed?

This particular map helps you discover and fix the hiccups in your customer journey and product flow.

Benefits of user and customer journey mapping?

Mapping customer experience or interaction with your product across the different stages of their journey can provide insights that could help with product development and improvement.

In other words, creating a customer journey map is a better way to develop products because it relies on how your user/customer base is experiencing your service. Here are a few other benefits.

Provide transparency across all teams involved in the development of your product

User and customer journey mapping look at the user’s interactions with your product (and brand as a whole), so the results you get from doing this can provide insight into how each team works at each stage of the customer’s journey. And also show you at what points improvements need to be made.

It helps cross-functional teams sync their actions of working towards the same business goal of improving customer experience. Instead of guessing/assuming, it shows the marketing team how their marketing efforts are received and which channels work best, the sales team gets insight into what kind of leads convert best, and the product team sees what parts of the product experience encourage users to move along their journey and where the friction points lie.

Drive product engagement and adoption

Customer journey mapping reveals what parts of your product work smoothly and which may be stalling users from progressing in their journey.

It could be a long and boring onboarding flow that keeps users from reaching activation so they leave. It could also be features that users are ignoring even though you know it’s important to their use case. Mapping how users use such a feature can show you how they experience it, and why they overlook it – it may be hard to find, they don’t see immediate value, hard to use, etc. This lets you know what needs to be done to increase product/feature engagement and adoption.

If you have a long-expected future, you can also use in-app announcements to notify users of new features.

Know which KPIs to track and why

There are a lot of KPIs or metrics to track in product marketing, so understanding how users see and experience your product can help you discover the most important ones to focus on right now. The customer journey mapping process helps you focus your efforts on what’s most important and remove friction points with in-app guidance.

A customer journey mapping examples could be of your users dropping off before reaching the activation stage. That could be your sign to focus on monitoring and improving onboarding flow and primary activation. Using a checklist, you can drive users to the activation point in their journey where they experience the value of the product.

How to create a product journey map?

Now you know what a product journey map is, and why you need it, the next thing is figuring out how to build one. The step-by-step process is what this section will cover.

#1 – Where to get data for your product journey map

The first thing to do is work out where the information you want to analyze will come from. You have two options:

Firstly, if you’re starting from scratch, the best way to get data is from user interviews.

This involves getting information directly from your users to understand how they interact with your product.

From user interviews, you can easily trace/map out how users see your product from their point of view. You can get a clear vision into their exact sentiments about several parts of the product and how easy or difficult it is for them to fulfill the desired action or achieve their goals.

The information you get here serves as a starting point. Since customer journeys aren’t static, your product map will need continuous adjustments as you move along.

Secondly, if you already have data from existing users you can:

• use product analytics tools to track in-app user behavior, user flow, friction points, etc
• Track user sentiments using in-app surveys like net promoter score (NPS) , customer satisfaction score (CSAT) , and customer effort score (CES) .
• Ask your sales and customer success/support teams for recurring customer queries, bugs, and common words or quotes. These give you a better understanding of users’ pain points and needs.

Check out this video on The What and Why of Continuous Discovery from Teresa Torres, author, Speaker, and Product Management Coach at ProductTalk.

#2 – Set your target

By identifying what goal you hope to achieve from your user journey maps, it’ll be easier to create one.

For example:

• Do you want to improve the user’s experience of your product? You’ll need a user journey map that highlights your friction points and tracks user behavior of those who churned out of your product.
• Or do you want to improve a specific feature ? An experience map of customer interaction with that feature will work best here to show how they experience it. From struggle points to the success areas.
• Looking to improve your product and make it more useful for your target user persona? A day in the life map of your target user can help you identify gaps and opportunities you can include in your product, because you’ll be able to see them as people, not just users of your product.

#3 – Define your user persona

Once you identify your goals and the type of user journey map you’ll be creating, the next step is to define your target user personas for the map.

By picking the necessary user personas on which your journey maps will focus, you’ll increase your chances of getting better results. So if your goal is to improve a specific feature, your target persona should be the users who use such feature.

Here’s an example of a Product Manager persona for Userpilot’s product adoption tool. It gives insight into their pain points, typical jobs to be done, the type of company they work for, and what they stand to gain from a tool like Userpilot.

#4 – Which journey stages are you mapping?

Your set objective will determine what stages of the user journey to map.

For example, if your goal is to improve onboarding flow and increase activation rates, your journey map will have to focus on only the primary onboarding stage of the user’s journey. This is because that’s the only part with influence on your goal.

#5 – Map out the key milestones in your product journey

Milestones are key points in the user’s journey through your product. They usually signify the end of a goal the user has achieved and are useful for tracking user progression.

Say your product is a meeting scheduling tool. There are several things your users have to do to achieve their goal.

• Sync calendar
• Create a meeting
• Share link.

If they don’t go through these steps they can’t experience your product’s benefit. But by completing the steps and achieving their goal of a scheduled meeting, they’ve reached one milestone in their journey.

Assigning milestones in your product journey map will give you insight into how the customer interacts with your product and if they’re advancing in their journey or not. Some examples of milestones include:

• Reaching the Aha moment
• Reaching the activation point
• Becoming an advanced user

Hint: translate those milestones into goals and track when users complete them using a product adoption tool like  Userpilot

#6 – Add relevant touchpoints to your product journey map

Using the meeting scheduling tool example from above, a milestone is a goal achieved by successfully scheduling your meeting. While the touchpoints in this case are all the steps you take to accomplish this.

The milestone is the fully baked cake, while the touchpoints are all the steps that went into baking it.

Touchpoints are a necessary addition to your product journey map because they show you how users navigate them to achieve their goals. Onboarding checklists are a great way to get users to each touchpoint in your product.

There are many tools companies use to create journey maps. Here are the best 6:

• UXPressia : their main focus is helping you improve customer experiences with your product. Asides from being a dedicated product journey mapping tool with several templates, you can also use this tool for your company employee onboarding. They also offer integrations with Slack and the design tool Marvel.
• Miro : this is one of the popular product journey map tools. With access to many preloaded templates, an easy UI, and a dedicated focus on product education which makes it super easy for anyone to use.
• LucidChart : If you use Google sheets, you may want to go with this tool because LucidChart integrates smoothly with it.
• Conceptboard : this is a recommended tool for remote teams. With this tool, you and your team can easily collaborate on creating product journey maps regardless of location.
• Smaply : With Smaply you can run multiple product journey maps across multiple roles and personas. This helps you compare and contrast and easily discover pain points in the journey flow.
• FlowMapp : this is a UX tool that helps you visualize various types of flow maps such as site maps and product journey maps.

The success of your product lies in how much your users love and value it. If they see the value, they stay and you grow. If they don’t, they leave.

Product journey maps reveal how users experience your product. They show you the user’s pain point with your product and how you can fix that to improve their experience.

Want to build product experiences code-free? Book a demo call with our team and get started!

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What is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey map template, the customer journey mapping process, data inputs for your customer journey map, why should you use customer journey maps, the uses of customer journey mapping, how to improve a customer journey, tools to help you with your journey mapping, see how xm for customer frontlines works, customer journey mapping 101: definition, template & tips.

22 min read Find out about how to start customer journey mapping, and how to improve it for the benefit of your customers and the business.

If you want to improve your customer experience you need to be able to understand and adapt the customer journey you offer when someone interacts with your organization. Whether their journey is entirely online , offline, or a blend of both, there are multiple journeys a customer might undergo.

Understanding the customer journey in depth helps you identify and take action on customer pain points and repeat what’s working. By doing this, you will improve the overall experience that your customers have, which will have better outcomes for your business.

Outlining the potential customer journeys your audience might go through requires a process called customer journey mapping.

Free Course: Customer journey management & improvement

Creating a customer journey map is the process of forming a visual representation of customers’ processes, needs , and perceptions throughout their interactions and relationship with an organization. It helps you understand the steps customers take – the ones you see, and don’t – when they interact with your business.

It enables you to assess:

• Insights – from your existing customer journey, how to understand it better
• Impact – how to optimize budgets and effort for changes we want to make to the customer experiences
• Issues/opportunities – Diagnose the existing customer journey
• Innovation – where you might want to completely change the existing customer experience

A customer journey map gives you deeper insight into the customer, so you can go beyond what you already know. Many brands see the customer journey as something that is visible – where the customer interacts with the brand. But in reality, this is not true, and only accounts for a percentage of the entire customer journey. Creating a customer journey map gets you thinking about the aspects of the journey you don’t see, but have equal weight and importance to the entire experience.

When mapping out the customer journey, you are looking for the moments that matter – where there is the greatest emotional load.

If you’re buying a car, then the greatest moment of emotional load is when you go to pick the car up because it’s yours , after picking the color, choosing the model, and waiting for it to be ready.

Ensuring these moments match your customers’ expectations of your product, brand and service teams are key to helping you reach your business goals. But you can only do that by understanding the journey your customers go on in order to get there, what they’re thinking and needing from you at that time. Developing a customer journey map puts you in their shoes so you can understand them better than ever before.

Getting started when creating a customer journey map template doesn’t have to be difficult. However, your customer journey map template will need to cover several elements in order to be effective.

There are several ingredients that make up the anatomy of a customer journey, all of which should be looked at carefully so that you can find out where the customer journey runs smoothly and meets customer needs at that moment in time – and where the experience does not, and needs some improvement.

Understanding their behaviors and attitudes also means you can fix bad experiences more effectively too because you know why you haven’t met your customers’ expectations and what you need to do to make amends. There may be times when things go wrong, but it’s how you adapt and what you do to fix these experiences that separates the best. Knowing how the customer will be feeling makes taking that decisive action much easier.

When exploring and visualizing the customer journey we are assessing:

• Customer behavior What is your customer trying to do?
• Customer attitudes What is your customer feeling/saying?
• The on-stage experience Who/what is your customer directly interacting with? (This includes various channels, such as TV ads or social media)
• The off-stage experience Who/what needs to be in place but which your customer is NOT directly aware of?

So what could the customer journey map examples look like when starting the process of buying a car?

Customer journey vs process flow

Understanding customer perspective, behavior, attitudes, and the on-stage and off-stage is essential to successfully create a customer journey map – otherwise, all you have is a process flow. If you just write down the touchpoints where the customer is interacting with your brand, you’re typically missing up to 40% of the entire customer journey.

There is no single customer journey. In fact, there are multiple. The best experiences combine multiple journeys in a seamless way to create a continuous customer lifecycle as outlined below.

Getting started with customer journey map templates

To begin, start by choosing a journey that you would like to create a customer journey map for and outline the first step that customers will take.

You can use this customer journey map template below to work out the customer behaviors, attitudes, the on-stage and off-stage processes – and the KPIs attached to measuring the success of this experience.

Download our free journey mapping template here

The step-by-step process of mapping the customer journey begins with the buyer persona .

Step 1 – Create a customer persona to test

In order to effectively understand the customer journey, you need to understand the customer – and this is where creating a persona really helps. You may base this around the most common or regular customers, big spend, or new customers you haven’t worked with before. This persona is beyond a marketing segment , but that can be a great place to begin if you’re just starting out on the mapping process for your organization.

What do you include? Start with these characteristics.

• Family status
• Professional goals
• Personal goals

These personas help you gain a deeper understanding of your customers and can be derived from insights and demographic data , or even customer interviews . This works for both B2B and B2C business models, but in B2B especially you’ll have multiple customers for each opportunity so it’s recommended you build out multiple personas.

To begin, start with no more than three personas to keep things simple.

Create a diverse team

When creating a customer journey map, you also need to build out a diverse mapping team to represent the whole business. Include frontline staff , day-to-day management, corporate teams, HR, and business support functions. They will give you vital feedback, advice, and perspectives you hadn’t thought of.

Step 2 – Choose a customer journey for mapping

Select a customer journey map to construct, then build a behavior line. This might be a new customer journey, renewal, or fixing a product issue. You might also choose this based on the most frequent customer journeys taken, or the most profitable.

Step 3 – Work through the mapping process

Ask yourself the following:

• Who are the people involved in this journey? E.g. if you’re in a car dealership, that might be the customer, the sales rep, and front-of-house staff.
• What are the processes or the things that happen during this journey?
• What are the customer attitudes ? What are they feeling at this time? Go beyond excitement or frustration. Bring these feelings to life. This car is my dream come true!
• What is the moment that matters? Identify the greatest moment of emotional load. The make or break where everything could be good up until that point, but if you get that moment of maximum impact wrong, then all that’s good is forgotten. The best experience brands get this moment right and identifying it is an important first step to achieving that. In that moment, ask yourself what are the things/people/processes involved? Think about this for the whole business – across your product , brand , and service teams.
• But beyond identifying this moment, you need to establish what your customers’ needs are. What are they getting out of this moment? How do their needs change if this experience goes badly? Knowing the answer to these questions can help you deliver experiences that will resonate , and respond quickly to unforeseen circumstances or issues.
• And finally, how do you measure how effectively you are meeting customer needs throughout the journey? Set KPIs to put benchmarks in place for your customer journey map and customer experience and track your progress.

Step 4 – Innovate

When you are mapping out your customer journey, brainstorm ideas for how to improve that moment that really matters . These ideas don’t need to be practical, but by putting together a diverse mapping team from around the business you can begin to filter through these ideas.

Then, test it.

Ask yourself: Is it feasible? Is it viable? Is it desirable? Don’t ask can we do it, ask should we do it? Then you can start to differentiate yourself from your competitors.

Step 5 – Measure

Use the customer journey map to decide on your measurement framework.

Who are you measuring? What are you measuring? When on the journey are you measuring it? And why? And finally, what metrics and KPI’s are in place to measure this?

Your customer journey map process will require you to use several different data inputs to get an accurate picture of how your customers behave and where you can improve their experience.

A customer journey map is often developed using data gleaned from customer feedback you’ve requested . While this type of market research is useful, your research process needs to be deeper to gain a richer, more accurate understanding of your customer’s behavior.

To create a customer journey map that accurately reflects the truth of customer actions and intentions, you need to take into account both solicited and unsolicited data.

Use solicited data to understand the voice of the customer

Solicited data includes the customer feedback you gain when you conduct research through surveys such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) or ask customers for feedback on social media. This approach can be very useful for understanding your customer’s point of view , rather than just making assumptions about how they think and behave.

However, your target audiences won’t tell you everything about what they plan to do when undergoing their customer journey. Though they might tell you that they’ve had a great experience in a particular part of their customer journey, this type of feedback presents a few issues:

• You have to know when to ask for feedback : You might already have a customer journey in mind when asking for feedback – but do you know all the routes a customer might take in your customer journey map?
• It’s a snapshot: When you survey customers, you’ll likely only get insights into their experience at that particular moment about a specific touchpoint
• It’s what customers say they think/will do, not what they actually think/will do: You’re relying on your customers to accurately reflect their sentiment and intentions in their responses, which isn’t always the case. For your customer journey map to be effective, you need to find the truth
• Your sample size might be too small : If you’re trying to understand how a relatively niche customer journey is doing, you might find that the number of customers who have not only taken the customer journey but are willing to respond with feedback is very limited. You can’t risk survey fatigue by polling the same audience several times, so your insights are limited
• You’re only getting part of the picture : You will likely have several types of useful customer data on file, but these are often not considered as part of the process when creating a customer journey design because solicited data takes precedence

You’ll need to infer how customers feel to be able to accurately predict the actions a customer takes. To do so, you’ll need to look at unsolicited data.

Unsolicited data

Unsolicited data covers everything your customers aren’t telling you directly when you ask them and contextual data that you likely already collect on them, such as purchase history. It can be taken from various sources, such as your website and social channels, third-party sites, customer calls, chat transcripts, frontline employee feedback , operational sources, and more.

This type of data is nuanced, but it allows you to establish the truth of your customers’ experience. The ability to gather unsolicited customer feedback from every channel enables you to see more than just what a customer tells you directly. Using real-time feedback gathering and natural language understanding (NLU) models that can detect emotion, intent, and effort, you’ll be able to understand your customers’ actions in a more profound way. Unsolicited data offers you a 100% response rate that better indicates what your customers actually think of each step in their customer journey.

Rather than be limited to a small sample size of customers who respond to surveys, you’ll be able to build an accurate picture of the average customer on each step of the customer journey map by using this richer insight data with your own operational data.

Why using solicited and unsolicited data is important data

With solicited data, you don’t always see why a customer behaves or thinks as they do. For example, a customer might tell you that they would recommend you to a friend or family – but they don’t renew their subscription with you. A customer might be an ideal candidate for a particular journey, but they abandon their basket when prompted to give their personal details. Understanding the why behind customer actions is key for designing a great customer journey, and that’s why both solicited and unsolicited data collection and evaluation are necessary for creating great customer journey maps.

Of course, knowing how customers will actually respond to your customer touchpoints is only part of the process. You may need to develop more than one customer journey map and create sub-audiences for your customer personas to accurately see where you can rectify pain points and improve outcomes. You will need to collect and analyze contextual data across all customer journey touchpoints and develop a highly detailed journey map that can unveil routes your customers might be taking without your knowledge.

Qualtrics’ Experience ID platform can overlay solicited and unsolicited data to provide an all-encompassing picture of your customer journey map, no matter how complex. Creating an effective customer journey map is easier with all your data collated and analyzed together, with actionable insights created automatically.

A customer journey map creates a common understanding for the organization of how a customer interacts during different stages of the customer lifecycle, and the roles and responsibilities of the different teams in charge of fulfilling that experience.

It will also bring an organization together, and foster empathy and collaboration between teams because people will know what is required from everyone in the business to deliver the experiences that customers expect. This will help you to develop a shared sense of ownership of the customer relationship, which ultimately drives a customer-centric culture . With everyone working towards a common goal, communication of what you learn about the customer and the journey they go through is vital in order to drive best practices throughout the organization.

Creating an accurate customer journey map will help your customer service team to focus on more specific issues, rather than handling problems generated by a less-tailored customer journey. Your customer experience will be improved with a customer journey that’s personalized to the specific personas you have generated. You’ll have put yourself in your customer’s shoes and adapted your strategy to reflect your customer’s perspective – which in turn will create more memorable experiences.

Creating a customer journey map will influence your journey analytics across the business. So for example, it will determine what you ask, who you ask, when you ask, why you ask it and how you ask questions in your Voice of the Customer Program .

So when should you use customer journey mapping?

There are four main uses:

• Assess the current state of your customer journey Understand and diagnose the specific issues in current experiences
• Understand what the future state of your customer journey should look like Design, redesign and create new experiences
• Blueprints For implementing change
• Communication Bringing teams together to train and scale up best practices.

Take stock and take action

To improve the customer journey you need a clear vision of what you want to achieve and you need to make a distinction between the present and the future.

• What is your customer journey right now?
• What does the future state of your customer journey look like?

This is why organizations blueprint their customer journey because they can see what works and act accordingly. By understanding your customers’ attitudes and needs at critical times in the journey, you can make amends to better meet them – and develop contingencies to cope when these needs aren’t or can’t be met. For example, during a sudden, unexpected surge in demand.

Orchestrate your customer journey

To offer your customers truly optimized experiences, you’ll need to go further than just creating a customer journey map. You’ll also need to orchestrate journeys using real-time customer behavior to adapt your strategy as your customers make choices. Orchestrating a journey means taking dynamic action towards optimizing your customer’s experience, using real-time customer behavior as informative data.

Improve your employee experience

Use your diverse mapping team to come up with ideas that incorporate experience from all aspects of the business to improve the customer journey – and remember that this has a significant payoff for your employees too. Improving the employee journey – by giving teams the tools to make a difference – can have a positive knock-on effect for the customer and improve their experience in those key moments. This is because employees have the autonomy and motivation in their roles to help their customers, and realize their own potential.

Your customer journey map isn’t just designed to improve the customer experience. Creating an accurate customer journey map can help you to improve your business outcomes.

Being able to link operational data to key touchpoints in a customer journey is transformative for organizations. This is because improving segments of the customer journey will see a direct impact on your business. The Qualtrics Journey Optimizer helps you do just that. By analyzing areas for improvement as outlined by your customer journey map, organizations can take actions that will have maximum benefit for their customers, and the business too.

With Qualtrics CustomerXM , you’ll:

• Create a common understanding throughout your workforce of how a customer interacts with your organization, and you’ll know the roles and responsibilities of your different teams
• Develop empathy and collaboration between teams, working together to achieve the same outcome
• Develop a shared sense of ownership of the customer relationship which ultimately drives a customer-centric culture

Free course: Customer journey management & improvement

Related resources

Customer Journey

B2B Customer Journey 13 min read

Customer interactions 11 min read, consumer decision journey 14 min read, customer journey orchestration 12 min read, customer journey management 14 min read, customer journey stages 12 min read, buyer's journey 16 min read, request demo.

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How to create an effective user journey map

No matter what you’re working on, the key to customer satisfaction and business growth is understanding your users. A user journey map helps you uncover pain points, explore the touchpoints from their perspective, and learn how to improve your product.

Imagine you just launched a new ecommerce platform. Shoppers fill their carts with products, but they abandon their carts before checkout. With a user journey map, you can pinpoint where the customer experience is going wrong, and how to enable more successful checkouts.

Read on to find out:

• What is a user journey map, and how it captures user flows and customer touchpoints
• Benefits of user journey mapping to refine UX design and reach business goals
• How to make user journey maps in five steps, using FigJam’s user journey map template

What is a user journey map?

Think about the path a user takes to explore your product or website. How would you design the best way to get there? User journey maps (or user experience maps) help team members and stakeholders align on user needs throughout the design process, starting with user research. As you trace users' steps through your user flows, notice: Where do users get lost, backtrack, or drop off?

User journey maps help you flag pain points and churn, so your team can see where the user experience may be confusing or frustrating for your audience. Then you can use your map to identify key customer touchpoints and find opportunities for optimization.

How to read a user journey map

Most user journey maps are flowcharts or grids showing the user experience from end to end. Consider this real-life journey map example of a freelancing app from Figma's design community. The journey starts with a buyer persona needing freelance services, and a freelancer looking for a gig. Ideally, the journey ends with service delivery and payment—but customer pain points could interrupt the flow.

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5 key user journey map phases.

Take a look at another Figma community user journey template , which uses a simple grid. Columns capture the five key stages of the user journey: awareness, consideration, decision, purchase, and retention (see below). Rows show customer experiences across these stages—their thoughts, feelings, and pain points. These experiences are rated as good, neutral, and bad.

To see how this works, consider a practical example. Suppose a new pet parent wants to learn how to train their puppy and discovers your dog-training app. Here's how you might map out the five key user journey stages:

• Awareness. The user sees a puppy-training video on social media with a link to your product website. They're intrigued—a positive experience.
• Consideration. The user visits your product website to preview your app. If they can't find a video preview easily, this could be a neutral or negative experience.
• Decision. The user clicks on a link to the app store and reads reviews of your app and compares it to others. They might think your app reviews are good, but your price is high—a negative or neutral experience.
• Purchase. The user buys your app and completes the onboarding process. If this process is smooth, it's a positive experience. If not, the customer experience could turn negative at this point.
• Retention. The user receives follow-up emails featuring premium puppy-training services or special offers. Depending on their perception of these emails, the experience can range from good (helpful support) to bad (too much spam).

2 types of user journey maps—and when to use them

User journey maps are helpful across the product design and development process, especially at two crucial moments: during product development and for UX troubleshooting. These scenarios call for different user journey maps: current-state and future-state.

Current-state user journey maps

A current-state user journey map shows existing customer interactions with your product. It gives you a snapshot of what's happening, and pinpoints how to enhance the user experience.

Take the puppy training app, for example. A current-state customer journey map might reveal that users are abandoning their shopping carts before making in-app purchases. Look at it from your customers' point of view: Maybe they aren't convinced their credit cards will be secure or the shipping address workflow takes too long. These pain points show where you might tweak functionality to boost user experience and build customer loyalty.

Future-state user journey maps

A future-state user journey map is like a vision board : it shows the ideal customer journey, supported by exceptional customer experiences. Sketch out your best guesses about user behavior on an ideal journey, then put them to the test with usability testing. Once you've identified your north star, you can explore new product or site features that will optimize user experience.

How to make a user journey map in 5 steps

To start user journey mapping, follow this step-by-step guide.

Step 1: Define user personas and goals.

Gather user research and data like demographics, psychographics, and shopping behavior to create detailed customer personas representing your target audience.  In your dog-training app example, one key demographic may be parents. What’s their goal? It isn't necessarily "hire a puppy trainer"—it could be "teach kids how to interact with a puppy."

Step 2: Identify customer touch points.

Locate the points along the user journey where the user encounters or interacts with your product. In the dog training app example, touchpoints might include social media videos, app website, app store category search (e.g., pets), app reviews, app store checkout, in-app onboarding, and app customer support.

Step 3: Visualize journey phases.

Create a visual representation of user journey phases across key touchpoints with user flow diagrams , flowcharts , or storyboards .

Step 4: Capture user actions and responses.

For each journey stage, capture the user story: at this juncture, what are they doing, thinking, and feeling ? This could be simple, such as: "Potential customer feels frustrated when the product image takes too long to load."

Step 5: Validate and iterate.

Finally, show your map to real users. Get honest feedback about what works and what doesn’t with user testing , website metrics , or surveys . To use the dog-training app example, you might ask users: Are they interested in subscribing to premium how-to video content by a professional dog trainer? Apply user feedback to refine your map and ensure it reflects customer needs.

Jumpstart your user journey map with FigJam

Lead your team's user journey mapping effort with FigJam, the online collaborative whiteboard for brainstorming, designing, and idea-sharing. Choose a user journey map template from Figma's design community as your guide. With Figma's drag-and-drop design features, you can quickly produce your own professional, presentation-ready user journey map.

Pro tip: Use a service blueprint template to capture behind-the-scenes processes that support the user journey, bridging the gap between user experience and service delivery.

Ready to improve UX with user journey mapping?

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Journey Mapping Method

A journey map is a holistic, visual representation of a user’s experience with a product or service over time. Journey maps combine data and insight from other research and discovery methods to provide a detailed description from the user’s point of view of steps taken, decisions made, successes, pain points, and emotions felt.

Journey maps help designers understand the user’s motivations and needs at each step of a process, from the earliest earliest phases of researching a product or service all the way through adoption, providing crucial insight for designing solutions that better meet user and business needs. The journey map’s visual and storytelling elements also help it communicate research data and findings to broader audiences within an organization.

Preparation

Journey Mapping is often more effective when it is informed by these complementary methods.

Contextual Interviewing

Observation of users performing tasks in their own environment

Task Analysis

Observe users in action to understand how they perform tasks to achieve goals

Written descriptions of how users will perform tasks with your product or on your website

A specific user's context, motivations, and goals for visiting a website or app

Stakeholder Interviewing

Understanding the perspective and influence of those invested in a project's success

User Interviewing

Understand the tasks and motivations of the user group for whom you are designing

• Define business and user goals Clearly articulate the organizational goals for the product or service, the design and business goals for the mapping exercise, and the goals of the target user the map is to represent.
• Gather research data Effective journey maps are based on qualitative and quantitative data collected across a range of activities. Review and incorporate existing research as you create your journey map, and note where gaps in understanding indicate the need for additional research. 
• Identify touchpoints and channels Touchpoints describe what users do and how they do it. Channels describe where the interaction takes place (e.g. website, call center, native app, or in-store). 
• Create an Empathy Map Empathy maps describe what users do, think, feel, say, and hear in a given situation. They help you understand and articulate users’ emotional state, and provide the basis for illustrating the peaks and valleys of frustration, anxiety, happiness, etc.
• Sketch the journey Visualize the order in which users exhibit behaviors, use information, make decisions, and feel emotions. Group elements into phases related to the narrative of each user. Integrate touchpoints, channels, empathy insights, and other research to show the user’s course of motion across the timescale as a whole. Include the user’s feelings at each touchpoint. 
• Review, refine, and revise Review your draft journey with team members and subject matter experts to gain new insight and integrate new perspectives. Use these to identify additional opportunities to make your journey map more accurate, more expressive of the data, and more useful for the design process. From time to time, evaluate your map to make sure it remains accurate. Revise as necessary to account for evolving research, product development, and user and business needs.

Journey Mapping typically produces insight and solutions focused on these areas:

User Preference

Elements, arrangements, or qualities of experience design that user state or show are valuable to them.

User Behavior

Information about how users currently use a site, service, or resource.

Journey Mapping Resources

10 most interesting examples of Customer Journey Maps

7 Interesting Real Life Customer Journey Map Examples

Customer journey maps for content: Untangle complex insights and create better experiences

144 Best Customer Journey Map Templates and Examples

Category Design

Creating structures and schemes that make the location and use of content clear

Persona Creation

Development of research-informed representations of target user goals, behaviors, and pain points

Style Tile Creation

Communicate the use of fonts, colors, and interface elements in a design system

Define a system for labeling and classifying content to make it easier to find, understand, and use

Journey Mapping Method details last edited on Sunday, February 6, 2022

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Customer Journey Analysis: Guide on How to Analyze and Improve

Customer Journey Analysis, a strategic technical process that let businesses understand the way customers interact with brands. From the very first encounter to the post-purchase engagement, every touchpoint paints a vivid picture of preferences, hesitations, and motivations.

Let's say Sarah, an e-commerce online shopper, stumbles upon a boutique fashion brand through a engaging Instagram ad. As interested, she explores the brand's website, researching into product descriptions, reviews, and the seamless checkout process. This marks the beginning of her journey, a journey that will extend far beyond a simple transaction.

Through Customer Journey Analysis, businesses can follow Sarah's footsteps, having a comprehensive understanding of what captures her interest, what builds trust, and what fosters a sense of loyalty.

This insights are beneficial, as it helps brands to make data-driven decisions that improve customer experiences and drive conversions.

Here are the topics that we will cover in this blog:

What is Customer Journey Analysis?

Why do companies use customer journey analytics, customer journey mapping vs. customer journey analytics, top 5 customer journey analysis tools.

• Steps to Perform Customer Journey Analysis

9 Metrics for Analyzing the Customer Journey

Customer Journey Analysis is a strategic process in marketing, it's all about understanding the steps a customer takes when they connect with a brand or business. We're talking about every interaction - from when they first hear about a product to when they become customer to do post-purchase engagement.

This analysis dives deep into what makes customers tick - their likes, dislikes, and what makes them hesitate.

This way, businesses can make better marketing decisions and efforts by comprehensively tracking and analyzing these touchpoints, such as website visits, social media interactions, and customer support interactions that improve customer experiences and drive conversions.

Customer Journey Analysis plays a pivotal role in crafting personalized marketing campaigns, refining product offerings, and improving overall customer satisfaction.

It aligns business's efforts with the customer's needs and expectations, fostering long-lasting and profitable relationships.

5 Customer Journey Stages

The customer journey comprises a series of stages that individuals progress through when interacting with a brand, from initial awareness to post-purchase engagement.

This comprehensive exploration of the customer journey stages provides invaluable insights for businesses aiming to optimize their strategies and enhance customer experiences.

1. Awareness Stage

Every customer journey typically begins at the awareness stage as a potential customer first finds a brand, product, or service.

It awareness stage could be through various channels such as social media, search engines, advertisements, or word of mouth as the key here is to grab attention and interest.

For instance, a person might get interested upon a captivating social media post showcasing the latest gadget, prompting them to explore further.

During this stage, businesses uses compelling content, eye-catching visuals, and persuasive messaging to leave a positive first impression. It's not just about making a sale; it's about building a connection and establishing credibility.

2. Consideration Stage

After the initial introduction, potential customers move to the consideration stage as they may start to measure the brand or product against their needs, preferences, and alternatives.

This is the time for in-depth research and comparison shopping where the customer wants to know more:

• How does this product differ from similar ones?
• What are the benefits?
• Are there reviews or testimonials to validate its quality?

Businesses must provide detailed, informative content at this stage which includes product specifications, expert reviews, and customer testimonials.

3. Decision Stage

As customers progress through their journey, they reach the decisive stage as they're confident to make a choice. They've weighed the options, considered the benefits, and are now ready to commit.

It's preconditioned for businesses to make this transition as appealing as possible.

This is where persuasive techniques, such as limited-time offers, personalized recommendations, and transparent pricing, come into play to build trust and confidence in the brand as it can be the deciding factor that leads to a conversion.

4. Post-Purchase Stage

A customer journey never ends with a purchase as it evolves to the post-purchase stage for a cultivating customer loyalty and advocacy.

This is the time to ensure that the customer is delighted with their decision. It's an opportunity to exceed expectations and solidify the brand-customer relationship.

Businesses have to engage with their customers through various means, such as post-purchase emails, surveys, and special offers for future purchases.

Exceptional customer service and prompt issue resolution can help to shape the overall perception of the brand.

5. Advocacy Stage

Ideally, a satisfied customer becomes an advocate. In this stage, customers who have had a positive experience become vocal proponents of the brand. They share their experiences, recommend products, and even defend the brand in conversations.

Creating an environment that encourages advocacy involves maintaining a high standard of quality, personalized communication, and actively seeking feedback. Social proof, in the form of customer testimonials or user-generated content, is a powerful tool for influencing potential customers.

6. Retention and Loyalty Stage

Retaining customers is more important just as acquiring new ones whereas this retention stage in customer journey focuses on nurturing long-term relationships.

Loyal customers not only make repeat purchases but also tend to spend more and become less price-sensitive.

Businesses invest in loyalty programs, exclusive offers, and personalized communication to keep customers engaged and appreciated as consistent, high-quality experiences, along with exceptional customer service, are the cornerstones of customer retention.

Companies are now in a terrible competetive field where they need to pave the way for smoother and more satisfying experiences.

Customer journey analytics helps companies in channel optimization, ensuring resources are allocated judiciously to identifies pain points, which may lead to customer dissatisfaction or abandonment.

#1 Understanding Customer Behavior

Customer journey analytics is the major tool used by companies to get a comprehensive understanding of their customers' behavior as they can track and analyze every touchpoint a customer has with their brand, from the initial awareness stage to the final purchase and beyond.

By studying this journey, companies can identify patterns, preferences, and pain points whixh let them to make informed decisions about marketing strategies, product offerings, and customer service improvements.

#2 Improved Customer Experience

The absolute reason behind companies investigating customer journey analytics is to improve the overall customer experience.

By mapping out the customer's interactions, businesses can pinpoint areas where improvements are needed.

For instance, they can find major bottlenecks in the purchasing process or areas where customers commonly abandon their carts which let them to streamline their processes, making it easier and more enjoyable for customers to engage with their brand website.

#3 Personalization and Targeted Marketing

Personalization has become a key aspect of our modern online marketing. Customer journey analytics provides the data necessary to create highly personalized experiences.

By understanding each customer's preferences, browsing behavior, and past interactions, companies can customize their marketing messages and product recommendations.

This approach not only increases the likelihood of conversion but also fosters a stronger sense of loyalty and connection with the brand.

#4 Optimizing Marketing Channels

As companies are now operating across various marketing channels, including social media, email, website, and physical stores, understanding which channels is most effective for different stages of the customer journey is one of the best decisions companies need to look over.

Customer journey analytics helps in attributing conversions to specific channels to allocate their resources more effectively.

For instance, if a majority of conversions are coming from social media ads, a company might choose to allocate more budget to this channel.

#5 Identify Pain Points and Friction

Every customer journey has its pain points or moments of friction that can lead to dissatisfaction or abandonment. Customer journey analytics helps in identifying these pain points.

It could be a slow-loading webpage, a confusing checkout process, or inadequate customer support.

Once identified, companies can take proactive steps to address these issues, ultimately leading to a smoother and more satisfying customer experience.

#6 Measuring and Improving Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is a key metric for any business as customer journey analytics provides a quantitative way to measure satisfaction at various touchpoints along the journey.

By tracking metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), companies can gauge how well they are meeting customer expectations. This data serves as a valuable feedback loop to make continuous improvements and ensure a high level of customer satisfaction.

Customer Journey Mapping is a qualitative, visual representation of the customer experience, while Customer Journey Analytics is a quantitative, data-driven analysis of customer interactions and behavior.

Both are valuable tools, and when used together, they provide a comprehensive understanding of the customer journey.

Customer Journey Mapping:

Customer Journey Mapping is a visual representation of the entire customer experience, from the first interaction to the last. It is a qualitative tool that focuses on understanding the customer's emotions, motivations, and pain points at each touchpoint.

This process involves creating a visual flowchart or diagram that outlines the various stages a customer goes through when interacting with a brand.

Customer Journey Mapping helps teams acquire empathy for the customer's experience and provides a holistic view of the customer's perspective.

Key Characteristics of Customer Journey Mapping:

• Qualitative Focus: It emphasizes understanding the customer's feelings, thoughts, and motivations throughout their journey.
• Visual Representation: It often involves creating diagrams or flowcharts that visually illustrate the customer's interactions and emotions.
• Emphasis on Empathy: It aims to put the team in the customer's shoes, helping them see the experience from the customer's perspective.
• Identifying Pain Points: It helps in pinpointing specific areas where customers may face challenges or frustrations.
• Creating Personas: It often involves the development of customer personas to better understand different segments and their unique journeys.

Customer Journey Analytics:

Customer Journey Analytics is a data-driven approach that involves the collection, analysis, and interpretation of quantitative data related to customer interactions.

It focuses on metrics, such as conversion rates, click-through rates, and customer behavior, to gain insights into the effectiveness of each touchpoint.

Customer Journey Analytics uses tools and technologies to track and measure customer interactions across various channels.

Key Characteristics of Customer Journey Analytics:

• Quantitative Focus: It relies on numerical data and metrics to analyze customer behavior and interactions.
• Data-Driven Insights: It leverages technologies like analytics platforms to collect and process large volumes of customer data.
• Conversion Tracking: It measures key performance indicators (KPIs) like conversion rates, bounce rates, and customer acquisition costs.
• Attribution Modeling: It helps in attributing conversions or actions to specific touchpoints or channels.
• Optimization and Testing: It enables businesses to experiment with different strategies and measure their impact on the customer journey.
• ReplayBird : ReplayBird is a comprehensive customer experience optimization platform. It offers a range of features including session replay, heatmaps, conversion funnels, and behavioral analytics. ReplayBird helps businesses understand and improve the digital customer experience by providing deep insights into user behavior and interactions.
• Hotjar : Hotjar offers a suite of tools including heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, and more. It helps you visualize how users interact with your website, enabling you to identify pain points and areas for improvement.
• Mixpanel : Mixpanel specializes in user analytics for web and mobile applications. It provides event tracking, funnels, retention analysis, and user segmentation to understand how users engage with your product.
• Crazy Egg : Crazy Egg provides heatmaps, scrollmaps, referral maps, and user recordings to help businesses understand how visitors interact with their websites. It's particularly useful for identifying areas of interest and drop-off points.
• Kissmetrics : Kissmetrics offers behavioral analytics to track and analyze customer interactions. It provides insights into customer journeys, retention, and segmentation to optimize marketing efforts.

Steps to Perform Customer Journey Analysis using ReplayBird

Step 1: start a new map.

Click on "path analysis", you will be taken to the default map of all the paths under one graph.

Step 2: Apply filter

Filters can be based on various criteria such as demographics, behavior, or specific time frames to narrow down the data on specific segments or journeys.

Step 3: Determine number of Steps

You can add how many of steps you want to visualze your customer's journeyt from one single page to various other pages. For instance, a simple journey might involve just a few touchpoints, while a more complex one could span multiple stages.

Step 4: Select Chart type: Sankey or Sunburst

Choose the chart type for visualizing the customer journey.

• Sunburst chart : A radial view for representing hierarchical data.

• Sankey diagram : Display the flow of interactions between stages.

Step 5: Save path

Save the customer journey path once you have configured the filters, selected the number of steps, and chosen the chart type. You can revisit and analyze the same customer journey in the future or share it with other team members for collaboration.

#1 Conversion Rate

The Conversion Rate measures how many visitors or leads take a specific action, like making a purchase or signing up. It shows how effective each step is in moving customers forward.

For example, if a customer goes from learning about a product to considering it and then buying it, the conversion rate at each step shows how well you guide them.

A lower rate may mean there's something slowing them down, which needs fixing. By checking rates at different points, you can make improvements like clearer messaging, better user experience, or providing incentives for a smoother process.

Calculate your conversion rate here for free

#2 Cart Abandonment Rate

The Cart Abandonment Rate is crucial for online stores. It shows the percentage of visitors who add items to their cart but don't finish the purchase.

In the customer journey, it helps find where customers might face problems. For example, if many abandon carts during checkout, it could be due to payment, shipping, or trust issues.

By fixing these, businesses can make the buying process smoother and improve the overall customer experience.

#3 Customer Churn Rate

The Customer Churn Rate shows how many customers stop using or buying from your brand for a period of time. It helps find where and why customers lose interest.

For example, if many customers leave after a certain point, it might mean there's a problem there. It could be because of a bad experience, unmet expectations, or not enough value. Knowing this, businesses can make things better.

They can improve products, offer better support, or add more value to keep customers interested.

#4 Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

The Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is how much revenue you can expect from a customer throughout their relationship with your brand. Understanding CLV helps you spend resources wisely. It shows which parts of the customer journey can bring in more revenue.

For example, if a certain step consistently brings in more value from customers, it's smart to focus on improving that part to get more from each customer.

Calculate your customer lifetime value here for free

#5 Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures how satisfied and loyal customers are to your brand. It gives a quick view of their overall experience with your brand.

You can ask for NPS feedback at different points in the customer journey. For example, after a purchase, ask if they'd recommend your brand.

If a specific point gets consistently low NPS ratings, it's a sign that it needs improvement. Fixing these areas can make the overall customer journey better, leading to more satisfaction and loyalty.

#6 Click-Through Rate (CTR)

The Click-Through Rate (CTR) is important for checking how well your marketing messages engage your audience.

In the customer journey, CTR helps you see if your content is interesting and relevant at different points.

For example, a high CTR for an email campaign means it's popular during the consideration phase. But if a product page has a low CTR, the content may need improvement.

Calcluate your Click-through Rate CTR here for free

#7 Bounce Rate

The Bounce Rate serves as a critical metric, measuring the proportion of visitors who exit a website after viewing just one page.

A detailed analysis of bounce rates throughout the customer journey yields invaluable insights into the efficacy of each touchpoint in sustaining visitor interest.

For instance, if a landing page exhibits a substantial bounce rate, it suggests that the content or call-to-action may not align with visitor expectations.

#8 Customer Retention Rate

The Customer Retention Rate measures how many customers stick with your brand and keep coming back over time. This helps you see how well your strategies are keeping customers engaged.

To make the most of this metric, track retention at different stages of the customer journey. This helps you figure out which points have the biggest impact on customer loyalty.

For example, if customers stick around after a follow-up, it shows they value the support they get. This lets you focus your efforts on the most effective touchpoints for keeping customers.

#9 Return on Investment (ROI)

Return on Investment (ROI) is a crucial metric that tells you how profitable your marketing efforts are. In customer journey analysis, it shows which touchpoints are most effective in generating revenue and growing your business.

To use ROI effectively, assess it at different stages of the customer journey. This helps you allocate resources wisely. For example, if a campaign performs well in the consideration phase, it's smart to invest more in similar efforts. ROI data helps you refine strategies so each touchpoint brings a positive return.

Calculate your Return on Investment (ROI) here for free

Conclusion:

Customer Journey Analysis align business' efforts with customer needs, driving meaningful interactions, and ultimately, business success.

It's not just about making a sale, but about building lasting connections and delivering exceptional value at every step of the customer's journey.

The customer journey is a multi-stage process, starting from awareness and progressing through consideration, decision, post-purchase, advocacy, and retention.

By using the Customer Journey analytics, businesses can thrive in today's competitive market by putting their customers at the center of their strategies.

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Unleash the power of behavioral insights with ReplayBird's intuitive heatmaps, session replays, and clickstream analysis allows you to visualize user behavior, identify popular elements, and detect pain points that might hinder user satisfaction.

Customer journey analysis and conversion funnels of ReplayBird to analyze deeper into user journeys, identify where drop-offs occur, and uncover conversion blockers.

Troubleshooting is now simpler with ReplayBird's robust debugging features. Detect and diagnose UX issues quickly, ensuring a seamless user journey from start to finish.

With ReplayBird, you have the ultimate toolkit to elevate your projects to the next level. The platform empowers you to create high-performing, user-centric applications that leave a lasting impression.

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Blog / Journey Tools

11 Customer Journey Mapping Tools to Navigate & Analyze User Experiences

• February 29, 2024

Table of Contents

Understanding your customers can be challenging when dealing with a vast amount of unstructured data.

On average, businesses source their customer data from 28 different channels and house it in 17 different applications. This data may help to gain insights about their customer experience and meet their expectations, but a lack of control over siloed data fails to serve the purpose.

That’s where data visualization comes into play.

Using customer journey mapping tools, you get a comprehensive view of how your customers interact with your brand and identify the different touchpoints and conversion paths they take to convert. More importantly, you can put all your collected customer data into use by visualizing it into customer journey maps without having to navigate through different platforms.

We’ve compiled a list of 11 customer journey mapping tools to help you get started and create the most accurate and data-backed maps to help with your marketing decisions.

Key Takeaways

Optimize the customer journey with real-time analytics

Visually understand the customer journey from start to finish- and how it can be improved

1. Funnelytics

Funnelytics is a customer journey mapping tool that uses whiteboard technology to help you draw your entire customer journey on a canvas.

“ I am able to show my clients exactly how their funnel will look in a clean visual way. This is a great sales tool. ” – Sam K .

Integrations with top analytics software allow for real-time, in-depth sales funnel data on an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. You can present this data visually to your clients and stakeholders with ease, which is very handy for agencies.

Even better, using funnel simulations, you can forecast the results of your funnel plan before implementing it. This allows you to test out the probability of success vs failure for every approach you take, and an opportunity to optimize for best results.

The learning curve to start with Funnelytics can be a little steep for people who are new to creating visual maps to track and understand customer journeys. This is why our team created a great resource in our vault of funnels (essentially templates.) You can import these funnels into your builder easily, which will jumpstart your project whether you’re a beginner or a visualization veteran.

Moreover, you’ll enjoy our onboarding process, where we help you get acquainted with the tool while also offering clients optimization workshops and same-day support to get you unstuck whenever you need.

“ Tracking multiple traffic sources across multiple domains is not easy. This is why I use Funnelytics. ” — Quentin P.

Understand your user flow with Funnelytics

We help performance-driven marketing teams plan and improve the customer journey at every level

Pricing : $199–$999 per month

Key features :

• Highly intuitive.
• Easy-to-use interface with visual drag-and-drop features for easy mapping and customer journey tracking .
• The traffic explorer feature allows you to map backward.

Smaply is a customer journey mapping platform that allows you to centralize and digitize your customer experience insights. Its simple drag-and-drop features help you visualize different types of data to review your customer experience and identify key friction points.

You can see a lot of customer data at once in Smaply, because it displays multiple channels and customer journeys simultaneously. This allows you to show the differences between the two tracks for better decision-making.

Smaply also offers customizable templates that can be duplicated and re-used and collaboration features, which allow sharing of customer journey insights to the team in real-time.

A downside to Smaply is that its users find the cost on the higher end compared to the features it offers, which can be off-putting for those with tighter budgets.

Pricing : $0 – $29 EUR per month, offers custom pricing

• Simple drag-and-drop editor
• Feedback mode and sharing to help with collaboration
• Customizable templates

3. Custellence

Custellence allows you and your team to collaborate and combine your customer journey efforts into a single dashboard. It helps you create your customer journey map in minutes, which allows you to present a strong customer case and get a buy-in from stakeholders.

With Custellence, you can create elaborate customer journey maps, easily share them with your teams, and collaborate with them on your workspace. Like Smaply, it offers a stack of templates you can adapt and tailor for your own purposes.

However, when it comes to adapting the tool for more complex journey maps, many users find it difficult to apply customer journeys for different use cases.

Pricing : $0 to $34 per member per month, offers custom pricing

• Churn management
• Intuitive, lane-based interface,
• Flexible map structure

4. UXPressia

UXPressia is more of an all-in-one tool that helps you create customer journey maps, user personas and impact maps—that means all your customer experience assets stay in one place. See statuses, tags, and ownerships of each journey map you create and visualize everything from the big picture to the micro journeys.

This makes it easier to align your team and stakeholders from different parts of your organization for better collaboration. You can create designer-quality journey maps and tweak them to present to different people, which can save you a lot of time and effort.

Moreover, you can embed website, product, or service prototypes, marketing presentations, survey results, etc. into your journey map so you don’t leave out any crucial information.

Given the vast variety of features UXPressia offers, it can be a little clunky and complex, which often bugs users looking for simpler solutions.

Pricing : $0 to $36 per user per month, also offers custom pricing

• 100+ free customer journey mapping templates
• User roles and teams for access control
• Version history
• Branding elements to help you stay on brand always

5. Lucidchart

Lucidchart is a visual whiteboard tool that allows teams to collaborate seamlessly—from initial ideas to successful delivery. This tool’s user-friendly interface and diverse tools make it easy to create diagrams.

Unlike tools like Funnelytics, it’s not specifically designed for mapping customer journeys around marketing and sales funnels. It’s more of a general intelligent diagramming tool that helps you assemble funnel maps, customer journeys, and flow charts.

However, that makes it suitable for any team for different purposes—the marketing team can create elaborate funnel maps while the design team can create flowcharts for their processes.

As a general-purpose tool, Lucidchart lacks several advanced features compared to its competitors, making it less of a versatile option for users looking for high-end functionalities.

Pricing : $0 to $9 per user per month, also offers custom pricing

• Virtual whiteboard to bring your ideas to life
• Intelligent diagramming to visualize complex data
• Cloud visualization to optimize your cloud environments

Figma is more of a general-purpose design tool that has different modes with different purposes—development, design, whiteboard, and prototyping—all in one platform. It’s mainly an all-in-one tool for product teams to create, test, and ship better products faster and more efficiently.

While the prototyping mode helps you create realistic prototypes to test the interactive experience before launching, the FigJam (whiteboard) is the one you can use to create your customer journey mapping while collaborating with your team on an intuitive interface.

However, one of the limitations of this tool is the lack of advanced prototyping features, which can be a challenge for those looking to build complex customer journey maps.

Pricing : $0 to $75 per editor per month

• Easy collaboration allowing brainstorming and working on complex workflows.
• Open sessions that allow you to invite anyone for 24 hours.
• Live audio calls on the board.
• Timer and voting options.

Miro is a multi-purpose online collaborative whiteboard that can be used to build funnel maps, plan marketing campaigns, develop a roadmap, and more.

It allows distributed teams to come together, work on a common goal and manage the processes throughout different lifecycle stages.

The interactive and easy-to-use whiteboard platform allows you to strategize new initiatives while considering your customers’ needs and designing customer-centric solutions.

Miro offers six core capabilities to help you with a layout to get started under different scenarios such as process mapping, workshop collaboration, product development workflows, etc. However, users find it difficult to follow through, considering its vast range of features and workflows.

Pricing : $0 to $16 per user per month, custom pricing also available

• Miro Assist to help you automatically generate mind maps, diagrams, and codes for you.
• Multiple solutions include mind mapping, flowcharts, wireframing, process mapping, technical diagramming, and more.
• Easy to collaborate

8. Visual Paradigm

Visual Paradigm is a development tool suite consisting of design, analysis, and management tools to help you manage your projects. Its customer journey mapping tool allows you to study customer experience and illustrate customer relationships with your brand.

The interface you get on creating a new customer journey map isn’t very intuitive, and some might find it pretty basic compared to other tools mentioned in this list. However, fewer features and simplicity mean the tool is easy to learn and grasp, and you can create simple customer journey mapping within minutes.

Pricing : $6 to $89 per month

• Visual modeling
• Business analysis and design
• Drag-and-drop editor

Sketch is another multi-purpose collaborative tool like Miro that markets itself as the complete design platform. It’s available as a web app and a Mac app. While you can build websites, icons, apps, illustrations, and design systems using Sketch, you can use its prototyping feature for customer journey research and mapping.

It comes with a powerful vector editor and built-in prototyping, so it’s easy to create stunning journey maps. It also allows you to collaborate with your team using its workspace feature, where you can share designs and prototypes and offer feedback.

Since it’s not specific to customer journey mapping or sales funnel, many advanced features are lacking. To get started, you’ll need to build your journey maps from scratch without the support of dedicated templates.

Pricing : Starting from $10 per month

• Powerful vector editing
• Easy, intuitive prototyping
• Shared Libraries, styles, and components
• Reusable design templates

10. Flowmapp

Flowmapp is a UX design platform popular among startups, agencies, designers, developers, and other teams. Though it’s specifically designed for end-to-end website design and development, it can be easily used for creating customer journey maps with its prototyping and wireframing features.

Using its pre-made templates, workspaces, and collaboration features, you can create stunning customer journey maps while keeping everyone on your team on the same page.

One of the main drawbacks of this tool is that it doesn’t offer a customization feature for adding specific elements to the journey map. For example, information from the SERP will be added as a text block, not a screenshot.

Pricing : $0 to $126 per month

• Visual sitemaps
• Prototyping tools with many templates
• Import and export diagrams

11.  Microsoft Visio

A diagram and flowchart tool by Microsoft, Visio helps you visualize your ideas with dozens of ready-to-use templates and thousands of customizable shapes. You can either choose to purchase Visio directly or get it as part of your Microsoft 365 subscription.

You can create flowcharts, org charts, floor plans, network diagrams, customer journey maps, and more with Visio and its simple user interface. You get all the latest diagramming features such as layers, containers, validation reports, shape sheets & drawing explorer, which allows you to create elaborate journey maps.

Some users find the pricing more costly than its competitors, which can affect those with budget constraints.

Pricing : $5 to $530 per month

• Easy to set up and use
• Workflow automation
• Comprehensive template library

How to choose the right customer journey mapping tool

With these many options, making a choice can be overwhelming. You need to consider your business requirements and the following factors.

• Visual/design capabilities : You should be able to design your customer journey maps in the way you desire—be it flowcharts, value ladders, or elaborate mindmaps.
• Intuitive/easy-to-use platform : You and your team should find it easy to navigate through and put the tool to proper use for creating and analyzing journey maps.
• Collaborative capabilities: The tool should allow you to invite your team members to collaborate and leave comments and feedback.
• Integrations with other tools : You need a customer journey mapping tool with integration capabilities to collect data from multiple platforms.
• Templates : You also need multiple templates to save time on creating maps.
• Customer pain point and journey optimization analytics: Your tool should offer detailed insights into the friction points in the customer journey. For example, in Funnelytics, you can analyze page insights in an elaborate form, which acts as an excellent heatmap alternative .
• Segmentation features : You should be able to segment journey maps into different groups based on the journey stage, touchpoint, channel, etc.
• Customer success team powered by experts : Access to customer support whenever you’re stuck is an absolute must.

Map your customer journey with real-time data

Customer journey mapping is a fun and extensive process that offers great insights into customer behavior and thought process, and Funnelytics is an excellent choice for a mapping tool.

We’ve put it as number one on the list because it connects whiteboarding technology to the user’s data. This allows you to map customer journeys, visually see how well they perform using split testing across the customer journey , and identify what portions of the journey or product to optimize. Moreover, it’s excellent for visual learners—you can visually see how people get to their site, move across pages, and where they drop. This allows for continuous improvement.

Funnelytics also has:

• A thorough onboarding process
• Customer journey experts who host optimization workshops
• Same-day support, as well as weekly live sessions where users can ask platform or strategy questions.

Learn more about customer journey tracking through Funnelytics’ blog , or get started today .

Implement your ideas faster with Funnelytics

Our visual platform makes it easy to see where customers need the most help in their journey

● What does customer journey mapping software do?

● what features do you need in a customer journey mapping software, ● why is a customer journey visualization platform a must-have.

Related resources

Sales Funnel vs. Customer Journey: What are the Differences?

Cracking the Code: Funnel Reporting for Marketers

The Customer Lifecycle Journey: What it is and How to Use it to Create Repeat Customers

9 Best Funnel Tracking Software Tools to Streamline Your Sales Success

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