10-step guide to creating customer journey maps

Mapping your customers’ journeys can feel daunting. There are many steps involved, and you may even need to create different maps for different types of customers.

Once you understand how to break down the journey mapping process step by step, however, creating customer journey maps becomes not just manageable, but simple. As you'll learn, there are a variety of resources available to help create customer journey maps. The more you use them, the faster and more efficient your mapping process will be.

This post will discuss:

• What is a customer journey map?
• Benefits of a customer journey map
• How to create a customer journey map
• Customer journey map best practices

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map helps you visualize how customers experience your product and service. It does this by describing the storyline of every customer interaction step by step.

Like user experience (UX) maps, the customer journey map seeks to clarify potential interactions between a user and a brand. However, UX is most concerned with discrete and often digital-only interactions. In contrast, the customer journey represents a birds eye view of every touchpoint between individuals and your brand — starting with awareness.

Different kinds of customer journey maps include:

• Current State. The Current State customer journey map involves visualizing customers’ experiences with your product or service as it currently exists. This particular map represents a critical tool for identifying possible friction points that could be costing you customers.
• Day in the Life. The Day in the Life customer journey map describes the routine activities a potential customer might cycle through on any given day, regardless of whether or not they happen to interact with your business. Its utility lies in its ability to identify needs your service or product can address.
• Future State. The Future State customer journey map includes visualizing the ideal map you and your team hope to construcact. This tool is especially helpful when introducing new products or services, or else when targeting new audience segments.
• Service Blueprint. To build a Service Blueprint, start with one of the above maps and then layer in all the technology, employees, and other services required as part of each touchpoint. Use it to visualize how your organization focuses its resources and identify possible shifts in allocation.

Most customer journey maps are designed chronologically, meaning they represent the customer experience as a timeline of events. But in reality, customer journeys — the series of steps from brand awareness to customer loyalty — are often not linear. Instead, customers follow a cyclical, multichannel set of steps as they engage with your business.

For example, they may make purchases online as well as offline during the same period (if you operate both types of sales channels). Customer journey maps need to account for the nonlinear nature of customer journeys, even as they also represent customer experience in a chronological fashion. To achieve the right balance, journey maps should include:

• Customer touchpoints. Every time your customer has some type of contact with your brand, even if it’s indirect, that touchpoint should be noted on the customer journey map.
• Customer moments of truth. Customer moments of truth happen when an event changes a customer’s perception of your brand. These are pivotal engagements and should be noted as such on the customer journey map.
• Customer pain points. Barriers or challenges that a customer experiences when interacting with your brand — such as hiccups in digital sales tools or delayed shipments — should be included on the map so you know how such events correlate with overall brand perception.
• Desired actions. Your customer journey map should note the actions you intend for customers to take, such as engagement with content or the completion of a purchase.
• Completed actions. Note the actual actions your customers take so that you can determine how often their behavior aligns with desired actions.

When your customer journey maps include all of the above information, you end up with the information that can help you deliver maximum benefits.

Benefits of a customer journey map

Understanding your customers’ experiences is critical to staying ahead of changing needs, technology, and global market shifts. According to Hanover Research, 79% of companies that invest in customer journey maps report becoming more customer-centric as a result.

More specifically, customer journey mapping allows companies to:

• Get targeted customer insights. The more you know about your customers, how they behave, and what they like and dislike, the better you can optimize marketing and sales processes.
• Increase customer engagement. Customer journey maps provide insights you need to create the kind of interesting and informative content your customers want to see, improving the effectiveness of your inbound marketing efforts.
• Experience higher customer retention. Satisfied customers are return customers. According to Zendesk, 61% of customers will abandon your brand after just one bad experience, but on the flip side, 71% of customers buy more from a brand they trust.
• Eliminate ineffective touchpoints. Some customer touchpoints are more successful than others, and customer journey maps help you identify the most effective ones. They may reveal, for example, that a certain ad channel is associated with low rates of engagement — so to address that, you could redirect your marketing spend to a more effective touchpoint.
• Drive better customer focus. Mapping the customer journey helps to place customers at the forefront of your company’s operations and get ahead of challenges that could undercut their experiences. For example, if you are expecting a customer surge, you can proactively inform your customers of the expected delay and launch alternative resources for them.
• Acquire new business. The more you know about the journeys of your current customers, the better positioned you are to expand on what works to engage new types of customer personas through campaigns tailored to them.
• Avoid business silos. Customer journey maps help every department visualize its respective impact on the customer experience. In turn, these maps help increase cross-unit functionality with regard to serving customers.
• Assess ROI of future UX/CX investments. The best tool for predicting the future of your business is its past. Locking down specific spends on past and current customer maps will help you piece together an informed prediction for similar investments in the future.

How to create a customer journey map

Constructing a customer journey map boils down to 10 steps, which are listed below. Follow them to ensure an end result capable of delivering on all of the above benefits.

1. Set clear objectives for the map

First, you need a clear goal. Rather than creating a customer journey map just to create one, decide what you are hoping to accomplish through the map, which customers you are targeting, and which types of experiences you want your maps to highlight. In addition, your goals for creating the customer journey should reflect your overall company goals, such as increased revenue or improved customer retention.

Be sure to also decide on relevant metrics you can track as you create and use your customer journey maps. Setting clear goals is worthless if there’s no standard for measuring them.

2. Conduct research

Harvest internal and external quantitative and qualitative data on your customers to look for trends both in not only the types of buyers your business currently attracts, but how they feel about their experiences. Places to mine this information include your own website analytics, social media, call center recordings, support logs, or directly from customers themselves through surveys.

Keep your eye out for anything that has to do with how that customer determined they needed your product or service in the first place, how they discovered your business, why they chose it, and if they were happy with that choice in the end.

3. Profile your personas and define their goals

From that data, determine which customer personas you want to target when creating maps. If you don’t have well-developed personas or need to update them, you can pull the insights you need through surveys, interviews, testimonials, reviews, and feedback from customer relations teams. These teams tend to have a good perspective on the pain points that lead to fall-offs during the buying journey.

The more specifics you can collect about who your customers are and what they want, the more effective your customer journey maps will be.

4. Highlight your target customer personas

At this point in your process, you’ve likely gathered more information than is directly relevant to this particular project. Now is the time to revisit your target customer personas to help whittle your data down to only the most important information.

Take care, however, not to toss out any data that may feel irrelevant to the current project. Instead, store it somewhere safe should you later decide to create additional customer journey maps better suited to a different persona or personas.

5. List out all touchpoints

Identify the touchpoints that you’ll represent on your customer journey maps. Touchpoints are any point of engagement between customers and your brand, and they are the foundation for your customer journey map.

Consider all of the places where the customer may interact with your business. Be sure to factor in indirect engagements, like reviews of your brand that customers read on third-party sites, in addition to direct touchpoints that you maintain. Each and every touchpoint can drive customer conversion, so it’s critical to represent all the possibilities.

6. Map the current buyer journey

Once you’ve identified your customers and touchpoints, you can map the steps that buyers follow on their way to making purchases. Be sure to represent every variation on the buyer’s journey, including different types of sales channels, multiple product versions, and small-volume as well as large-volume purchases.

7. Map the ideal buyer journey

The journey you want customers to take may vary from their actual journey, especially if you release new products or services and the desired buyer journey changes as a result. Be sure to represent the ideal buyer journey alongside actual buyer journeys on your maps.

8. Determine the resources you have and the ones you’ll need

Translating a theoretical map into a lived experience for customers requires, at a minimum, employee time. Additional demands may include new software or an increased budget to help reduce costly friction points and holes responsible for lost revenue.

Create a detailed list of all that constructing the new map will require, and avoid getting halfway in before realizing you’re short the resources you need to complete the job.

9. Take the customer journey yourself

Don’t force your customers to double as your guinea pigs. Try out the journey yourself and identify places where the experience plays out differently in reality versus on paper. Does it feel confusing or tedious in any place? Are there any distractions that need to be eliminated?

Make note of all of these, then have someone else give it a go. Once you and several others have tested it, compare notes and see if and where tweaks are needed.

10. Make the necessary changes

Implementing those changes before you hit the green light may seem obvious. But it can be a challenge if, say, you’re already running behind the schedule you initially set for yourself.

The temptation will always be to release the current version and make adjustments over time. Do this, however, and you risk frustrating customers who may not return to see the improvements you have planned.

Customer journey map best practices

Avoid false starts and dead ends during the construction of your new map. Instead, maximize its potential reach and profitability by implementing each of these best practices.

• Set a goal for the journey map. Decide upfront what you hope to accomplish through the map, which customers you are targeting, and which types of experiences you want your maps to highlight. In addition, your goals for creating the customer journey should reflect your overall company goals, such as increased revenue or improved customer retention. Be sure to also decide on relevant metrics you can track as you create and use your customer journey maps. Setting clear goals is worthless if there’s no standard for measuring them.
• Survey customers to understand their buying journey. Don’t try and guess your customers’ behaviors or needs — ask. Simple questionnaires regarding how they found your company or what about that experience they would like to see improved are cost effective, easy to implement, and invaluable for ensuring your efforts respond to a real and not only perceived issue. Customers often will have thought of solutions that may not have occurred to you and your team. Be sure to include questions about the customers themselves. The information gathered from these questions will prove invaluable later as you narrow down your data to those you hope to focus your attention most with this current customer journey map.
• Ask customer service reps about the questions they receive most frequently. Then let their responses shape your map’s goal in tandem with your target personas. Don’t be intimidated by any surprises you might encounter. Rather, take any unexpected feedback for what it is — new opportunities to mine for growth.
• Orchestrate your customer journey. Avoid the tendency to think of the customer journey map you hope to create in isolation. As mentioned earlier, customers rarely follow a single linear journey. Harness real-time customer data to shape real-life behavior and optimize experiences.
• Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona. As a reminder, UX maps are a diagram of the steps a customer must take to complete a single task. These tasks can range from something as complex as finding and purchasing a product in your online store, to one as straightforward as signing up for an email newsletter. Even the latter can benefit from a thoughtful examination based on persona. For example, some older customers avoid using their phones for anything besides calling and texting, opting instead for the bigger screens found on computers or tablets when it comes to anything related to searching the Web. A UX journey optimized for a range of devices will ensure a better experience for a more senior demographic.
• Review and update each journey map after every major product release. Be sure to involve all relevant stakeholders in this process, particularly those parties closest to the product. Not only does this review and revision process help maximize the new product’s reach — it also serves as a general wellness checkup to ensure your maps remain effective in an ever-shifting marketplace.
• Make the customer journey map accessible to cross-functional teams. Defeat information silos and boost employee buy-in of your customer journey map by distributing it widely throughout your organization. For the most effective map possible, do so early in the process to allow other teams to weigh in from their unique vantage points, then again upon completion.
• Improve your employee experience. An effective customer journey map doesn’t just boost your bottom line. By eliminating inefficiencies and offering a better process, it helps to better life for your employees. This is especially true when they feel heard as part of the process — one more reason to make it available to all related teams early enough to adjust based on their input.

Tools to create customer journey maps with ease

Smart, research-backed customer journey maps deliver more than short-term positive business outcomes. They are critical to your organization’s long-term resilience in today’s experience-driven marketplace.

Although creating customer journey maps may seem complicated at first, getting started is merely a matter of identifying clear, concrete steps. This is especially true when you enlist the right tools designed to help you understand your customers’ journeys — both online and offline — quickly and get the necessary insights to meet them with real-time experiences at scale.

Adobe Customer Journey Analytics can help you break down, filter, and query years’ worth of data and combine it from every channel into a single interface. Real-time, omnichannel analysis and visualization further allow you to make better decisions with a holistic view of your business and the context behind every customer action.

Watch the overview video to learn more about Adobe Customer Journey Analytics.

Meanwhile, Adobe Journey Optimizer intelligently determines the next best interaction with scale, speed, and flexibility across the entire customer journey and creates and delivers scheduled marketing campaigns with tailored individual communications within the same application.

Get a free demo of Journey Optimizer.