Customer experience journey map template

Visualize the highs and lows of an existing product or service experience

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Customer experience journey map

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Use the customer experience journey map template to better understand customer touchpoints, needs, motivations, and obstacles by illustrating the customer journey from start to finish. When possible, use this map to document and summarize interviews and observations with real people rather than relying on your hunches or assumptions.

Customer journey maps are a visual representation of a customer’s experience with a brand, product, or service. Journey maps often include key steps a customer takes, their interactions, goals, positive moments, negative moments, and more.

Journey maps are crucial for understanding the customer experience, allowing teams to understand what pain points users or customer experience, create better solutions for the end-user, reduce frustrations, and make areas of opportunity clear from the onset.

Customer journey maps help teams:

Step into a customer’s shoes and understand their perspective
Gain empathy to understand customer needs, perceptions, and overall experience
Identify problems and roadblocks that a customer may experience
Align with other team members and stakeholders to solve cross-functional problems

How to use the customer journey map template

Follow these step-by-step instructions to build a robust customer journey map from the template.

Step 1: Establish your customer scenario

Choose a customer persona or segment that you want to understand, and decide on a specific scenario that your customer would find themselves in (i.e.: browsing, booking, attending, and rating a local city tour).

If possible, choose a user persona informed by customer data and user research. This prevents teams from making incorrect assumptions and ensures that your target audience benefit from any changes in the customer journey.

Step 2: Define the steps your customer or buyer persona takes

What steps does the customer persona take during the scenario you defined? List out each step and describe any smaller steps that are involved. Think about what someone may experience during this step and what the desired future-state of that experience would be.

Dig deep: For each of the following sections, ask the following questions:

Entice: How does somebody initially become aware of this process? Where is the starting point?
Enter: What do potential customers experience as they begin the step or process?
Engage: In the core moments in the process, what happens?
Exit: What do people typically experience as the process ends?
Extend: What happens after the experience is over?

Step 3: List the different interactions customers might have

Mention what interactions users face during each step of the process. This includes the people they see or talk to, where they are, and the digital touchpoints or physical influences used to move them into the funnel.

This could be anything from learning about a new product from a promoted social media post, to contacting customer support for an issue the user faces. Keep in mind that interactions and touchpoints can and should be different depending on where someone found you, or how they got to your website.

Step 4: Think about the customer’s goals and motivations

Step into the customer's shoes. For each step, what is the customer's primary goal or motivation? What can you do to fulfill their needs? For an emphasis on how your customer or user is feeling during the journey, an empathy map can help you tap into their thoughts and emotions.

Step 5: Highlight the customer’s positive moments

List the steps users found enjoyable, productive, or motivating. Take inspiration from positive moments to improve weak areas. Positive moments can help you to gain a deeper understanding of your customers and how to communicate with them on other channels.

Step 6: Consider a customer’s negative moments

List which steps the user found frustrating, angering, or time-consuming. Identifying pain points, in particular, helps to make changes and improve the user experience.

For more instructions, check out our guide to creating customer journey maps.

Tips for creating better customer journey maps

Use market research to guide your assumptions: Conduct surveys or interviews that ask customers how they came to learn about your company and how they interact with your brand. You may be surprised. Real customer interactions will make your journey map more accurate and successful.
Revisit and optimize the customer journey map: Your customer journey map will likely need to be updated and adjusted over time. Just as customers' wants, needs, and expectations change, so must your strategy.
Share the customer journey map with involved stakeholders: The user journey will likely span multiple efforts in your organization, so be sure to let stakeholders know if they can help make the buyer journey more customer-focused.
Get real customer feedback: While you should be creating your customer journey map based on interviews and real-world data, try validating your assumptions by getting feedback from a customer on how accurate the user experience matches the different stages in your finished map.

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Customer experience journey map template FAQs

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual diagram that shows each stage of the customer experience when interacting with a company. It can depict the process customers go through when buying products online, accessing customer service, airing grievances on social media, or any other engagement with a service, brand, or product.

The goal of customer journey mapping is to understand what customers go through and improve the quality of their experience.

What are some benefits of customer journey mapping?

Maps are extremely useful in understanding a customer's point of view and identifying where they exit processes. Mapping a customer journey helps:

Improve customer retention: Mapping identifies positive and negative moments users experience while interacting with your product or service. Eliminating negatives reduces frustration and streamlines processes meant to increase satisfaction and, ultimately, sales.
Reduce costs associated with inefficient marketing tactics: Customer journey maps highlight which marketing efforts are successful and which fall flat. Detailed maps show real-time metrics on where customers enter the process. A customer that enters during the awareness phase, for example, is probably not ready to buy and could visit a few more times for additional information. This allows you to give them exactly what they’re looking for to nudge them toward a decision.
Identify key demographics: Mapping identifies which customers complete processes for a particular product or service. This helps define customer personas to target in future marketing campaigns. You can collect customer data to share with marketing and sales teams to make better-informed decisions by analyzing this data and putting the right information in front of the right people.
Evaluate pricing strategy: Suppose your map indicates a drop-off during the purchasing phase. In that case, it could lead you to believe that the purchasing process is overly complex or that users find the cost too high. This data allows for constant adjustment by knowing where users are leaving your funnel.
Position your company to be customer-focused: During the early stages of an organization, each decision is based on what customers need and want. As a company grows, it's easy to lose sight of this. Maps place customers on top and remind departments who the customer is and how your solutions can best suit their needs. Putting customers at the center of business decision-making builds brand loyalty and improves retention.

When would you want to create a customer journey map?

Designing a new product or service: When you're in the early stages of designing a new product or service, creating a customer journey map can provide valuable guidance. By mapping out each touchpoint and interaction that a customer goes through, you can identify pain points, gaps in the experience, and opportunities for innovation. This helps you shape your product or service to better align with customer needs, desires, and expectations. By having a clear understanding of your customers' journey, you can design a seamless and delightful experience from start to finish.
Improving an existing user experience: If you already have a product or service in the market, creating a customer journey map can help you identify areas of improvement in the current state user experience. By mapping out the entire customer journey, you can pinpoint moments of frustration, confusion, or churn.
Aligning cross-functional teams: Creating a customer journey map is not only beneficial for product teams but also for cross-functional collaboration. It serves as a visual representation that aligns various teams, including product management, design, marketing, sales, customer success, and customer support. By collaboratively mapping the customer journey, teams gain a shared understanding of the customer's perspective, fostering empathy and collaboration.