What is customer journey map? Types, examples, templates & best practices

How many times have you wondered how a lead became a customer for your business? For marketers and sales, it's an everyday question. We constantly wonder about the journey they take to reach us. The lines between B2B and B2C are blurring, but when it comes to the customer’s journey, it remains ever-evolving and increasingly complex.

Table of contents:

• What is the customer journey?
• What is the customer journey map?
• Why customer journey mapping is important for businesses?
• Things to include in a customer journey map
• Customer journey map stages
• How to create customer journey map: 7 Steps
• Types of customer journey maps, examples, and templates
• Customer journey map best practices

Before we dive deep into the insights, let's understand the basics. 

What is the customer journey? 

The text book definition of customer journey might go something like this, "The customer journey refers to the complete experience a customer has with a brand, from the initial awareness stage to post-purchase interactions."

From a customer's perspective, it's more than just a transaction. It's the journey where their path intersects with the brand, as the brand works to earn trust, become a confidant, and provide support at every step along the way.

What is the customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a pictorial/visual representation of the steps a customer takes when interacting with a brand from the first point of contact till forever.

With a customer journey map, a business can gain insight on the customer's emotions, needs, and challenges with each touchpoint.

Why customer journey mapping is important for businesses?

In the definition of customer journey mapping, we learned that brands use it to understand the customer’s emotions, needs, and challenges at every stage.

But why is this understanding necessary for businesses? How would it help their business? Let’s dive into the "why."

A recent real-life incident highlights this on a micro-level. While most brands were sending out promotional campaigns for Mother’s Day, one brand stood out by offering customers the option to ‘Press Pause’ on these campaigns, recognizing that this day could be difficult for some. This act of hyper-personalization reflects the present and future of customer experience—knowing your customers deeply.

How well do you know your customers?

Answering this question is crucial for the success or stagnation of a business. Customer journey mapping is the tool that provides these insights.

Here’s why customer journey mapping is essential:   

• Mapping the customer journey provides a more customer-centric approach in all business operations.
• Businesses can improve customer experience at each touch point, thereby increasing conversions and sales.
• With well-mapping the customer journey, you can ensure enhanced customer retention and can foster long-term loyalty and advocacy.
• You can visualize the data gaps, new market opportunities, analyze customer feedback, and prioritize resources effectively.
• Journey mapping also helps in segmenting audiences based on different customer personas and journeys, enabling more personalized and targeted communication.

Related reads:
B2B vs. B2C customer journey mapping
Customer journey optimization

Things to include in a customer journey map 

Here's a simple customer journey map would look like:

1. Stages: The different phases a customer goes through, such as Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Retention, and Advocacy.
2. Touchpoints: The specific interactions between the customer and the brand (e.g., visiting a website, interacting with customer support, reading reviews).
3. Emotions: The feelings and emotional responses of the customer at various stages (e.g., excitement, confusion, frustration).

Not just these (Stages, Touchpoints and Emotions) components; you can make the journey map in-depth by adding additional data. Consider the following points to create an actionable journey map:

• Customer persona: A detailed profile of the customer engaging in the journey.
• Customer goals: What the customer wants to achieve at each stage.
• Pain points: Any frustrations or obstacles the customer faces during their journey.
• Opportunities: Areas where the business can improve the customer experience or address unmet needs.

Customer journey map stages 

When mapping the customer journey, stages are foremost because they reflect the phases a customer goes through when interacting with businesses.

The customer journey map is typically divided into stages that reflect the phases a customer goes through when interacting with a brand. While the exact stages may vary based on the industry and customer type (B2B or B2C), the most common stages are:

1. Awareness
2. Consideration
3. Decision & Purchase
4. Retention
5. Advocacy

1. Awareness  

At this point, they realize that they are going through a challenge and start looking for solutions or options for their problems. As they start their research, that is when a brand should use this opportunity to establish the first point of contact.

The awareness stage is the initial point of contact between a customer and your brand. It's where they first become aware of your existence, whether through advertising, word-of-mouth, or other means, with an awareness that you can solve or provide a solution to their challenge. This stage is crucial because it sets the foundation for the rest of the customer journey.

 Customer's mindset: "I have a problem or need, and I’m starting to explore solutions." 

Examples of awareness tactics  

• Paid advertising:
  • Search engine advertising (SEA)
  • Social media advertising
  • Display advertising
• Organic search:
  • Search engine optimization (SEO)
  • Local SEO
• Content marketing:
  • Blog posts
  • Videos
  • Infographics
• Public relations (PR):
  • Press releases
  • Media outreach
• Events and sponsorships:
  • Industry events
  • Sponsorships 
• Word-of-mouth:
  • Customer referrals
  • Online reviews

Best practices for the awareness stage: Focus on content, content and more valued content.

• Know your target audience: understand their needs, preferences, and pain points to create content that resonates with them.
• Create high-quality content: ensure your content is informative, engaging, and visually appealing.
• Optimize for search engines: use relevant keywords, meta descriptions, and header tags to improve your website's search engine visibility.

 Tips: Use analytics to track where your customers are coming from and what content is most effective. 

2. Consideration  

The consideration stage occurs when a potential customer has shown initial curiosity in your brand or product and is seeking more information. It's a crucial opportunity to engage them further and move them towards the consideration stage.

 Customer's mindset: "Is this product or service the right fit for me?" 

Examples of interest-generating activities  

• Website visits
• Content consumption (Blog posts, articles, videos, or other content)
• Downloads (Whitepapers, ebooks, case studies, or other resources)
• Sign-ups (Email list, newsletter, or webinars)
• Social media engagement

Best practices for nurturing interest:   

• Provide product marketing related content that addresses their needs, answers their questions, and provides solutions to their problems.
• Showcase customer testimonials, case studies, and reviews to demonstrate your product's effectiveness and reliability.
• Allow customers to experience your product or service first-hand before making a purchase.
• Use limited-time offers, discounts, or scarcity tactics to encourage immediate action.

 Tips :

•  Use email marketing to nurture leads at different stages of their journey. 
•  Group leads based on their interests, demographics, or behavior to send more relevant content. 
•  A/B test your campaigns to optimize your email marketing efforts. 

3. Decision and purchase

The decision stage is a critical juncture where businesses need to provide compelling reasons for customers to choose their brand over competitors. The customer finally decides to purchase or engage with the brand based on their evaluation and finalizes their decision by making a purchase.

Customer's mindset: "I’m ready to choose this product/service." "I’ve made my choice and completed the transaction." 

Best practices:

• Clearly articulate the features and benefits and use compelling storytelling and persuasive language to emphasize your unique value proposition.
• Be responsive to customer inquiries and address their concerns promptly. Offer personalized support and guidance throughout the decision-making process.
• Ensure your website is easy to navigate, visually appealing, and optimized for conversions. Use clear calls to action and a streamlined checkout process.
• Provide a variety of secure payment options to accommodate different preferences.

Tips: Simplify the checkout process to minimize cart abandonment. Consider offering guest checkout options and saving customer information for future purchases. 

Related read:17 client retention strategies to retain customers

4. Retention  

Retention is a critical stage in the customer journey that follows the purchase stage. It involves keeping customers engaged, satisfied, and coming back for repeat business.

Customer's mindset: "I want support, ease, and value from my choice." 

Examples of retention tactics:  

• Personalized recommendations based on past purchases or browsing history.
• Customer success programs

Best practices for customer retention:  

• Provide a customer success manager who will anticipate the customer needs and provide timely assistance by proactively reaching out to them.
• Offer support through various channels such as phone, email, live chat, and social media.
• Enable self-service with a well-organized knowledge base to empowers customers to find answers to common questions independently.

 Tip: Seek feedback and make ongoing improvements to your products, services, and customer experience. 

5. Advocacy  

The advocacy stage represents the pinnacle of the customer journey. Loyal customers are repeat purchasers who are deeply committed to your brand and are likely to advocate for you to others. They are invaluable assets to your business.

 Customer's mindset: "I love this brand/product, and I’m happy to share my experience." 

Examples of loyal customer behavior  

• Repeat purchases
• Referrals
• Positive reviews
• Participation in loyalty programs
• Brand advocacy

Best practices for fostering loyalty  

• Reward customer loyalty with loyalty programs that offer exclusive discounts, perks, and rewards to incentivize repeat purchases.
• Create a sense of belonging and connection among your customers by building a community around your brand.
• Acknowledge and thank customers for their loyalty. Consider sending personalized thank-you notes or gifts.

 Tips: Use CRM software to personalize your communications and offer relevant recommendations. 

How to create customer journey map: 7 Steps  

Every customer journey is unique. Creating customer journey maps will be different for different individuals. Although you might feel that the process is repetitive, the design and platform you choose to create the map will vary.

Here are the steps you can follow to create a customer journey map.

Step 1: Define your customer personas  

To start, you need a deep understanding of who your customers are.

 What are customer/buyer personas? 

 According to Gartner, "Customer personas are archetypal representations of existing subsets of your customer base who share similar goals, needs, expectations, behaviors and motivation factors." 

Create detailed personas based on demographics, behaviors, and goals. This helps in identifying the different journeys they might take.

Step 2: Identify customer stages  

Break down the key stages of the customer journey, such as Awareness, Consideration, Decision and Purchase, Retention, and Advocacy. Each of these stages is critical for guiding prospects through the funnel.

Step 3: List all touchpoints  

Document every interaction a customer has with your brand, both online and offline, across each stage. This includes social media, website visits, emails, live chats, or sales calls. Offline touchpoints may include trade shows, events, or printed materials.

Fact: A Harvard Business¹ online review shows that 73% of consumers use multiple channels throughout their entire purchasing journey.

Listing all the touchpoints will help in our business strategies.

Step 4: Understand customer emotions and pain points  

For each touchpoint, consider the emotions, needs, and potential challenges the customer might face. Identifying these pain points helps in eliminating friction or opportunities for improvement.

Some examples of customer journey pain points include:

• Product issues: Quality concerns, feature limitations, or usability challenges
• UI and UX: An unappealing interface with a confusing or counter-intuitve UX with accessibility issues
• Pricing and value: Excessive costs that don't align with perceived value, limited flexibility, or hidden fees that are not clearly disclosed
• Website experience: Information overloaded or confusing content on the website, poorly designed navigation, or slow loading times
• Onboarding and renewal: Lengthy or complicated signup or renewal process, friction points that hinder the customer journey, or a generic experience that lacks personalization 
• Purchasing process: A convoluted or multi-step purchasing process, insufficient or confusing product or purchase options, or limited customizations.
• Customer support: Ineffective agents, long wait times with inadequate solutions to address the customer's problem
• Support team organization: Inefficient communication and coordination with customers being bounced around to different teams without resolution or limited availability

Step 5: Visualize data and feedback  

Turn your insights into a visual journey map. This should include each stage, the associated touchpoints, customer goals, pain points, and opportunities for improvement.

Step 6: Optimize and personalize  

Once your journey map is complete, identify areas for optimization. Use the map to refine each touchpoint, providing more personalized, relevant experiences for your customers.

Step 7: Test and iterate  

Customer journeys evolve, so your journey map should be a living document. Regularly test and update it based on customer feedback and business changes.

Types of customer journey maps, examples, and templates

Customer journey maps are of several types. Each customer journey maps is designed by focusing on specific elements of the customer experience.

Here are the most common types of customer journey maps:

1. Current state map 

A fact-based map that shows how customers currently interact with a product, service, or brand. This is the most common type of customer journey map and can help identify problems and ways to fix them.
 

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Key points to remember:

•  Purpose: Visualizes the customer’s experience as it is today.
• Focus: What customers currently think, feel, and do at each stage of their interaction with a brand or product.
• Use case: Understanding current pain points, bottlenecks, or opportunities for improvement.
• Example: A retail customer’s path from discovering the brand to making a purchase in-store.

2. Future state map 

A future state map envisions the ideal customer experience that a brand or organization wants to create. This type of map focuses on how the customer journey should look in the future and what changes need to happen to achieve it.

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Key points to remember:

•  Purpose: Illustrates the ideal customer experience that the company wants to create.
• Focus: Desired emotions, thoughts, and actions of the customer in the future.
• Use case: Strategic planning to enhance the customer journey and achieve better outcomes.
• Example: Designing an ideal B2B customer onboarding experience for a SaaS platform.

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3. Day-in-the-life map 

A map that shows a customer's day in a holistic way, whether or not it includes the brand's products or services. This type of map can be useful for iden tifying unmet customer needs.

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Key points to remember:

•  Purpose: Takes a broader view of a customer’s daily life, not limited to their interaction with a specific brand or product.
• Focus: Understand the customer’s overall lifestyle, pain points, and motivations.
• Use case: Developing new products or services that align with the customer’s real-world needs.
• Example: A day in the life of a small business owner and how they manage inventory, sales, and marketing tasks.

4. Service blueprint 

A service blueprint is a comprehensive map that details both the front-end customer experience and the back-end processes that support it. It goes beyond just mapping the customer journey by also mapping internal workflows, systems, and resources involved in delivering the service.  
 

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Key points to remember:

•  Purpose: Goes beyond the customer experience to map out the underlying processes, systems, and touchpoints that support the journey.
• Focus: Both the front-end customer experience and the back-end operations.
• Use case: Identifying internal processes that may need to be optimized to support the customer journey.
• Example: Mapping a customer’s journey through an ecommerce checkout process, alongside the systems and teams involved (payment processing, shipping, etc.).

5. Persona-based journey map

A persona-based journey map depicts the end-to-end experience of a specific type of customer or persona as they interact with a product, service, or brand. It focuses on the individual characteristics, goals, pain points, and behaviors of a particular customer segment.
 

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Key points to remember:

•  Purpose: Tailors the journey map to a specific customer persona or segment.
• Focus: How a particular type of customer interacts with the product or brand.
• Use Case: Customizing marketing strategies or product features based on specific customer needs and behaviors.
• Example: Mapping the journey for a corporate decision-maker versus a product end-user for a B2B software product.

6. Experience map

An experience map shows a broader, high-level visualization of a customer’s interactions with a brand over time. Unlike a persona-based journey map, it is less focused on one specific persona and more focused on mapping the overall experience of customers across various touchpoints and channels, irrespective of individual personas.

Image credit: pinterest.com.

Key points to remember:

•  Purpose: Focuses on a broader view of the customer’s overall experience with a brand over time. 
•  Focus: How the customer perceives the brand through various touchpoints. 
•  Use case: Understanding long-term customer loyalty and brand perception. 
•  Example: A luxury car brand mapping the journey from initial research to post-purchase ownership. 

Customer journey map templates

1. Basic customer journey map template

Here's a basic customer journey map template that you can use for your business.

Download customer journey map template (.xl)

2. B2B journey template example (for SaaS):

• Awareness: First interaction via industry-specific blogs or conferences.
• Consideration: Discussions with decision-makers, review of case studies.
• Decision: Detailed product comparison and final approval.
• Onboarding: Product implementation and training.
• Expansion: Upselling or cross-selling after initial use.
• Advocacy: Sharing success stories or participating in case studies.

Customer journey map best practices 
 

 Mnemonic: SMART MAP  

S: Set a goal
M: Maintain customer perspective
A: Analyze pain points and motivations
R: Review data from analytics and feedback
T: Align with goals and business objectives
M: Map every touchpoint
A: Assemble input from teams
P: Prioritize updates and feedback

• Establish a goal for your customer journey map.
• Keep the customer’s perspective at the center of the map. Identify pain points and motivations throughout their journey.
• Leverage data from analytics, customer feedback, and interactions from tools like CRM and analytics to create a more accurate representation of customer behavior.
• Ensure that each stage of the journey aligns with both the customer’s goals and the company’s business objectives, whether that’s lead generation, retention, or advocacy.
• Consider every touchpoint where the customer interacts with your brand, from emails and social media to website visits, live chat, and support tickets.
• Sales, marketing, and customer support teams should all contribute to building a customer journey map to ensure it reflects every stage accurately.
• Treat the map as a living document, iterating as you gather new customer insights. Use feedback tools like Zoho Survey to gauge satisfaction at different stages.
• Make the journey map easy to understand with clear stages and actions. Utilize visual aids and ensure each stakeholder can quickly interpret the map’s insights.

How Zoho SalesIQ helps:  

The real-time engagement tools in Zoho SalesIQ allow you to continuously test how your touchpoints perform and what can be improved. Automated chat transcripts and data logs help you track customer satisfaction and optimize future interactions.

Customer persona: With visitor tracking and lead scoring, you can understand user behavior on your website in real-time. This gives you the insights to better define your personas.

Customer journey stages: You can track where visitors are in their journey by monitoring their actions on your site and interactions with your chatbots or live agents. This helps you identify which stage of the journey they are in and respond appropriately.

Customer journey mapping: You can enable businesses to engage customers across multiple touchpoints like live chat, email, social media, and even WhatsApp, all from one platform. This makes it easier to map and optimize the customer journey.

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Remember; every lead counts for a business and understanding the journey is the key to unlocking business growth.

“The customer journey is not a linear path but a complex ecosystem of interactions. It’s about understanding the emotional and cognitive experiences that customers have at every touchpoint.” 

 — Paul Roetzer, Founder and CEO of PR 20/20 

References:
1. https://wisernotify.com/blog/online-review-stats/