Customer Journey Mapping 101: How to Map Your Customer Experience

Boosting traffic, increasing sales, raising customer retention, reducing churn — these are all goals that many modern businesses share. They’re also goals that you can work toward with customer journey mapping. 

How? It’s all about empathizing with your customers. Customer journey mapping helps you get much deeper insights into what your customers are thinking, feeling, and doing as they move along the buyer journey. Those insights help you understand what you’re doing right — and where you can make improvements that create an even better customer experience.

It’s not difficult to create a customer journey map, but you will need to know a bit about the customer journey itself and follow a few simple steps to help you create your first map. Keep reading to get started.

What Is Customer Journey Mapping?

To understand customer journey mapping, you’ll need a basic understanding of the customer journey itself. So what is it? 

A customer’s journey represents the series of steps that a customer takes when they’re interacting with your brand. It starts with the awareness stage — when the customer first discovers who you are and what you’re offering — and moves through several different stages until the customer reaches the purchase stage by buying your product.

That leads us to customer journey mapping, which is the act of creating a visual representation of this journey. Along the way, you’ll be charting customers’ needs, perceptions, thought processes, and more as they move through each step of the customer journey.

Why Is Customer Journey Mapping Important?

The customer journey mapping process comes with several different advantages. First and foremost, it’ll give you a much better understanding of the steps that your customers are taking when they’re interacting with your brand.

Once you’ve mapped these interactions out, you’ll get deeper insights into your customer base. 

Here are some of the biggest benefits of customer journey mapping:

• It allows you to refocus marketing campaigns from outbound (which is you reaching out to customers) to inbound (customers discovering your brand and coming to you). This is because your customer journey map can help you understand the types of content that customers are looking for.
• It helps you find new target audiences. Throughout the mapping process, you’ll be researching your typical customer’s pain points — and that will give you the insights needed to market toward specific audiences who need to solve specific problems.
• It improves your retention rate and reduces churn by identifying which stages of the journey feature pain points that result in canceled subscriptions.
• It improves customer service. Journey mapping will give you a better understanding of the customer experience from start to finish, providing you with insights into things your sales team or customer success team could be doing better. It can also reveal things like the most common types of customer support requests so that you can take a proactive approach to problem solving.

What Are the 5 Stages of the Customer Journey?

Ready to create a customer journey map? Before we begin, let’s examine each stage of the customer journey to help you understand what these phases are all about.

1. Awareness

The awareness stage starts with a potential customer realizing they have a need to be fulfilled or a problem to be solved. They’ll start looking for ways to meet that need or solve that problem — and that’s when (hopefully) they’ll discover your brand.

You can help customers make this discovery through educational content or customer touchpoints, including:

• How-tos and guides on your blog
• Promotional social media posts
• Content that ranks on search engines

2. Consideration

By the consideration stage, customers have realized they need a particular type of product or service to fulfill their need — and now they’re comparing different brands to find the best fit. Customers in this phase benefit from content that helps them with the decision-making process. This includes things like whitepapers, product listicles, and product comparisons.

3. Decision

When customers select a product or service and make a purchase, they’ve entered the decision stage. At this point, customers no longer need educational content to help them choose a product — but they do need a seamless purchase process that makes buying your product as easy as possible. 

To encourage the purchase decision, you can offer: 

• Pricing pages so customers can compare plans
• Free consultations with your sales reps
• Free demos so they can try your product before they make the purchase

4. Retention

Whether your product is a one-time purchase or a subscription, the customer retention stage comes next. The goal is to keep customers either by encouraging them to return to your brand when they need more of your product or by encouraging them to keep on subscribing to your service.

There are lots of strategies that can help you retain customers — but most of them revolve around offering excellent customer service. You can do that by:

• Providing a smooth and seamless onboarding process
• Making sure your customer service team is easy to access
• Making improvements based on customer feedback
• Building out an accessible knowledge base that makes it easy for customers to find answers to their questions.

5. Loyalty

The loyalty stage is the last one — but keep in mind that it can happen alongside the retention stage. Customers enter the loyalty stage when they’re pleased enough with your product or service that they actively promote it to friends, family, and colleagues. 

Providing excellent service plays a key role in building this kind of customer satisfaction — and so does a fantastic end-to-end user experience, not just with your product, but also across your website, social media, and elsewhere. 

What Is a Customer Journey Map Example?

There are various types of customer journey map designs. You get to decide what kind of design elements you want to combine with text to create a visual of your customer journey. You may decide to use a flowchart, a spreadsheet style, etc.

In most cases you’ll want a row, column, or section for each stage of the customer journey. Then, for each stage, you’ll want to paint a clear picture of exactly what is happening during that part of the journey.

Here’s what you should be including for each stage.

User Actions

These are concrete things that customers are doing at each phase of the user journey. Some are visible actions that you can see and measure, like users clicking on your ads during the awareness phase, or they can be invisible things, like users becoming aware of your product by asking  friends or coworkers for recommendations. 

Touchpoints

Touchpoints are the places where customers interact directly with your brand — and you should have touchpoints for each stage of the customer journey. 

Examples of touchpoints include banner ads or social media posts that lead to discovery during the awareness stage. Other touchpoints include your website, blog, landing pages, checkout and payment pages, review pages, ecommerce sites, or things like speaking to a support team member for troubleshooting.

Emotions

How are customers feeling during each stage of the customer journey? Perhaps at the awareness stage, they’re unhappy because they’re facing a particularly thorny pain point that needs to be remedied — but by the purchase stage, they’re happy because their problem is about to be solved. 

Keep in mind that you can list more than one emotion for each stage. Maybe some customers are happy during the purchase stage, but others are encountering a buggy checkout process that leaves them frustrated.

Pain Points

Pain points go hand-in-hand with emotions. Wherever you have neutral or negative emotions on your map, there is probably an associated pain point to match, like the hypothetical buggy checkout process that results in frustration. 

Possible Solutions

Once you’ve used the customer’s perspective to identify problems, you’ll also want to list out possible solutions for each problem. For example, if customers are dismayed with long shipping times, possible solutions include using a faster shipping service or making shipping times clear on your product pages so that customers know what kind of timeframe to expect.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map in 4 Steps

You’ve got the basics down, and now it’s time to get started on your first customer journey map. You may need to do some market research and collect customer data beforehand to develop customer personas, but if you’ve already done that, the rest is a relatively simple process. Just follow the four steps below.

1. Choose a Buyer Persona

Rather than covering the average customer, customer journey maps should zoom in to focus on a specific customer segment — and the main reason why is because customer behavior can be different from one group to another. Younger customer segments might discover your brand on TikTok, for instance, whereas older customers may find you on Facebook. 

To zero in on specific segments, use your customer personas (or create new customer personas if you don’t already have them). A fleshed-out persona will serve as a guide you can follow as you map out the customer journey.

2. Create a Customer Journey Map Template

Next, you’ll need a template. Either create your own, or use one that you’ve found online — but remember that customer journey maps aren’t always exactly the same. The customer journey model that we illustrated above is the most common, but some organizations use slightly different models that more accurately reflect the specific steps on their customer journey.

Similarly, our customer map example details the most common information to include on your customer journey map — but you can modify these to better reflect what you’re trying to learn or improve upon with your map. 

For example, if you want to find ways to make the customer journey smoother, you could add “Questions Asked” to explore the types of questions that customers are asking themselves at each stage of the journey. 

Or if you want to explore what could be causing customers to abandon shopping carts or cancel their subscription, you could include “Barriers,” and then brainstorm the possible causes behind customer drop-off at each point along your customer journey.

3. Start Brainstorming

Now that you have a template, you’re ready to brainstorm. To do it effectively, place yourself in your customer’s shoes. You need to understand what is happening when a real customer interacts directly with your brand, and you need to pinpoint things you can’t see — like when customers ask friends for product recommendations.

One of the best ways to brainstorm? Go on the customer journey yourself! Place yourself into the mindset of the buyer from your persona. Begin from the perspective of someone who knows little or nothing about your brand or products. 

Then, start asking questions. How did you find your brand? Are there spots along the way where you find yourself wishing for more information? Are parts of the journey unnecessarily difficult or frustrating? These are the kinds of questions that will help you identify actions, emotions, and pain points.

4. Test and Modify

Your customer journey map isn’t complete yet! Actually, customer journey mapping should be an ongoing process that helps you continuously improve the customer experience so that you can boost sales and meet business goals.

As far as testing goes, you can rely on key performance indicators (KPIs) and other metrics to gauge how well your solutions are working or whether your customer journey map needs more adjusting. 

For example, if your analytics reveal that your paid ads are getting lots of clicks, but you still have a relatively low conversion rate, use your map as a tool to help identify the roadblock that is causing customers to drift away between the conversion and decision stages. Once you’ve identified the problem and implemented a solution, you can come back later with updated analytics to see if your conversion rate is improving.

Metrics will only get you so far, however. It’s also important to listen to the voice of the customer. Where possible, ask for feedback or conduct surveys to get opinions and gauge customer sentiment. Feedback will identify customer pain points so that you can find solutions, and if you pursue follow-up feedback after implementing solutions, you can judge how well those solutions are working. 

Enhance Your Customer Journey Maps With Jebbit

Need data to help you flesh out your customer journey map? Jebbit can help. Jebbit delivers interactive experiences that can help you get customer feedback and first-party data, which you can use to better understand how customers are interacting with your brand. 

To learn more, schedule a strategy call today to discover how Jebbit will help you unlock valuable insights.