The complete guide to understanding and optimizing a user’s experience.

When a customer makes a purchase, marketers usually don’t know whether the customer has seen the product one time or 50. Plenty of people take years to make buying decisions, while others make them on the spot. 

Though it’s tricky to predict how many times a consumer will interact with a product before they buy it, the best marketers gather clues about how customers find, consider, and use products. Then they piece together the clues to make a customer journey map. 

Customer journey mapping (or user journey mapping, in tech circles) demystifies customer behavior. It plots each step of a customer’s experience with your product, providing a lens into a customer’s motivations and preferences. In the end, you can use this information—along with new feature research and customer interviews—to improve your whole product experience.

Product development guided by insights

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual tool that describes a customer’s experience with your product or service. While customer journey maps come in many formats, they all show the different touchpoints customers have with your brand. The map lets you visualize the path that led a customer to your company. It can also give you the tools to improve that experience.

While a journey map should include detailed visuals, it’s not just for looks. It can help a number of teams—product developers, marketers, and executives among them—discern which parts of a company’s outreach or design efforts aren’t working so well. With that knowledge, those decision-makers will be better equipped to create a product experience customers enjoy.

Examples of customer journey maps

While every customer journey map is unique, the best have a few common foundational elements. Here are a few examples of how to build a customer journey map around different product types and scenarios. 

Say you work for an airline. Your customer journey map should include all the steps an air traveler experiences as they plan and book travel with you. Those include:

  • travel research

  • flight search

  • reading reviews of your airline

  • scanning social media

  • booking a flight

  • pre-travel preparation

  • check-in

  • boarding

  • in-flight experience 

As another example, say your company sells consumer packaged goods (CPG)—like Ritz Crackers or Coca-Cola. Potential buyers likely experience hundreds of brand touchpoints before and after purchase, given those products’ ubiquity. So marketing teams at such companies draw elaborate customer journey maps, with brand experiences likely falling into these four stages:

  • Awareness: radio and TV advertisements, word-of-mouth mentions, social media 

  • Consideration: company website, reviews 

  • Purchase: cost, availability, checkout experience, customer service

  • Loyalty: exclusive offers, rewards, email

Now think of the customer journey map for software. In this case, the product is likely more complex and has a higher cost. The need for the product could be business-related, or personal. Either way, mapping the customer journey around software can include the same four phases, but the factors influencing a purchase will be quite different.

  • Awareness: friend or colleague recommendation, advertisements, blog articles, press releases, trade shows

  • Consideration: company website, testimonials, reviews, sales conversations

  • Purchase: buying experience, customer support, implementation

  • Loyalty: ease of use, exclusive offers, customer support, documentation, email

Key elements of a customer journey map

Customer journey maps should be flexible and incorporate the types of material that work best for your product and team. But all journey maps begin with aggregated data about your customer, which should be distilled into these key elements: 

Personas and Actors 

Personas, or “buyer personas,” are semi-fictional characters or archetypes you develop to represent a group of target customers. They bring your customers to life by having names and stories that reflect their unique attributes and behaviors, such as motivations, pain points, and needs. (For more, check out the Nielsen Norman Group’s guide to creating personas.)  In contrast to a persona, an actor is a single person or user that the journey map is built around. 

Situations and Expectations

You should start creating a customer journey map by asking yourself a few important questions: Which customer situations do you want to understand? Are you diagnosing the cause of a struggling product, or entering an existing market with a new product? Would you like to improve product awareness, or beef up some other aspect of the customer journey? 

These answers set the context for your map and will determine how you compile the remaining elements. 

Journey Phases and Touchpoints

As mentioned (twice!) each customer journey should be divided into the following categories, in this order:

  • awareness

  • consideration

  • action (or purchase)

  • loyalty

Touchpoints are moments in which customers interact with your product or brand. These include: visits to your website, talks with a customer service agent, receiving direct mail or email, and using your product or service. 

Actions and Emotions 

As a customer moves between brand interactions, their actions and emotions fill in gaps along the way. Actions and emotions are the connective routes on the customer journey map. Understanding them will give you a clue to what propels customer experience and why it is (or isn’t) working well.

What is the value of a customer journey map?

The value of a customer journey map lies in its ability to connect the dots between customer behavior and product interactions. This includes first contact (seeing an ad, hearing about the product from a friend) to the end goal (whether that’s product purchase or customer loyalty). 

More importantly, a customer journey map puts you in your customer’s shoes. The map helps many internal teams build empathy for customers, and it will help them make better decisions on your customers’ behalf. Those teams include customer support, marketing strategy, user experience, and product design, to name a few.

The journey map should account for experiences of all customers, whether they are new or existing. 

This is especially vital in a world where the cost of poor experience is steep. Research from PwC found that 32% of customers will walk away from a brand they love after a single bad experience. Making meaningful improvements in customer experience is one of the easiest ways to increase brand loyalty, and retain customers.

More benefits of a good customer journey map:

  • Better CX/UX

  • Improved engagement

  • Improved customer retention

  • Streamlines ineffective touchpoints/eliminate roadblocks

  • Sharpens the company’s customer focus 

  • Enhances customer service to be more proactive/constructive

  • Eliminates internal silos

  • Identifies new personas/target new markets

Product development guided by insights

Types of customer journey maps

Not all goods and services are alike, and neither are their respective journey maps. 

A current-state journey map

A current-state journey map communicates your customers’ current interactions with your brand and focuses on their end-to-end experience. Built on data you’ve collected about your customer, this type of map is commonly used to describe and set benchmarks for your customer’s existing perceptions. 

A day-in-the-life journey map

A day-in-the-life journey map tells the story of a typical day in for your ideal customer. Given this is a brief period, you get to see exactly how customers incorporate your product into their routine.

A future-state journey map

A future state journey map is more exploratory. Instead of translating current customer data, you’re interpreting what you know about your customers and mapping out an entirely new experience they might someday have. While a current-state map helps you improve what already exists, a future-state map calls on you to innovate and think creatively about what the future holds for you and your products.

How to create a customer journey map

How do you put the above principles to use? Start with these rules: 

  • A customer journey map should be an honest reflection of what the customer experiences, not what the company experiences or wishes for the customer.

  • The map should combine factual details about a customer’s actions with their emotional state throughout each activity.

  • The map should include input from many stakeholders across your company, not just the person who creates it.  

5-steps to create a customer journey map

1. Identify clear goals

Identifying goals for the map might mean outlining with internal stakeholders which questions you’d like to answer. For example, you could check in with your product team to see how the map fits in with their product planning process. 

Example goals at this stage: 

  • becoming the #1 product in a competitive market

  • launching a new product for your existing customer base

  • lowering cost per acquisition across all of your products

2. Conduct persona research

Once you’ve set goals, it’s time to investigate your ideal customer. This involves gathering data about your real-world customers through a mix of surveys and user studies. While researching personas, you might also want to interview subject-matter experts, analyze existing customer data, or do market research. 

Sample questions at this stage:

  • Who are your users?

  • What channels do customers use to find you? 

  • What's their background, age, or location? 

  • What pain point or frustration does your product solve for them?

  • What are their expectations for a product like yours?

  • What are some top customer needs, overall?

  • What assumptions do they have? 

3. Define personas 

Now it’s time to turn all this customer data into personas. You want at least three different personas, each with unique descriptions. Personas represent your ideal customers as various archetypes with common demographic and psychographic characteristics. 

It’s typical to include these details with every persona: 

  • Fictional name of persona group 

  • A picture or headshot representing the persona group

  • Job responsibilities and titles

  • Demographics such as age, location, education, ethnic background, and family status

  • The goals and tasks they’re hoping to accomplish with the product

  • Their physical environment and technology usage

Your marketing team may have already done a related exercise if they do persona-based content marketing, so check with them to share insights. 

4. Identify touchpoints and stages 

This is the stage where your customers' needs, emotions, and perspectives come into play. To start, you can pretend you are the customer and act out each customer interaction. But real user feedback is often the most valuable data in a mapping activity. Check out Airtable’s product and user research templates to help kickstart your brainstorming. What is the overarching narrative that ties the customer journey together? Include any supporting data for how a customer might be feeling at each step.  

5. Continually revise the map to reflect current and future states

Products evolve, sometimes due to changes in the market, customer motivations, or the product’s own functionality. The evolution goes for journey maps too. To ensure your customer journey map remains valuable, revisit and revise it regularly.

Product development guided by insights


About the author

Airtable's Product Teamis committed to building world-class products, and empowering world-class product builders on our platform.

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