Customer Journey Map: What It Is + Free Template

As a sales leader or account executive, you understand that the key to building successful customer relationships lies in gaining a deep understanding of their journey. One powerful tool that can help you in this endeavor is a customer journey map. 

Through the effective utilization of a customer journey map, you can get valuable insights into the experiences, challenges, and expectations of your customers at every stage of their buying process — specifically focused on their interactions with your business. This could include their initial encounters with a virtual receptionist to post-purchase activities like reaching out to customer support.

In this post, we’ll walk you through what a customer journey map is, how to create one, and examples so you can apply similar principles to your own customers and business. 

We’ve even included a free template that’ll help save you time and empower you to take your sales team to new heights of success through the art of customer journey mapping.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation or diagram that illustrates the complete experience of a customer with a particular product, service, or brand. It provides insights into the customer's interactions, emotions, and touchpoints at various stages of their journey, from initial awareness and consideration to purchase, usage, and post-purchase support.

A customer journey map typically includes multiple stages that a customer goes through in the digital marketing funnel, such as:

1. Awareness: The stage where a customer becomes aware of a product or service.
2. Consideration: The customer explores different options, compares features, and evaluates alternatives.
3. Purchase: The actual transaction or conversion point where the customer decides to make a purchase.
4. Onboarding: The process of familiarizing the customer with the product or service after the purchase is made.
5. Usage: The customer begins using the product or service and interacts with it regularly.
6. Support: The availability of customer support or assistance throughout the customer's usage phase.
7. Retention: The customer's ongoing relationship with the brand and their potential to become repeat customers or advocates.

Customer journey maps are created by collecting data and insights from various sources, including customer surveys, interviews, feedback, analytics, and market research. They help businesses understand the customer's needs, pain points, and expectations at each stage of the journey, enabling them to identify opportunities for improvement and deliver a better customer experience.

How to create a customer journey map

Customer journey maps are meant to be dynamic and adaptable. They should serve as a valuable tool to guide your business to deliver exceptional customer experiences and foster long-term customer relationships. 

That being said, while customer journey maps can vary in their specifics, they typically adhere to a similar framework. To help you create your own customer journey map, follow the steps outlined below.

Define your customer personas

Start by identifying and defining your target customer segments or personas. These personas represent your ideal customers and help you understand their characteristics, goals, motivations, and behaviors. 

To avoid complexity, it’s recommended to concentrate on a single persona and one customer scenario at a time.

Map the customer journey stages

Create a visual representation of the customer journey stages. Typically, these stages include awareness, consideration, purchase, onboarding, usage, support, and customer retention. You can customize these stages based on your specific business and customer lifecycle.

Identify customer touchpoints

List down all the touchpoints or interactions a customer has with your brand throughout their journey. These touchpoints can include website visits, social media interactions, live chat messages, phone calls, email communications, and more.

Plot customer actions and emotions

Within each stage, identify the specific actions customers take, pain points they may experience, and the emotions they feel. An empathy map is a great way to help you do this because it uses data from different sources and stakeholders. This helps you understand the customer's mindset and expectations throughout each stage. 

Connect touchpoints and actions to stages

Connect the touchpoints and actions to the corresponding stages of the customer journey. Show how the customer moves from one touchpoint to another as they progress through the stages. This helps you understand the sequence of interactions and potential gaps or friction points. More importantly, it helps you understand the type of sales conversations that should take place before the purchase — and the level of customer support that should take place after.

Analyze and identify opportunities

Analyze the customer journey map to identify pain points, areas of improvement, and opportunities to enhance the customer experience. Look for moments where you can deliver a wow factor, reduce friction, or address customer needs more effectively. 

Take action

Based on your analysis, prioritize the opportunities and develop an action plan to improve the customer journey. This may involve making changes to specific touchpoints, optimizing processes, improving lead nurturing, enhancing customer engagement, or implementing better customer support.

Iterate and update

Customer journey mapping is an iterative process. Continuously collect feedback, measure the impact of your improvements, and update the journey map accordingly. Customer needs and preferences may evolve, so it's important to keep your map up to date.

Customer journey map examples

Customer journey maps differ among businesses based on their unique offerings, customer lifecycles, industries, and overall business models.

To inspire you, we’ve compiled several real-life examples of customer journey maps. These examples will give you an understanding of the diverse visual representations that a customer journey map can take.

Example #1: B2B SaaS 

This example by Freshworks is an overview of a customer’s journey with a B2B SaaS product. In this customer journey map, you can clearly see the different stages a customer goes through along with elements such as their cognitive state, emotions, opportunities, barriers, and touchpoints. 

This map also incorporates the internal teams and key performance indicators (KPIs) being monitored, providing a valuable perspective on which teams are currently involved in customer interactions during their journey and which KPIs hold the greatest significance in each stage.

Example #2: Travel agency

While the 2020 pandemic disrupted many industries, the travel industry took a major hit. To help understand the traveler’s journey, Travelport put together this map with the persona of a leisure traveler planning a post-pandemic trip.

By comparing this map with their pre-pandemic customer journey map, Travelport was able to identify new opportunities to better their traveler’s experiences. Recognizing the increasing demand from travelers for destination-specific information like local regulations and restrictions, they identified an opportunity to empower customers with self-service options for obtaining those details.

Example #3: Entertainment

Spotify, renowned as one of the leading audio streaming services around the world, recognized the need to enhance its customers' music-sharing experiences. To better understand users, Spotify engaged the expertise of Meghana Bowen to develop a customer journey map. 

The primary aim of this map was to identify the optimal placement of music-sharing features within the overall customer experience offered by Spotify. Thanks to this map, Spotify was able to identify pain points for users and address them so that the music-sharing experience is easier — encouraging users to share music more often.

Customer journey map template

To jumpstart your customer journey mapping process, check out our free downloadable template that you can customize and adapt to your specific industry, target audience, and sales objectives. This ready-to-use resource will save you time and ensure you're on the right track.

Enhance the customer journey with Smith.ai

A customer journey map helps ensure that each touchpoint leaves a lasting impression, motivating customers to progress on their buying journey with your business.

At Smith.ai, we can help you enhance the customer journey by providing unified solutions that address every lead, while also engaging your existing customers, giving you peace of mind in knowing they’re in excellent care. 

Whether you need a virtual receptionist, live chat support, or an outreach campaign service, our professional team of agents are available 24/7 to assist you in effectively engaging with your leads and customers. 

To discover more about how Smith.ai can contribute to your business success, book a free consultation.