customer journey mapping tools free

Collaborative customer journey mapping tools

Gain a deep understanding of customer needs and business priorities

Ready-made customer journey map templates.

Design transformative customer journeys with templates for persona building, touchpoint maps, service blueprints, and more. Help your team quickly visualize, collaborate, and iterate on your customer experience, bringing in data and research to make the best-informed decisions.

Create a shared understanding, faster

Build highly visual and accurate maps that bring a customer’s humanity and experience to life with dynamically populated input, feedback, and data from various sources, like Amplitude, Looker, Blossom, Loom, and UserTesting. Record interactive walkthroughs with Talktrack so everyone can engage on their own time, with all the context on the board.

Easy to share and change

Give your team easy access to customer journey maps so they can leave feedback, ask questions, and make immediate changes as needed. Keep customer-centricity top of mind by embedding it everywhere your teams work (like Confluence) and it’ll always be synced to the latest version, or export your customer journey map as an image or PDF file for presentations.

Why people love Miro for customer journey mapping

Uncover possibilities.

Miro’s infinite canvas gives you the ability to collaborate across product teams and cross-functional stakeholders on customer journeys. It serves as a team hub for mapping and research, where you can plot your customer’s paths, visualize their journey, and gather insights all in one tool.

Empathy made easy

Make sure all voices are heard and tap into your team’s collective imagination to identify customer pain points, cultivate empathy, wireframe solutions, and ship innovative products — all with Miro’s customer journey map tools.

Be the voice of the customer

Map your user journey step-by-step and truly understand the people using your product. Bring your team with you in this process and share your customer journey map across your organization. Become the customer advocate and ensure you add value to your product.

Quickly get started

Miro’s customer journey map tool helps accelerate your team’s processes by clearly visualizing journeys, touchpoints, personas, and more. Save time by crafting your customer journey map using one of our pre-made frameworks, or build one from scratch with our many editing tools.

Deliver better results

Make better-informed decisions by getting instant feedback and craft experiences that people will remember. Tag team members, receive comments, and gain more insights with Miro’s collaborative customer journey mapping tool.

Share it with everyone

Share your insights and be proactive by running customer workshops inside your organization. Use Miro’s collaborative features, such as the timer and voting, to help lead interactive sessions and engage your team. Offer the space and tools needed for blue-sky thinking.

Related pages

Research and design.

Strategic planning

Product management

Content and data visualization

Research synthesis

Related templates

Customer Journey Map Template

Customer Touchpoint Map Template

Empathy Map Template

Customer Journey Map

Service Blueprint Template

Customer Journey Map Workshop

Customer Experience Template by Essense

5E Service Blueprint

Experience Mapping Template

How to create a customer journey map with miro.

1. Define personas

Determine which specific customer segments or personas you want to focus on. Collect data and insights about their needs, behaviors, and preferences.

2. Identify touchpoints

Identify key stages of the customer journey listing the touchpoints. Detail the specific actions, emotions, and pain points customers experience at each stage.

3. Add context and insights

Integrate data from customer surveys, interviews, analytics, and other sources to enrich your understanding of customer behaviors and preferences.

4. Share and find opportunities

Identify opportunities to improve the customer experience. When ready, share with stakeholders for feedback and collaboratively draft an action plan to implement the findings.

5. Iterate and update

Embed the map where teams and stakeholders can easily find it. Regularly review and evolve the customer journey map as you gain more data, insights, and feedback.

Customer journey mapping tools FAQs

What makes a good customer journey?

To create a good customer journey map, make sure you add all the stages your user goes through by mapping every customer touchpoint and the phases they belong to. After you map out your customer journey, to know more about who they are, you can create a storyboard or dig deeper with an empathy map. Miro’s customer journey mapping software makes it easy to add other artifacts and maps to your board, so you can have a great overview of your customer journey and what influences your customer's experiences. It can get messy, and it’s ok! Once you have all the information you need in one shared space, it’s easier to craft your customer journey or create a new user journey map.

What are the components of a customer journey map?

In Miro’s customer journey mapping tool, you have the flexibility to add as many components as you’d like. In our template, we use the following: actions, touchpoints, customer thoughts, customer feelings, process ownership, and opportunities. Each component belongs to a customer journey stage and is added to the board. Some folks also add user research data and other tools, such as empathy maps or timelines.

Can I download or share my customer journey map?

Yes, you can download your customer journey map as an image or PDF file or share your board link with others. Embed the map everywhere your teams work, like Confluence or Notion and it'll always be synced to the latest version. The customer journey map can be treated as a living document, evolving according to your product evolution and need.

The ultimate list of templates for understanding your customers

What is a customer journey map, 3 steps to go from customer interviews to a customer journey map, the difference between a service blueprint and a journey map, get on board in seconds, plans and pricing.

What is a Customer Journey Map? [Free Templates]

Learn what the customer journey mapping process is and download a free template that you can use to create your own customer journey map.

Table of Contents

Mapping the customer journey can give you a way to better understand your customers and their needs. As a tool, it allows you to visualize the different stages that a customer goes through when interacting with your business; their thoughts, feelings, and pain points.

And, it’s shown that the friction from those pain points costs big: in 2019, ecommerce friction totaled an estimated 213 billion in lost US revenue .

Customer journey maps can help you to identify any problems or areas where you could improve your customer experience . In this article, we’ll explain what the customer journey mapping process is and provide a free template that you can use to create your own map. Let’s get started!

Bonus: Get our free, fully customizable Customer Experience Strategy Template that will help you understand your customers and reach your business goals.

What is a customer journey map?

So, what is customer journey mapping? Essentially, customer journey maps are a tool that you can use to understand the customer experience. Customer journey maps are often visual representations showing you the customer’s journey from beginning to end. They include all the touchpoints along the way.

There are often four main stages in your sales funnel, and knowing these can help you create your customer journey maps:

• Inquiry or awareness
• Interest, comparison, or decision-making
• Purchase or preparation
• Installation, activation, or feedback

Customer journey maps are used to track customer behavior and pinpoint areas where the customer experiences pain points. With this information uncovered, you can improve the customer experience, giving your customers a positive experience with your company.

You can use customer journey mapping software like Excel or Google sheets, Google Decks, infographics, illustrations, or diagrams to create your maps. But you don’t actually need customer journey mapping tools. You can create these maps with a blank wall and a pack of sticky notes.

Though they can be scribbled on a sticky note, it’s often easier to create these journeys digitally. That way, you have a record of your journey map, and you can share it with colleagues. We’ve provided free customer journey mapping templates at the end of this article to make your life a little easier.

The benefits of using customer journey maps

The main benefit of customer journey mapping is a better understanding of how your customers feel and interact with your business touchpoints. With this knowledge, you can create strategies that better serve your customer at each touchpoint.

Give them what they want and make it easy to use, and they’ll keep coming back. But, there are a couple of other great knock-on benefits too.

Improved customer support

Your customer journey map will highlight moments where you can add some fun to a customer’s day. And it will also highlight the pain points of your customer’s experience. Knowing where these moments are will let you address them before your customer gets there. Then, watch your customer service metrics spike!

Effective marketing tactics

A greater understanding of who your customers are and what motivates them will help you to advertise to them.

Let’s say you sell a sleep aid product or service. A potential target market for your customer base is young, working mothers who are strapped for time.

The tone of your marketing material can empathize with their struggles, saying, “The last thing you need is someone asking if you’re tired. But we know that over half of working moms get less than 6 hours of sleep at night. While we can’t give you more time, we know how you can make the most of those 6 hours. Try our Sleep Aid today and sleep better tonight.”

Building out customer personas will show potential target audiences and their motivation, like working moms who want to make the most of their hours asleep.

Product advancements or service improvements

By mapping your customer’s journey, you’ll gain insights into what motivates them to make a purchase or prevents them from doing so. You’ll have clarity on when or why they return items and which items they buy next. With this information and more, you’ll be able to identify opportunities to upsell or cross-sell products.

A more enjoyable and efficient user experience

Customer journey mapping will show you where customers get stuck and bounce off your site. You can work your way through the map, fixing any friction points as you go. The end result will be a smoothly-running, logical website or app.

A customer-focused mindset

Instead of operating with the motivation of business success, a customer journey map can shift your focus to the customer. Instead of asking yourself, “how can I increase profits?” ask yourself, “what would better serve my customer?” The profits will come when you put your customer first.

At the end of the day, customer journey maps help you to improve your customer experience and boost sales. They’re a useful tool in your customer experience strategy .

How to create a customer journey map

There are many different ways to create a customer journey map. But, there are a few steps you’ll want to take regardless of how you go about mapping your customer’s journey.

Step 1. Set your focus

Are you looking to drive the adoption of a new product? Or perhaps you’ve noticed issues with your customer experience. Maybe you’re looking for new areas of opportunity for your business. Whatever it is, be sure to set your goals before you begin mapping the customer journey.

Step 2. Choose your buyer personas

To create a customer journey map, you’ll first need to identify your customers and understand their needs. To do this, you will want to access your buyer personas.

Buyer personas are caricatures or representations of someone who represents your target audience. These personas are created from real-world data and strategic goals.

If you don’t already have them, create your own buyer personas with our easy step-by-step guide and free template.

Choose one or two of your personas to be the focus of your customer journey map. You can always go back and create maps for your remaining personas.

Step 3. Perform user research

Interview prospective or past customers in your target market. You do not want to gamble your entire customer journey on assumptions you’ve made. Find out directly from the source what their pathways are like, where their pain points are, and what they love about your brand.

You can do this by sending out surveys, setting up interviews, and examining data from your business chatbot . Be sure to look at what the most frequently asked questions are. If you don’t have a FAQ chatbot like Heyday , that automates customer service and pulls data for you, you’re missing out!

Get a free Heyday demo

You will also want to speak with your sales team, your customer service team, and any other team member who may have insight into interacting with your customers.

Step 4. List customer touchpoints

Your next step is to track and list the customer’s interactions with the company, both online and offline.

A customer touchpoint means anywhere your customer interacts with your brand. This could be your social media posts , anywhere they might find themselves on your website, your brick-and-mortar store, ratings and reviews, or out-of-home advertising.

Write as many as you can down, then put on your customer shoes and go through the process yourself. Track the touchpoints, of course, but also write down how you felt at each juncture and why. This data will eventually serve as a guide for your map.

Step 5. Build your customer journey map

You’ve done your research and gathered as much information as possible, now it’s time for the fun stuff. Compile all of the information you’ve collected into one place. Then, start mapping out your customer journey! You can use the templates we’ve created below for an easy plug-and-play execution.

Step 6. Analyze your customer journey map

Once the customer journey has been mapped out, you will want to go through it yourself. You need to experience first-hand what your customers do to fully understand their experience.

As you journey through your sales funnel, look for ways to improve your customer experience. By analyzing your customer’s needs and pain points, you can see areas where they might bounce off your site or get frustrated with your app. Then, you can take action to improve it. List these out in your customer journey map as “Opportunities” and “Action plan items”.

Types of customer journey maps

There are many different types of customer journey maps. We’ll take you through four to get started: current state, future state, a day in the life, and empathy maps. We’ll break down each of them and explain what they can do for your business.

Current state

This customer journey map focuses on your business as it is today. With it, you will visualize the experience a customer has when attempting to accomplish their goal with your business or product. A current state customer journey uncovers and offers solutions for pain points.

Future state

This customer journey map focuses on how you want your business to be. This is an ideal future state. With it, you will visualize a customer’s best-case experience when attempting to accomplish their goal with your business or product.

Once you have your future state customer journey mapped out, you’ll be able to see where you want to go and how to get there.

Day-in-the-life

A day-in-the-life customer journey is a lot like the current state customer journey, but it aims to highlight aspects of a customer’s daily life outside of how they interact with your brand.

Day-in-the-life mapping looks at everything that the consumer does during their day. It shows what they think and feel within an area of focus with or without your company.

When you know how a consumer spends their day, you can more accurately strategize where your brand communication can meet them. Are they checking Instagram on their lunch break, feeling open and optimistic about finding new products? If so, you’ll want to target ads on that platform to them at that time.

Day-in-the-life customer journey examples can look vastly different depending on your target demographic.

Empathy maps

Empathy maps don’t follow a particular sequence of events along the user journey. Instead, these are divided into four sections and track what someone says about their experience with your product when it’s in use.

You should create empathy maps after user research and testing. You can think of them as an account of all that was observed during research or testing when you asked questions directly regarding how people feel while using products. Empathy maps can give you unexpected insights into your users’ needs and wants.

Customer journey map templates

Use these templates to inspire your own customer journey map creation.

Customer journey map template for the current state:

The future state customer journey mapping template:

A day-in-the-life customer journey map template:

An empathy map template:

A customer journey map example

It can be helpful to see customer journey mapping examples. To give you some perspective on what these look like executed, we’ve created a customer journey mapping example of the current state.

Buyer Persona:

Curious Colleen, a 32-year-old female, is in a double-income no-kids marriage. Colleen and her partner work for themselves; while they have research skills, they lack time. She is motivated by quality products and frustrated by having to sift through content to get the information she needs.

What are their key goals and needs? Colleen needs a new vacuum. Her key goal is to find one that will not break again.

What are their struggles?

She is frustrated that her old vacuum broke and that she has to spend time finding a new one. Colleen feels as though this problem occurred because the vacuum she bought previously was of poor quality.

What tasks do they have?

Colleen must research vacuums to find one that will not break. She must then purchase a vacuum and have it delivered to her house.

Opportunities:

Colleen wants to understand quickly and immediately the benefits our product offers; how can we make this easier? Colleen upholds social proof as a decision-making factor. How can we better show our happy customers? There is an opportunity here to restructure our website information hierarchy or implement customer service tools to give Colleen the information she needs faster. We can create comparison charts with competitors, have benefits immediately and clearly stated, and create social campaigns.

Action Plan:

• Implement a chatbot so customers like Colleen can get the answers they want quickly and easily.
• Create a comparison tool for competitors and us, showing benefits and costs.
• Implement benefit-forward statements on all landing pages.
• Create a social campaign dedicated to UGC to foster social proof.
• Send out surveys dedicated to gathering customer feedback. Pull out testimonial quotes from here when possible.

Now that you know what the customer journey mapping process is, you can take these tactics and apply them to your own business strategy. By tracking customer behavior and pinpointing areas where your customers experience pain points, you’ll be able to alleviate stress for customers and your team in no time.

Turn customer conversations and inquiries into sales with Heyday, our dedicated conversational AI chatbot for social commerce retailers. Deliver 5-star customer experiences — at scale.

Turn customer service conversations into sales with Heyday . Improve response times and sell more products. See it in action.

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Colleen Christison is a freelance copywriter, copy editor, and brand communications specialist. She spent the first six years of her career in award-winning agencies like Major Tom, writing for social media and websites and developing branding campaigns. Following her agency career, Colleen built her own writing practice, working with brands like Mission Hill Winery, The Prevail Project, and AntiSocial Media.

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Updated: April 17, 2024

Published: May 04, 2023

Did you know 70% of online shoppers abandoned their carts in 2022? Why would someone spend time adding products to their cart just to fall off the customer journey map at the last second?

The thing is — understanding your customer base can be very challenging. Even when you think you’ve got a good read on them, the journey from awareness to purchase for each customer will always be unpredictable, at least to some level.

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While it isn’t possible to predict every experience with 100% accuracy, customer journey mapping is a convenient tool for keeping track of critical milestones that every customer hits. In this post, I’ll explain everything you need to know about customer journey mapping — what it is, how to create one, and best practices.

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

What is a customer journey map, benefits of customer journey mapping, customer journey stages.

• What’s included in a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Steps for creating a customer journey map.

• Types of Customer Journey Maps

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Customer Journey Design
• Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Free Customer Journey Template

Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free templates.

• Buyer's Journey Template
• Future State Template
• Day-in-the-Life Template

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The customer journey is the series of interactions a customer has with a brand, product, or business as they become aware of a pain point and make a purchase decision. While the buyer’s journey refers to the general process of arriving at a purchase, the customer journey refers to a buyer's purchasing experience with a specific company or service.

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

Many businesses that I’ve worked with were confused about the differences between the customer’s journey and the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey is the entire buying experience from pre-purchase to post-purchase. It covers the path from customer awareness to becoming a product or service user.

In other words, buyers don’t wake up and decide to buy on a whim. They go through a process of considering, evaluating, and purchasing a new product or service.

The customer journey refers to your brand’s place within the buyer’s journey. These are the customer touchpoints where you will meet your customers as they go through the stages of the buyer’s journey. When you create a customer journey map, you’re taking control of every touchpoint at every stage of the journey instead of leaving it up to chance.

For example, at HubSpot, our customer’s journey is divided into three stages — pre-purchase/sales, onboarding/migration, and normal use/renewal.

1. Use customer journey map templates.

Why make a customer journey map from scratch when you can use a template? Save yourself some time by downloading HubSpot’s free customer journey map templates .

This has templates that map out a buyer’s journey, a day in your customer’s life, lead nurturing, and more.

These templates can help sales, marketing, and customer support teams learn more about your company’s buyer persona. This will improve your product and customer experience.

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

Before you dive into your customer journey map, you need to ask yourself why you’re creating one in the first place.

What goals are you directing this map towards? Who is it for? What experience is it based upon?

If you don’t have one, I recommend creating a buyer persona . This persona is a fictitious customer with all the demographics and psychographics of your average customer. This persona reminds you to direct every aspect of your customer journey map toward the right audience.

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

Next, you should conduct research. This is where it helps to have customer journey analytics ready.

Don’t have them? No worries. You can check out HubSpot’s Customer Journey Analytics tool to get started.

Questionnaires and user testing are great ways to obtain valuable customer feedback. The important thing is to only contact actual customers or prospects.

You want feedback from people interested in purchasing your products and services who have either interacted with your company or plan to do so.

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

• How did you hear about our company?
• What first attracted you to our website?
• What are the goals you want to achieve with our company? In other words, what problems are you trying to solve?
• How long have you/do you typically spend on our website?
• Have you ever made a purchase with us? If so, what was your deciding factor?
• Have you ever interacted with our website to make a purchase but decided not to? If so, what led you to this decision?
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how easily can you navigate our website?
• Did you ever require customer support? If so, how helpful was it, on a scale of 1 to 10?
• Can we further support you to make your process easier?

You can use this buyer persona tool to fill in the details you procure from customer feedback.

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

Once you’ve learned about the customer personas that interact with your business, I recommend narrowing your focus to one or two.

Remember, a customer journey map tracks the experience of a customer taking a particular path with your company. If you group too many personas into one journey, your map won’t accurately reflect that experience.

When creating your first map, it’s best to pick your most common customer persona and consider the route they would typically take when engaging with your business for the first time.

You can use a marketing dashboard to compare each and determine the best fit for your journey map. Don’t worry about the ones you leave out, as you can always go back and create a new map specific to those customer types.

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

A touchpoint in a customer journey map is an instance where your customer can form an opinion of your business. You can find touchpoints in places where your business comes in direct contact with a potential or existing customer.

For example, if I were to view a display ad, interact with an employee, reach a 404 error, or leave a Google review, all of those interactions would be considered a customer touchpoint.

Your brand exists beyond your website and marketing materials, so you must consider the different types of touchpoints in your customer journey map. These touchpoints can help uncover opportunities for improvement in the buying journey.

Based on your research, you should have a list of all the touchpoints your customers are currently using and the ones you believe they should be using if there’s no overlap.

This is essential in creating a customer journey map because it provides insight into your customers’ actions.

For instance, if they use fewer touchpoints than expected, does this mean they’re quickly getting turned away and leaving your site early? If they are using more than expected, does this mean your website is complicated and requires several steps to reach an end goal?

Whatever the case, understanding touchpoints help you understand the ease or difficulties of the customer journey.

Aside from your website, you must also look at how your customers might find you online. These channels might include:

• Social channels.
• Email marketing.
• Third-party review sites or mentions.

Run a quick Google search of your brand to see all the pages that mention you. Verify these by checking your Google Analytics to see where your traffic is coming from. Whittle your list down to those touchpoints that are the most common and will be most likely to see an action associated with it.

At HubSpot, we hosted workshops where employees from all over the company highlighted instances where our product, service, or brand impacted a customer. Those moments were recorded and logged as touchpoints. This showed us multiple areas of our customer journey where our communication was inconsistent.

The proof is in the pudding — you can see us literally mapping these touch points out with sticky notes in the image below.

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Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free customer journey map templates.

Service Hub provides everything you need to delight and retain customers while supporting the success of your whole front office

Learn / Guides / Customer journey mapping (CJM) guide

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Customer journey mapping in 2 and 1/2 days

How to create a customer journey map that improves customer success.

Last updated

Reading time.

There’s a common saying that you can’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes—and that’s exactly what customer journey maps do: they help you put yourself in different customers’ shoes and understand your business from their point of view.

Why should you do it? How should you do it? Find the answers in this guide, which we wrote after interviewing 10+ customer journey experts who shared methodologies, dos and don’ts, and pro tips with us. 

On this page:

What is a customer journey map?

How to create a customer journey map in 2 and ½ working days

4 benefits of customer journey mapping for your business

In later chapters, we dive deeper into customer journey analytics, workshops, and real-life examples.

Start mapping your customer journey

Hotjar lets you experience the customer journey through their eyes, so you can visualize what’s working and what needs improvement.

A customer journey map (CJM) is a visual representation of how customers interact with and experience your website, products, or business across multiple touchpoints.

By visualizing the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers experience, a customer journey map helps you better understand them and identify the pain points they encounter. This is essential if you want to implement informed, customer-focused optimizations on your site.

Mapping the customer journey: narrow vs. wide focus

A customer journey map can have a very narrow focus and only look at a few, specific steps of the customer experience or buyer’s journey (for example, a product-to-purchase flow on a website), or it can take into account all the touchpoints, online and offline, someone goes through before and after doing business with you. 

Each type of customer journey map has its advantages:

A CJM with a narrow focus allows you to zero in on an issue and effectively problem-solve 

A CJM with a wide focus gives you a broader, holistic understanding of how customers experience your business

Regardless of their focus, the best customer journey maps have one thing in common: they are created with real customer data that you collect and analyze . The insights are usually organized into a map (hence the name), diagram, or flowchart during a group workshop, which is later shared across the entire business so everyone gets a clear and comprehensive overview of a customer’s journey.

How to create your first customer journey map in 2 and ½ working days

The process of creating a customer journey map can be as long or short as you need. Depending on how many people and stakeholders you involve, how much data you collect and analyze, and how many touchpoints there are across the business, you could be looking at days or even weeks and months of work.

If you’re new to customer journey mapping, start from a narrower scope before moving on to mapping every single customer touchpoint . 

Here’s our beginner customer journey mapping framework to help you create your first complete map in 2 and ½ working days:

Day 1: preliminary customer journey mapping work

Day 2: prep and run your customer journey mapping workshop.

Final ½ day: wrap up and share your results

Download your free customer journey map checklist  (as seen below), to mark off your tasks as you complete them.

On your first day, you have three essential tasks:

Define the goal and scope of your CJM

Collect customer data and insights

Invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

Step 1: define the goal and scope of your CJM

Clarifying what part(s) of the journey you're looking at, and why, helps you stay focused throughout the mapping process.

If this is your first map,  start from a known issue or problematic area of your website. Keep the scope small, and focus on anything you can break down into four or five steps. For example:

If you have a high drop-off on a pricing page with five calls-to-action, each of which takes users to a different page, that’s enough for a mappable journey

If your purchase flow is made of five self-contained pages, each of which loses you potential customers, that’s a good candidate for mapping

✅ The output: a one- or two-sentence description of what your map will cover, and why, you can use whenever you need to explain what the process is about. For example: this map looks at the purchase flow on our website, and helps us understand how customers go through each step and the issues or obstacles they encounter. The map starts after users click ‘proceed to checkout’ and ends when they reach the 'Thank You' page .

Step 2: collect customer data and insights

Once you identify your goal and scope, the bulk of your first day should be spent collecting data and insights you’ll analyze as part of your mapping process. Because your map is narrow in focus, don’t get distracted by wide-scale demographics or data points that are interesting and nice to know, but ultimately irrelevant. 

Get your hands on as much of the following information as you can:

Metrics from traditional analytics tools (such as Google Analytics) that give you insight into what’s happening, across the pages and stages your customer journey map covers

Data from analyzing your conversion ‘funnels’ , which record how many visitors end up at each stage of the user journey, so you can optimize those steps for potential customers and increase conversions

Behavior analytics data (from platforms like Hotjar) that show you how people interact with your site. For example, heatmaps give you an aggregate view of how users click, move and scroll on specific pages, and session recordings capture a user’s entire journey as they navigate your site

Quantitative and qualitative answers to on-site surveys relevant to the pages you’re going to investigate, as customer feedback will ultimately guide your roadmap of changes to make to improve the journey

Any demographic information about existing user and customer personas that helps you map the journey from the perspective of a real type of customer, rather than that of any hypothetical visitor, ensuring the journey makes sense for your target audience

Any relevant data from customer service chat logs, emails, or even anecdotal information from support, success, and sales teams about the issues customers usually experience

✅ The output: quantitative and qualitative data about your customers' interactions and their experiences across various touchpoints. For example, you’ll know how many people drop off at each individual stage, which page elements they interact with or ignore, and what stops them from converting.

💡Pro tip: as you read this guide, you may not yet have most of this data, particularly when it comes to heatmaps, recordings, and survey results. That’s ok. 

Unless you’re running your CJM workshop in the next 12 hours, you have enough time to set up Hotjar on your website and start collecting insights right now. The platform helps you:

Learn where and why users drop off with Funnels

Visualize interactions on key pages with Heatmaps

Capture visitor sessions across your website with Recordings

Run on-site polls with Surveys

When the time comes for you to start your customer journey mapping process, this data will be invaluable.

Step 3: invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

In our experience, the most effective way to get buy-in is not to try and convince people after things are done—include them in the process from the start. So while you can easily create a customer journey map on your own, it won’t be nearly as powerful as one you create with team members from different areas of expertise .

For example, if you’re looking at the purchase flow, you need to work with:

Someone from the UX team, who knows about the usability of the flow and can advocate for design changes

Someone from dev or engineering, who knows how things work in the back end, and will be able to push forward any changes that result from the map

Someone from success or support, who has first-hand experience talking to customers and resolving any issues they experience

✅ The output: you’ve set a date, booked a meeting space, and invited a group of four to six participants to your customer journey mapping workshop.

💡Pro tip: for your first map, stay small. Keep it limited to four to six people, and no main stakeholders . This may be unpopular advice, especially since many guides out there mention the importance of having stakeholders present from the start.

However, when you’re not yet very familiar with the process, including too many people early on can discourage them from re-investing their time into future CJM tasks. At this stage, it’s more helpful to brainstorm with a small team, get feedback on how to improve, and iterate a few times. Once you have a firm handle on the process, then start looping in your stakeholders.

On workshop day, you’ll spend half your time prepping and the other half running the actual session.

Step 1: prepare all your materials 

To run a smooth workshop, ensure you do the following:

Bring stationery: for an interactive workshop, you’ll need basic materials such as pens, different colored Post-its, masking tape, and large sheets of paper to hang on the wall

Collect and print out the data: use the data you collected on Day 1. It’s good to have digital copies on a laptop or tablet for everybody to access, but print-outs could be the better alternative as people can take notes and scribble on them.

Print out an empathy map canvas for each participant: start the workshop with an empathy mapping exercise (more on this in Step 2). For this, hand each participant an empty empathy map canvas you can recreate from the template below.

Set up a customer journey map template on the wall: use a large sheet of paper to create a grid you'll stick to the wall and fill in as part of the workshop. On the horizontal axis, write the customer journey steps you identified during your Day 1 prep work; on the vertical axis, list the themes you want to analyze for each step. For example:

Actions your customers take

Questions they might have

Happy moments they experience

Pain points they experience

Tech limits they might encounter

Opportunities that arise

Step 2: run the workshop

This is the most interactive (and fun) part of the process. Follow the framework below to go from zero to a completed draft of a map in just under 2 hours .

Introduction [🕒 5–10 min]

Introduce yourself and your participants to one another

Using the one-two sentence description you defined on Day 1, explain the goal and scope of the workshop and the activities it will involve

Offer a quick summary of the customer persona you’ll be referring to throughout the session

Empathy mapping exercise [🕒 30 min]

Using the personas and data available, have each team member map their observations onto sticky notes and paste them on the relevant section of the empathy mapping canvas

Have all participants take turns presenting their empathy map

Facilitate group discussions where interesting points of agreement or disagreement appear

Customer journey mapping [🕒 60 min]

Using Post-its, ask each participant to fill in parts of the map grid with available information. Start by filling in the first row together, so everybody understands the process, then do each row individually (15–20 min). At the end of the process, you should have something like this:

Looking at the completed map, encourage your team to discuss and align on core observations (and take notes: they’ll come in handy on your final half day). At this point, customer pain points and opportunities should become evident for everybody involved. Having a cross-functional team means people will naturally start discussing what can, or cannot, immediately be done to address them (35–40 min).

Wrap up [🕒 5 min]

Congratulations! Your first customer journey map is complete. Finish the session by thanking your participants and letting them know the next steps.

Final half-day: wrap up and share

Once you’ve gone through the entire customer journey mapping workshop, the number one thing you want to avoid is for all this effort to go to waste. Instead of leaving the map hanging on the wall (or worse: taking it down, folding it, and forgetting about it), the final step is to wrap the process up and communicate the results to the larger team.

Digitize the map so you can easily update and share it with team members: it may be tempting to use dedicated software or invest time into a beautiful design, but for the first few iterations, it’s enough to add the map to your team’s existing workflows (for example, our team digitized our map and added it straight into Jira, where it’s easily accessible)

Offer a quick write-up or a 5-minute video introduction of the activity: re-use the description you came up with on Day 1, including who was involved and the top three outcomes

Clearly state the follow-up actions: if you’ve found obvious issues that need fixing, that’s a likely next step. If you’ve identified opportunities for change and improvement, you may want to validate these findings via customer interviews and usability testing.

4 benefits of customer journey mapping

In 2023, it’s almost a given that great customer experience (CX) provides any business or ecommerce site with a competitive advantage. But just how you’re supposed to deliver on the concept and create wow-worthy experiences is often left unsaid, implied, or glossed over.

Customer journey maps help you find answers to this ‘How?’ question, enabling you to:

Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

Create cross-team alignment around the business

Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

We’ve done a lot of customer journey work here at Hotjar, so we know that the above is true—but don’t just take our word for it: all the people we interviewed for this guide confirmed the benefits of journey mapping. Let’s take a look at what they shared.

1. Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

It’s one thing to present your entire team with charts, graphs, and trends about your customers, and quite another to put the same team in front of ONE map that highlights what customers think, want, and do at each step of their journey.

I did my first customer journey map at MADE.COM within the first three months of joining the company. I was trying to map the journey to understand where the pain points were.

For example, people who want to buy a sofa from us will be coming back to the site 8+ times over several weeks before making a purchase. In that time, they may also visit a showroom. So now I look at that journey, at a customer’s motivation for going to the website versus a physical store, and I need to make sure that the experience in the showroom complements what they're doing on-site, and vice-versa, and that it all kind of comes together.

The map helps in seeing that journey progress right up to the time someone becomes a customer. And it also continues after: we see the next touchpoints and how we're looking to retain them as a customer, so that they come back and purchase again.

A customer journey map is particularly powerful when you incorporate empathy into it, bringing to light specific emotions that customers experience throughout the journey.

2. Create cross-team alignment around the business

The best, most effective customer journey maps are not the solo project of the user experience (UX) or marketing team (though they may originate there).

Customer journey maps are a quick, easy, and powerful way to help everybody in your business get a clearer understanding of how things work from a customers’ perspective and what the customers’ needs are—which is the first step in your quest towards creating a better experience for them.

Our first goal for preparing a customer journey map was to improve understanding customers across the company, so that every employee could understand the entire process our clients go through.

For example, people from the shipping department didn't know how the process works online; people from marketing didn't know how customers behave after filing a complaint. Everything seems obvious, but when we shared these details, we saw that a lot of people didn't know how the company itself works—this map made us realize that there were still gaps we needed to fill.

If we discover that customers have a pain point in a specific section of the map, different teams can look at the same section from several angles; customer support can communicate why something is not possible, and engineering can explain why it’s going to take X amount of effort to get it done. Especially in cross-functional teams where we all come from really different disciplines, I find these maps to be an incredible way for us all to speak the same language.

3. Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

As a company grows in size and complexity, the lines of ownership occasionally become blurry. Without clarity, a customer might get bounced like a ping pong ball across Sales, Success, and Support departments—not great for the seamless and frictionless customer experience we all want to offer.

A central source of ‘truth’ in the form of a customer journey map that everybody can refer to helps clarify areas of ownership and handover points.

We were growing as a team, and we realized we needed to operationalize a lot of the processes that, before then, had just been manually communicated. We did it through a customer journey map. Our goal was to better understand where these hand-off points were and how to create a more seamless experience for our customers, because they were kind of being punted from team to team, from person to person—and often, it was really hard to keep tabs on exactly where the customer was in that entire journey.

4. Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

A customer journey map will take your team from 'It appears that 30% of people leave the website at this stage' to 'Wow, people are leaving because the info is incomplete and the links are broken.' Once everyone is aligned on the roadblocks that need to be addressed, changes that have a positive impact on the customer experience and customer satisfaction will happen faster.

The customer journey map brings it all together: it doesn't matter who you've got in the room. If you’re doing a proper journey map, they always get enlightened in terms of ‘Oh, my word. I did not know the customer's actually experiencing this.’ And when I walk out of the session, we have often solved issues in the business. Accountability and responsibilities have been assigned, and I find that it just works well.

Shaheema (right) working on a customer journey map

Collect the right data to create an effective customer journey map

The secret of getting value from customer journey mapping is not just building the map itself: it's taking action on your findings. Having a list of changes to prioritize means you can also measure their effect once implemented, and keep improving your customers' experience. 

This all starts with collecting customer-centric data—the sooner you begin, the more information you’ll have when the time comes to make a decision.

Start mapping your customer journey today

Hotjar lets you experience your customer’s journey through their eyes, so you can visualize what’s working and what needs improvement.

FAQs about customer journey mapping

How do i create a customer journey map.

To create a useful customer journey map, you first need to define your objectives, buyer personas, and the goals of your customers (direct customer feedback and  market research will help you here). Then, identify all the distinct touchpoints the customer has with your product or service in chronological order, and visualize the completion of these steps in a map format.

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping provides different teams in your company with a simple, easily understandable visualization that captures your customers’ perspective and needs, and the steps they’ll  take to successfully use your  product or service. 

Consider customer journey mapping if you want to accomplish a specific objective (like testing a new product’s purchase flow) or work towards a much broader goal (like increasing overall customer retention or customer loyalty).

What is the difference between a customer journey map and an experience map?

The main difference between an experience map and a customer journey map is that customer journey maps are geared specifically toward business goals and the successful use of a product or service, while experience maps visualize an individual’s journey and experience through the completion of any task or goal that may not be related to business.

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10 Best Customer Journey Mapping Software Tools in 2024

Senior Content Marketing Manager

May 13, 2024

Understanding your team’s needs and customer expectations is critical to running a successful business. One way to achieve this understanding is by mapping out their journey, from their first interaction to their final purchase, and yes, there are tools to automate this process and make it way easier!

This article will explore customer journey mapping tools and outline our top 10 of the crop, each with unique features and benefits. Keep reading to find the perfect software to enhance your customer engagement efforts.

What are Customer Journey Mapping Tools?

2. custellence, 4. lucidchart, 5. visual paradigm, 6. uxpressia, 9. flowmapp, 10. microsoft visio, what to look for in customer journey mapping tools.

A customer journey mapping tool is a software application or platform that helps businesses create visual representations of customer touchpoints and experiences. Customer journey mapping involves understanding and documenting a customer’s various interactions with a business, from their initial awareness and engagement to the final purchase or onboarding and post-purchase experience.

The best customer journey mapping tool typically provides user-friendly interfaces that let businesses create visual diagrams on digital Whiteboards or Mind Maps of the customer journey. These journey maps often include different stages or phases of the customer’s experience and other aspects such as awareness, consideration, decision-making, purchase, and post-purchase.

Within each stage, the user journey map tool allows the user to define and outline specific touchpoints, interactions, channels, and emotions the customer may experience.

Mastering the customer journey mapping process helps you make sense of customer data, gain insights and identify areas for improving your average customer’s experience.

10 Best Customer Journey Mapping Software to Use in 2024

Are you tired of hearing about the essence of mapping your customer journey but unsure where to start? Fear not, as we are about to give you “the tea” on the best customer journey mapping software for you to get started.

Our top 10 picks for customer journey mapping tools include the following:

ClickUp is an excellent customer journey mapping tool that lets you create the best visual workflow representations with its whiteboard feature and mind map maker. These features help you outline and view the various touchpoints of your customer lifecycle, from awareness to conversion, repeat purchases, churn, and more.

ClickUp also offers multiple customer journey map templates , so you don’t have to create yours from scratch. Create detailed workflows and approval processes with Mind Maps so you can easily create dependencies for each step.

ClickUp key features

• ClickUp’s Whiteboard : ClickUp has a whiteboard feature that allows individuals and teams to visualize ideas, improve communication and create unique CRM workflows to improve customer journeys
• Mind Map Maker : ClickUp’s Mind Mapping feature helps create dynamic visual outlines and flowcharts for ideas, projects, or existing tasks
• Customizable templates : ClickUp provides templates for multiple use cases, including creating project roadmaps and customer journey maps – so you have a base to start from
• Custom views : Choose between 15+ different views for task management, journey mapping, diagramming, or through custom Gantt charts

ClickUp limitations

• ClickUp has a ton of customizations, so it can be a little difficult to learn it all right away

ClickUp pricing

• Free Forever
• Unlimited: $7/month per user 
• Business: $12/month per user
• Enterprise: Custom pricing available–if you need software to handle your business, contact Sales to help set you up when you are ready

ClickUp customer ratings

• G2 : 4.7/5 (6,700+ reviews)
• Capterra : 4.7/5 (3,600+ reviews)

Custellence is a customer journey mapping tool that helps teams and organizations understand and improve customer experiences. With its simple drag-and-drop functionality and real-time collaboration features, Custellance lets users create customer journey maps in minutes, get buy-in from stakeholders, increase customer engagement, and drive customer-centered change.

Custellence best features

• Unique image collection
• Flexible journey map structure
• Curated icons
• Broad color palette
• Multiple templates for a quick start
• Enables export to PNG, CSV, or PDF versions
• Commenting feature for seamless collaboration
• Ability to choose your preferred code system

Custellence limitations

• Text updates sometimes take a while
• No free offer to create customer journey maps from templates

Custellence pricing

• Standard : $0 
• Professional : $30/month per user
• Enterprise : Custom pricing

Custellence ratings & reviews

• G2: 4.2/5 (5+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.3/5 (10+ reviews)

Smaply is one of this list’s top customer journey mapping tools because it helps create visually appealing journey maps and facilitates customer feedback tools for real-time online collaboration.

On Smaply, teams can collaborate on different maps, exchange customer feedback and visualize customer experience insights.

Smaply best features

• Online and offline collaboration features with an intuitive interface
• Drag and drop editor for detailed journey maps
• GDPR compliant
• High data security
• No credit card required

Smaply limitations

• Not enough persona templates
• No rewind button

Smaply pricing

• Free: 0 eur/month per user
• Basic: 19 eur/month per user
• Pro: 29 eur/month per user
• Enterprise: Contact Smaply for pricing

Smaply ratings & reviews

• G2: 4.6/5 (10+ reviews)
• Capterra : 4.4/5 (15+ reviews)

Lucidchart is an intelligent diagramming software that can create customer journey and stakeholder maps. It allows teams to efficiently and collaboratively build visual presentations of complex processes , systems, and ideas.

With Lucidchart, you can easily create journey maps to understand how customers find, buy and use your products – and improve them to capture more revenue.

Lucidchart best features

• Data linking
• Auto-visualization
• Integration options like Google Workspace, Atlassian, Slack, and more.
• Visualization filters to highlight specific customer journeys
• Automatic cloud documentation to save and share customer personas

Lucidchart limitations

• Sometimes lags when working on large, complex diagrams with multiple elements
• Steep learning curve, unlike many alternatives
• Low-resolution exports
• Some users’ pain points are with the limited brand icons, images, and shapes to illustrate user journey maps
• Importing external graphics is complicated and sometimes impossible

Lucidchart pricing

• Individual: $7.95/ month per user
• Team: $9/month per user
• Enterprise: Contact Lucidchart for pricing

Lucidchart ratings & reviews

• G2 : 4.6/5 (2300+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.5/5 (1900+ reviews)

Check out these Lucidchart alternatives!

Visual Paradigm is a suite of agile project tools for boosting productivity. The platform offers visual modeling and diagramming features that can be used to build journey maps and gain insight into customer emotions as they interact with your brand.

Visual Paradigm has several diagram types for conducting user research and building more precise visual representations of customer behaviors and journey maps.

Visual Paradigm best features

• Customer experience design tool
• Process map designer to highlight customer touchpoints
• Online diagram tool for detailed customer and stakeholder maps
• Report generation for customer journeys
• Textual analysis
• Mind mapping tool for customer journey maps
• Project publisher
• Infographics and diagram maker
• Drag-and-drop diagram editor for simple journey mapping

Visual Paradigm limitations

• Diagram connections can be complicated for some when building customer journey maps
• Some users found the app’s shortcuts sometimes don’t work
• Lacks some of the collaborative features users are looking for

Visual Paradigm pricing

• Modeler: $6/month per user
• Standard: $19/month per user
• Professional: $35/month per user
• Enterprise: $89/month per user

Visual Paradigm ratings & reviews

• G2: 4.5/5 (2+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.2/5 (15+ reviews

UXPressia is a visual collaboration software for creating not just customer journey maps but user personas and impact maps as well. The software enables real-time collaboration and offers customer experience courses to help individuals and teams perform better.

UXPressia best features

• High-quality exports with custom branding
• 70+ customer journey maps, personas, and impact map templates
• Interactive online courses
• Online persona creator to highlight pain points
• Experience graph
• Integrated web analytics to detail the customer experience
• File attachments
• Presentation mode to display journey maps online

UXPressia limitations

• Some users felt constrained by limited features and unintuitive workflow
• No Jira or Confluence integration can make it difficult for users with that software in their workflow
• Steep learning curve for some users creating customer journey maps

UXPressia pricing

• Starter : $16/month per user
• Pro : $36/month per user
• Enterprise : Contact UXPressia for pricing

UXPressia ratings & reviews

• G2: 4.4/5 (10+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.7/5 (70+ reviews)

Sketch enables users to create different designs for their projects. With its robust features, like copy and paste, image editing and adjustments, library management, and more, Sketch can build journey maps across customer touchpoints.

Recently, the journey map company introduced an experimental feature menu for users to try unreleased features and share feedback before launch.

Sketch best features

• Available on multiple platforms – MacOS and web
• Advanced vector editing with its mapping tool
• Reusable design templates
• Intuitive prototyping
• Shared libraries
• Solo design or real-time collaboration
• Customizable toolbars

Sketch limitations

• Mapping tool is not available on iPad, which makes it tough for on-the-go Mac users
• It takes time to learn the full of the journey mapping capabilities
• Doesn’t work on Windows devices

Sketch pricing

• Standard: $12/month per editor
• Business: $20/month per editor

Sketch ratings & reviews

• G2 : 4.5/5 (1,100+ reviews)
• Capterra : 4.6/5 (750+ reviews)

Figma is a collaborative interface design software famous for its prototyping capabilities. With Figma, individuals and teams can create designs from scratch, including customer journey maps that can be used to visualize and improve customer satisfaction.

This customer experience and journey mapping tool stands out in this list because it offers a whiteboarding function for freehand wireframing and designing. Figma is targeted at user interface/experience (UI/UX) design rather than customer journey mapping, unlike many other tools on this list.

Figma best features

• Modern pen tool
• Plugins for automating tasks and improving workflows
• Flexible styles
• Accessible libraries
• Unlimited viewers
• Easy export to share the customer experience with your team

Figma limitations

• Not available offline, which can be difficult if you’re traveling where there’s spotty wifi
• It can be difficult to find resources in the community section
• Some users felt there weren’t enough image manipulation options—especially when creating customer journey maps

Figma pricing

• Figma professional : $12/month per editor
• Figma organization : $45/month per editor

Figma ratings & reviews

• G2: 4.7/5 (800+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.7/5 (600+ reviews)

One of the leading UX tools for web design workflows , FlowMapp allows individuals and teams to create and iterate sitemaps. It also offers features that track the status and comments/ongoing conversations about each design.

FlowMapp’s design functionalities come in handy for customer experience management, journey mapping, and the creation of customer personas.

FlowMapp best features

• Intuitive sitemaps for visualizing team workflows
• Flowchart diagrams for user journey and website planning
• User flow diagrams for planning a better customer journey and improved user experiences
• Ability to share, transfer, or archive projects or customer experience logs
• Drag and drop interface

FlowMapp limitations

• Inflexible nodes and templates compared to alternatives
• No separate input field specifically for search engine results page (SERP) information
• Some users struggled to navigate between projects
• Not enough integrations for some journey mapping tool users

FlowMapp pricing

• Pro : $18/month per user
• Team : $54/month for up to five team members
• Agency : $180/month for an unlimited number of team members

FlowMapp ratings & reviews

• G2: 4.7/5 (80+ reviews)
• Capterra: Unavailable

Microsoft Visio uses stencils, premade templates, starter diagrams, and flowcharts to help customer journey managers and individuals looking to create easy-to-understand visuals.

With Visio, you can create, edit, and collaborate in Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft products.

Microsoft Visio best features

• Built-in templates for flowchart creation
• Organization chart
• Export and import functionality
• Highly customizable diagrams and graphics

Microsoft Visio limitation

• Difficulty with linking elements and sharing large files
• Limited collaboration options
• Does not integrate well with various wireframe programs
• Incompatible with tools outside the Microsoft Suite

Microsoft Visio pricing

• Visio plan 1: $5/month per user
• Visio plan 2: $15/month per user

Microsoft Visio ratings & reviews

• G2: 4.2/5 (600+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.5/5 (3000+ reviews)

Customer journey mapping software is indispensable for businesses that want to enhance their customer experiences. When selecting a customer journey mapping software, it is crucial to consider the following:

• Multi-channel journey mapping : Your customer journey mapping software should support multi-channel mapping, allowing you to capture and analyze interactions across different channels, including websites, mobile apps, social media, physical stores, call centers, and more.
• Data integration and automation : Look for software that seamlessly integrates with other data sources, such as CRM and project management systems, marketing automation platforms, or analytics tools. This integration lets you gather real-time data and automate the mapping process, saving time and improving the accuracy of the information.
• Collaboration and sharing features : The software should facilitate collaboration among team members, allowing them to work simultaneously, leave comments, and track changes.
• Analytics and metrics tracking : Look for customer journey maps with built-in analytics and metrics tracking capabilities to measure the effectiveness of your customer journey initiatives. It should allow you to set and track key performance indicators (KPIs) related to customer experience and other relevant metrics.
• Scalability and flexibility : You want journey mapping tools that can manage large datasets, support complex customer journeys, and adapt to changing business needs. Look for customizable features that allow you to tailor the software to match your specific requirements, ensuring flexibility and long-term usability.
• Customer support and training : Evaluate the level of customer support and training the software vendor provides. That includes assets like comprehensive documentation , tutorials, and training resources to assist users in maximizing the software’s potential. 

A customer journey mapping tool with the right blend of these features will help you gain valuable customer insights, improve user satisfaction, and drive sustainable business growth.

ClickUp—Your Best Customer Journey Mapping Software

ClickUp is the best customer experience management and journey mapping software out there. It’s like having a super-smart assistant who knows your customer’s ins and outs.

Say goodbye to the headache of manually organizing customer data, and hello to a tool that makes your customer analytics process so much easier.

Try ClickUp’s customer journey map template today .

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Customer journey mapping 101 (+ free templates)

When I was a kid, I remember watching my parents switch between different credit cards to get the best rewards for a particular purchase. They almost always pulled out the American Express first because (as they explained to me) the base reward rate was higher than even the sector-specific perks offered by other cards. Twenty years later, when I decided to get a high-end credit card, Amex was the first one that came to mind.

Customer journey mapping is the process of planning out people's awareness of and relationship to your brand, starting with their very first impression—even if, as in my case, that impression is made a full decade before they can actually use your product.

Table of contents: 

What is a customer journey map?

Think back to any recent purchase of your own, and try to trace your own customer journey:

When and where was your first contact with the product or service?

How many channels of communication with the company did you have available?

How was the contact you had, if any? Was it personal or formulaic?

Were your problems, if any, solved? If so, were they solved in a timely manner?

What do you now know about the brand besides the product or service itself?

The customer journey vs. the user journey vs. the buyer journey

What's the difference between the customer, user, and buyer journeys?

The customer journey is split up into two parts: the buyer journey and the user journey. The buyer journey covers everything up to the point of purchase. After that point, the customer becomes a user, and all of their experiences are part of the user journey. 

Benefits of customer journey mapping

Here are the main benefits of the customer journey mapping process:

Touchpoint optimization: With a clear understanding of what your touchpoints are and where they occur, you can track and adjust them based on how they perform.

Enhanced customer experience insights: Through customer profiling and a better overview of all the touchpoints that make a journey, you can acquire more precise and actionable customer experience insights.

Improved product development: Thoughtful and intentional journey planning creates more opportunities for meaningful customer feedback, which gives businesses better information to improve their product.

Customer journey map template

The customer journey map includes additional details within each phase (which I'll discuss in more detail later) to help you strategically plan your customers' touchpoints and move them closer to a purchase.

Below, we'll walk through each part of the customer journey map and how to use it. 

Parts of a journey map

If you're already familiar with journey mapping, you can start filling in the template right away. Otherwise, here's a quick walkthrough of what goes in each section.

What is the customer doing?

In this section, you'll jot down the main things that the prospect, lead, or customer is doing during this stage. For example, if you're a personal trainer, an awareness stage key step might include something like "Prospect wants to get in shape." Or if you offer an email newsletter app, an expansion and advocacy stage key step might be "Customer upgrades their plan." 

Each stage will likely have more than one key step or milestone—that's good. You should be specific enough to be able to create touchpoints, content, and marketing campaigns geared toward each milestone.

What is the customer thinking?

Next, put yourself in the customer's shoes and think about what questions they might have at each stage. In the awareness stage, it might be things like "How can I do X better?" or "What is [your product name]?" In the consideration phase, questions like "Is this worth my time/money?" or "Will this help me solve my problem?" will come to the forefront. 

Where and how could the customer encounter our brand?

After you've outlined what your customer is thinking at each stage, align each question with the relevant touchpoint that could address each concern.

What touchpoint opportunities are missing?

When you have a question or milestone that doesn't have a corresponding touchpoint, you've found a gap in your customer journey. That means customers at this stage are going to be left with unmet needs and unanswered questions, and may look more seriously at competitor products as a result. It's essential to develop touchpoints to fill this gap and prevent losing potential customers at a key milestone.

Stages of the customer journey

The customer journey map can be split into five phases: awareness, consideration, conversion, retention, and brand loyalty.

Customers can't decide whether or not they want your product if they don't know that it exists. In the earliest phase of the customer journey, a business's goal is to reach the individual and, ultimately, attract them to the brand.

Consideration

Once potential customers are aware of your brand, the next phase they enter is called "consideration" or "research." This is when the customer's perspective shifts from simple awareness of your brand's existence to an understanding of the value that you have to offer them. 

Some businesses also include a mini-stage called "Intent" or "Onboarding," when the customer has decided they're interested in the product and is testing it out. The company's goal in this stage is simply to provide an exceptional user experience—they want to make sure the product works as intended and the customer's questions and requests are handled well.

A business can identify customers that are primed for conversion based on behavior in the consideration stage. Someone who signs up for a newsletter isn't a hot sales prospect quite yet, but when they start opening more emails and spending more time on the site, that's when brands know they're ready for a conversion push.

An abandoned cart email pushing a browsing shopper to complete a purchase

A physical mail offer pushing a potential customer to open an account

A seasonal campaign highlighting why a product is perfect for a particular holiday, celebration, or event

When a conversion is successful, a potential buyer becomes an actual customer. The goal in the retention stage is to demonstrate to the customer why they were right to make their purchase, and set them up to make more purchases or renew services in the future.

The retention stage is also where the user experience or user journey begins. The company's job in this phase, then, is to provide the best possible user experience. Easy installation, frictionless customer service, and—this part should be obvious—a product or service that works well and provides the user what they need are all key components to improved customer retention.

Brand loyalty

In the final customer journey phase, users go from run-of-the-mill satisfied customers to active advocates for your business. 

Keep in mind: a customer doesn't need to be a zealot for your company to be an unintentional brand advocate. One of the biggest reasons I made the decision to apply for Amex's high-end card is because my best friend has it. She didn't specifically recommend it to me, but I became interested after experiencing a lot of the card benefits vicariously through her. 

Advanced customer journey mapping tips

Everything we've covered up to this point will only get you as far as a basic customer journey map. That doesn't mean, however, that your customer journey map will be good . Once you have the basic journey mapping structure down, you'll want to take steps to continually improve your map's effectiveness.

Survey your customers and customer teams

Talk to your customer-facing employees, too. The people who work directly with customers day-to-day will have more accurate information about how to interact with them.

Automate customer data collection

Tweak for b2b, b2c, and saas industries.

The nature of the customer journey is different for SaaS, B2B, and B2C companies. A B2B company's interactions with prospects might include in-person conferences, while a SaaS company's touchpoints will be mostly digital. Companies that sell to consumers will need to think through individual people's experiences in a way that B2B companies don't. A company whose products are designed for emergencies will need to think through crisis scenarios instead of day-to-day customer experiences.

Tweak your customer journey categories to fit your company, product, and industry. Using a generalized or poorly-fitting customer journey map will result in vague and unhelpful interactions with your brand.

Create multiple maps for different journeys

When people refer to the customer journey, they're typically talking about the overarching journey from awareness to brand loyalty that we outlined above. However, you can map any part of the customer journey and experience. 

Do you target college students? Replace the five stages with four academic quarters and map their experience over the course of a year. 

Is your product designed to be used in the car? Map the customer journey through each hour of a long road trip. 

Zooming in to create detailed maps of different aspects of the customer journey will help you create even more specifically tailored customer experiences.

Types of journey maps

The template above follows the standard stages of the customer journey, but it's not the only way to do your customer journey mapping.

Two other commonly-used journey maps are the "Day in a life" journey map and the customer support journey map. We've provided the key elements of both below, as well as customer journey map templates for each.

Day/week/month in the life map

This map includes space for you to record the buyer persona's name, occupation, and motto, but these are really just shorthand for key persona characteristics. If you're selling baby diapers, for instance, your persona's occupation would be "parent," even if the person in question is also an accountant. 

The "motto" should be a condensed version of your persona's primary mindset with regard to their wants, needs, and pain points. The motto for an expecting first-time parent might be, "I'm excited but nervous—I have to make sure I'm prepared for anything."

Use the column headers to set your time frame. If you're marketing to expecting parents, the time frame might be the nine months of a pregnancy, or you might map an expectant mother's experiences through a single day in her third trimester. At each stage, ask yourself the same questions:

Where and how could the customer encounter our brand? Alternatively: how could our brand provide value at each stage?

A day in the life customer journey map will not only help you zoom in to develop more tailored experiences, but it will also give you insights into what might be useful to add or improve in your product or service.

Support experience map

This journey map is a bit different in that it doesn't just map touchpoints; it maps functional interactions between the customer and customer service representatives as well as the behind-the-scenes activities necessary to support the customer-facing team.

This map starts when the support ticket is opened and ends when the customer's issue is resolved. The top row of the map is simple: what is the customer doing at each stage in the support process?

​​Next, you'll record the corresponding actions of your customer-facing, or "frontstage" team. This includes both employees' actions and the systems engaged in the support process. For example, if the first step of your customer support process is handled by a chatbot or automatic phone system, these will go in the technology row. If the customer moves forward to request to speak with a representative, then the second stage is where your "employee actions" row will come into play.

Finally, the bottom row is for behind-the-scenes activity performed by employees who don't interact with the customer at all. For example, if the customer representative needs to get information from another department to answer the customer's questions, the other department's involvement will be recorded in the "backstage actions" section of the map.

Customer journey mapping example

To put it all together, here's an example customer journey map for a gym. 

Researches local gyms online

Reads reviews

Compares membership options

"I can't go up a flight of stairs without getting winded; I need to get my health and fitness on track."

"I wish I knew someone who could recommend this gym." 

Encounters: 

Online reviews

Social media pages

Missing touchpoint:

Success stories on social media in a front-and-center location, like a saved Instagram Stories collection or a pinned post 

Views gym's social media

Visits gym's website

Views membership pricing page

"This gym looks clean and modern from the photos."

"I hate calling the gym, but I'd like to learn more about personal training or class options."

Contact form

Free trial request pop-up

A live chat box on the gym's website for prospective customers to ask questions about the facility or membership options before visiting 

Visits the gym to take a tour

Meets with a membership consultant

Potentially signs up for free trial

"The staff was friendly and it was easy to sign up."

"I wish I could see what classes they offer and weekly schedules without having to visit the gym."

In-person visit

Facility tour

Consultation

Free trial sign-up

Orientation session

Gym access card

A mobile app where members can track their progress, access class schedules, book personal trainer sessions, and receive personalized workout recommendations

Visits the gym regularly

Participates in classes

Engages with personal trainers

Potentially pays for membership after free trial ends

"Maybe I should compare options again." 

"I wish I knew someone who could work out with me."

Personal trainer consults

Email reminders about upcoming end to free trial

Personalized offer encouraging renewal

Follow-up call

Community-building events like workshops or challenges to foster a sense of community and support among members and staff

Refers friends and coworkers

Promotes the gym on social media

Regularly visits and attends classes 

"My coworker would love this gym since it's so close to work." 

"I love that teacher. I'm going to try some of her other classes."

Referral programs

Social media engagement

Reviews gym

Potentially provides a testimonial for gym

Missing touchpoints:

A loyalty rewards program for members' continued commitment and engagement that offers exclusive discounts, merchandise, or access to premium services 

Related reading:

This article was originally published in May 2021 by Nick Djurovic. The most recent update was in August 2023.

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Amanda is a writer and content strategist who built her career writing on campaigns for brands like Nature Valley, Disney, and the NFL. When she's not knee-deep in research, you'll likely find her hiking with her dog or with her nose in a good book.

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Customer journey mapping software

Lucidchart is a visual workspace that combines diagramming, data visualization, and collaboration to accelerate understanding and drive innovation.

Grasp the customer experience with our customer journey mapping tool

Create in-depth diagrams that capture the customer experience

Understanding your customer’s expectations, objectives, and interactions with your company is essential for creating a flawless customer experience. By mapping the customer journey from your consumer’s perspective, you can gain insight into the individual interactions that make up their experience from beginning to end. With customizable templates and extensive formatting options, our customer journey software lets you easily visualize and share your findings, helping you target specific personas, increase customer engagement, and ultimately increase your organization’s revenue.

Build a streamlined site with our user story software

As a UX designer, a user journey map can help you visualize your customer’s experience as they interact with your site or app. Our intuitive user story mapping tools let you easily outline how individual personas navigate and ultimately reach your site’s point of sale, allowing you to cater to your audience’s motivations and eliminate pain points. Lucidchart’s easy-to-use interface makes it simple to build and refine your user story map as your organization and customer experience evolve.

Collaborate with other departments and stakeholders

Ensure that your customer journey map is as comprehensive as possible. Lucidchart helps you collaborate with the stakeholders and teams responsible for each touchpoint in the customer journey. Using real-time collaboration and in-editor commenting and chatting, your team can keep your map up to date without worrying about version control or wasted time. No matter where or when your team is working, your customer journey map will reflect all of your latest updates.

Share, publish, and implement your customer journey map

Our dynamic sharing options and powerful integrations make it easy to distribute your diagram amongst stakeholders and decision makers. Easily invite others to view and edit your diagram via email or embed your diagram in collaborative platforms like Jira, Salesforce, or Slack. Once the final version of your customer journey map is complete, publish and share your diagram company-wide to keep your organization on the same page as you implement action items and revise your customer journey.

How to create a customer journey map

Define clear objectives for the map.

Identify the purpose of your customer journey map, the experience it is based on, and its audience. Your map can be based on an actual, hypothetical, or future customer experience.

Conduct customer persona research to understand your customer's goals

Collect info on your customer, including variables they're likely to experience during their journey with your company. List related touchpoints, actions, channels, motivations, pain points, and ownership.

Start mapping the user journey to include touchpoints

With your customer's info collected, add elements to your customer journey map that address the touchpoints and objectives specific to your customer.

Identify gaps along the customer journey and refine

Identify potential pain points in the customer journey. Lucidchart makes it easy to visualize and refine the journey to ensure the customer has an efficient and satisfying experience.

Present and share

Share your user journey map with stakeholders to implement appropriate solutions. Keep your map accessible to easily test, update, and improve it every six months or so.

Frequently asked questions about creating a customer journey map online

You can create a customer journey map from scratch by dragging and dropping basic shapes, or you can customize a customer journey map from our template gallery.

Read the blog post linked below for tips to create and keep your customer journey map organized.

Yes! We have an assortment to choose from, depending on your customer journey map’s objective. Type "customer journey" in the template gallery search bar to browse through templates.

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Customer Journey Map Template

Basic Customer Journey Map Template

Coffee Shop Journey Map Template

Customer Experience Map Template

Content Map Template of Customer Journey

Onboarding Customer Journey Map Template

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Top 5 Customer Journey Mapping Tools (+ Templates)

As the digital world continues to change, you must know more about your customer's journey. Customer Journey maps help you see and analyze how customers interact with your brand. You can improve marketing strategies and customer experiences using them. Let's explore customer journey mapping tools and top templates that you can use to understand customer behavior better and create customer-centric products and services.

A customer journey map is a visual storyline of a customer's experience with a brand—from initial contact to long-term engagement. Such maps are crucial for you to understand and improve customer interactions. With the right tools, creating these maps becomes easier and more effective. 

Explore the top five customer journey mapping tools and templates to streamline your design efforts and elevate the customer experience.

But first, let’s get into some basics. 

Why Use a Customer Journey Map?

Customer journey maps serve a specific purpose : to show customers' paths with your brand. They reveal insights into customer interactions. Let’s understand how customer journey maps contribute to a more customer-centric business approach.

Matt Snyder, Head of Product and Design at Hivewire, discusses the power of journey mapping.

• Transcript loading…

1. Enhance Customer Understanding

Creating a journey map fosters a deep understanding of your customers. You see their experience through their eyes. This insight helps you create a customer experience design and tailor services to their needs, which will ultimately lead to higher satisfaction and loyalty.

2. Identify Pain Points

Mapping the customer journey highlights areas where customers face challenges. You can work on solutions as you identify these pain points. 

3. Boost Cross-Functional Collaboration

Journey maps bring various teams together, from marketing to product development . This collaboration ensures a cohesive strategy. It can enhance the consistency and quality of customer interactions across all touchpoints.

4. Informed Decisions Based on Real Data

Teams create customer journey maps based on real user data. This helps all stakeholders make informed, strategic decisions that are aligned to ensure a better match between what customers want and what the business offers.

5. Foster Innovation

Journey maps inspire innovation in customer experience. They reveal opportunities and spark new ideas that could lead to breakthroughs in brand engagement. This innovation shapes how you connect with your audience.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map

Creating a journey map is a strategic process that unveils how customers interact with your brand. It provides a detailed overview of their experience, from initial contact to post-purchase engagement. This section guides you through the essential steps to craft a comprehensive customer journey map.

Define Your Map’s Business Goal : Determine the purpose of the map and its target audience. Focus on specific user experiences it aims to address.

Conduct Research : Gather data on customer experiences across all touchpoints. Collect statistical and anecdotal evidence using customer interviews , surveys , and social media insights.

Whether it’s an interview or a survey , the quality of the results depends on the quality of the questions. Watch William Hudson, UX expert and Author, discuss how to write good questions. 

Review Touchpoints and Channels : Identify all customer touchpoints and channels. Customers may make online bill payments or do other work through your app. 

Make a Persona : Create a customer persona where you understand customer actions, thoughts, feelings, and needs. You must identify barriers and annoyances.

Sketch the Journey : Combine all elements, including touchpoints, timescale, and persona. Illustrate the customer's path through these elements. Note down their emotions at each stage.

Iterate and Refine : Continuously improve your sketch with the aim of an ideal representation of the customer journey.

Share with Stakeholders : Ensure all stakeholders understand the map’s significance. It helps you enhance customer experiences and benefit the organization.

Tools and Software for Customer Journey Mapping

The right tools for customer journey mapping can make a significant difference. We’ll discuss the top five tools and provide a starter template for each tool to help you get started. This synergy ensures you extract maximum value from the tool and its accompanying template. Let's explore some of the top options available.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0

© ClickUp, Fair Use

ClickUp stands out for crafting outstanding customer journey maps. You can visualize your workflow using its whiteboard tool and mind map creator. These tools allow you to map out every stage of your customer's journey, including awareness, purchase, repeat buying, and churn.

Additionally, ClickUp provides a variety of pre-made templates for customer journey maps. This saves time and effort. The Mind Maps feature lets you set up detailed workflows and approval processes. It simplifies the task of assigning dependencies for each step.

Best Features

Whiteboard to visualize ideas.

Mind Map Maker for dynamic outlines and flowcharts.

Customizable templates for different use cases.

Variety of views for task management and journey mapping.

Limitations

Numerous customizations can be overwhelming. 

A steep learning curve for new users.

Free Forever plan.

Unlimited: $7/month per user.

Business: $12/month per user.

Enterprise: Custom pricing.

ClickUp’s Customer Journey Map Template

ClickUp's customer journey map template helps teams visualize the customer's path. It allows teams to track actions, touchpoints, and experiences for strategic improvements. This tool fosters collaboration, as team leads can oversee the journey for a seamless customer experience from awareness to conversion.

Get the template

© Miro, Fair Use

Miro is a versatile digital whiteboarding platform. It excels in facilitating remote collaboration across teams. You can use Miro for brainstorming , project planning, and customer journey mapping. Its intuitive interface and extensive template library make it a popular choice.

Expansive template library for various use cases.

Real-time collaboration tools for product teams and cross-functional stakeholders. 

Integration with popular apps like Slack, Microsoft Team and Jira.

Infinite Canvas offers vast space for mapping complex journeys.

New users may find using Mitro overwhelming due to its extensive features.

Occasional lag with larger boards or when many users collaborate.

Limited customization options in templates.

Basic: Free with limited features.

Starter: $8/month per user.

Business: $16/month per user.

Enterprise: Custom pricing for comprehensive needs.

Miro’s Customer Journey Map Template

This Miro template features a comprehensive customer journey map. It helps teams capture key goals, struggles, actions, touchpoints, and customer feelings. Miro enables collaborative editing and brainstorming to support the process. It makes the mapping exercise highly interactive and efficient.

3. Figjam by Figma

© Figma, Fair Use

Figjam by Figma is an excellent tool for collaborative interface design and prototyping . It lets people and teams create designs from scratch, including customer journey maps. 

This tool has a free whiteboarding feature. It's great for sketching designs and wireframes . While mainly for UI / UX design , it stands differently than other customer journey mapping tools.

Modern pen tool for precise design.

Plugins for automating tasks.

Flexible styles and accessible libraries.

Easy export options for sharing designs.

No offline accessibility .

Difficulty in finding specific resources in the community section.

Limited image manipulation options when you create customer journey maps.

Free plan available.

Professional: $12/month per editor.

Organization: $45/month per editor.

Enterprise: $75/month per editor. 

Figjam by Figma’s Customer Journey Map Template

This FigJam template includes a profile section that ensures teams focus on the user. Key sections capture user actions, goals, emotions, opportunities, and challenges. You can document the learnings at the end and add insights for future strategies.

4. Lucidchart

© Lucidchart, Fair Use

Lucidchart is an advanced diagramming tool that creates customer journey maps. It enables teams to collaborate and visualize complex processes, systems, and customer interactions. 

Integrates data into diagrams for dynamic mapping.

Generates visual representations from data.

Compatible with Google Workspace, Atlassian, Slack, and more.

Visualization filters to highlight specific parts of the customer journey.

Saves and shares customer personas and journey maps.

Performance lags with large, complex diagrams.

Steep learning curve compared to simpler alternatives.

Issues with low-resolution exports.

Free: $0, offers basic features.

Individual: $7.95/month per user for more advanced capabilities.

Team: $9/month per user, designed for team collaboration.

Enterprise: Custom pricing, suitable for larger organizations with specific needs.

Lucidchart’s Customer Journey Map Template

The Lucidchart template features a persona profile, scenarios , and expectations. Lucidchart offers tools like shape libraries, text formatting options, and diagram key creation for a clear, structured journey visualization in the template.

5. UXpressia

©UXpressia, Fair Use

UXpressia is a leading UX tool for creating customer journey maps, personas, and impact journey maps. It enables individuals and teams to collaborate in real-time. Also, UXpressia offers interactive online courses to help teams with their journey-mapping initiatives. 

It has 70+ customer journey maps, personas, and impact map templates. 

It has a big list of features to make small and big/complex journey maps.

Comes with integrated web analytics to detail the customer experience.

Its presentation mode displays journey maps online.

Allows exports with custom branding.

Limited features and unintuitive workflow

Steep learning curve

Starter: $16/month per user

Pro: $36/month per user

Enterprise: Contact the UXPressia sales team for pricing

UXpressia’s Customer Journey Map Template

UXpressia offers a blank canvas for a customer journey map segmented into stages like Aware, Join, Use, Develop, and Leave. It's structured to define user goals , processes, channels, problems, and experiences. The design encourages adding personas for tailored journey mapping. You can change the positioning of stages and add different colors to each stage. 

Design Your Own Customer Journey Map

 Use this five-step approach to map your customer’s experience:

Add a Persona : You can create a persona representing a typical customer. Add detailed information about this persona at the top of the map. Include their demographics and characteristics relevant to the journey.

Add Phases : Divide the customer experience into key segments or phases. Each phase column will include the persona's thoughts and actions later.

Add Actions : Next, detail the actions and thoughts of the persona in each phase based on user research findings.

Add Trends : Here, you include quantitative measures that show how the experience changes over time. These could be survey results or any relevant data that suggests fluctuations in the journey.

Add Narrative Facts : This step uses qualitative and quantitative elements from user research. You can add quotes from the persona or significant data points explaining the highs and lows in the journey. You may include any roadblocks the customer faces.

You can use the IxDF Customer Journey Map Template as a handy reference to quickly design your map.

This template helps you map crucial parts of the customer journey to make informed design decisions. It keeps the process simple and uses standard data representation methods.

Customer journey maps don’t need to follow a specific format; you can tailor them to suit your project. Here’s another example, along with a blank template to inspire your map.

The Take Away

Customer journey maps help teams understand the customer's experience and reveal pain points, emotions, and interactions.  Use these maps to: 

Understand customer experiences to tailor strategies for each stage of their journey.

Consider customer emotions and pain points as significant influencers in their decision-making.

As a visual tool to capture these insights and guide business strategies.

To optimize customer experiences or identify new business opportunities.

These insights help you create a delightful and compelling customer journey.

Where to Learn More

The topic Customer Journey Map: Definition & Process .

Take our course Journey Mapping

Read Hubspot’s Whitepaper on the Customer Journey Map

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Customer journey map templates to visualize your buyer’s point of view.

Use FigJam’s online whiteboard to plot your ideal customer journey from first to final touchpoints.

Bring over existing journey maps from Figma

If you already have a team library of journey map components and styles inside Figma, copy and paste them into FigJam to build out new maps faster. Curated tools and styling in FigJam let you edit most layers that you bring over.

No one journey is the same

Customer journey maps illustrate a buyer’s actions, emotions, and barriers as they interact with your brand, on a diagram. With FigJam you can:

Capture your customer personas: Create and import tabular data on target audiences directly into your FigJam workspace.

Capture and document customer’s touchpoints: Out-of-the-box shapes and connectors snap right into the grid for a visual representation of your buyer’s current and future states.

Organize, test, iterate: Widgets let you add branches to map customer interactions along the different stages of a user journey.

Chime in to bring this shared vision to life

The customer journey is something everyone should feel connected to and a part of. With audio for live conversations, cursor chats, stamps and emotes, and observation mode real-time collaboration is easier than ever. With Open sessions anyone can join your FigJam space for 24 hours—no new account required.

Get started with diagramming templates

Start diagramming with any of these free diagramming templates. Or, if you want to see how other teams jam with FigJam, head over to our Community.

Fishbone diagram

Spark ideas, create a visualization, and get to the root cause of an issue.

Try this template

Affinity Diagram

Explore ideas, identify opportunities, and create solutions together with this affinity diagram.

Explore templates

Better products start with better ideas. Brainstorm ideas with this mind map.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the steps a customer takes when interacting with a product, service, or company. Journey mapping should include every individual touchpoint to fully understand the buyer persona, customer needs, and potential pain points. It's an effective tool for a variety of stakeholders, including customer service, marketing, product, and design teams dedicated to creating an optimal user experience.

Click here to learn more about how to make an effective customer journey map.

How do you create a customer journey map?

Our free template helps teams map out the entire customer journey.

Start by identifying your target customer - develop a buyer persona to understand their needs, pain points, and goals. Map out their journey, making sure to include every customer touchpoint. Identify key actions within each touchpoint, and evaluate if there are opportunities to optimize that customer interaction.

Further customize your customer journey map with specific details, especially after gathering data from multiple sources (including feedback forms, customer service data, and more). Test and validate your map as needed to ensure accuracy.

What are the benefits of using a customer journey map template?

Customer journey map templates help teams better understand customer behavior at each key touchpoint. In doing so, teams can address needs, create solutions for potential pain points within the buying process, and support overall customer retention efforts.

What are some tips for creating an effective customer journey map?

As part of this mapping experience, your goal should be to create an optimal customer experience. Some other tips include:

• Use multiple sources of data (qualitative and quantitative) to accurately portray customer behavior. Review market research, social media comments, customer service queries, and more.
• Get customer feedback to understand specific thought processes and feelings throughout different parts of their journey.
• Review the map regularly and make updates as needed to reflect existing and potential customers (especially if your product or service offering has changed significantly).

Other templates you might like

Explore 1,000+ templates on the Figma community

Explore even more templates, widgets, and plugins—all built by the Figma community.

A new era of customer journey management

An all-new tool for customer journey mapping & management. Create customer journey maps, collaborate in real-time, and manage your customer journey maps from one central tool.

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Smaply's customer journey mapping software commits to the highest data protection and privacy standards. Your CX data is safe, regardless of where you're based or if you use an enterprise solution or a monthly subscription. Our enterprise customers benefit from our certifications and additional custom solutions.

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Smaply 3.0 comes with a simple customer journey mapping tool for you to build maps via drag-and-drop. Visualize different types of data that you need for your business CX strategy. The journey mapping software to create user journey maps, employee journey maps or citizen experience – everything is possible.

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Home CX Customer Experience

Customer Journey Mapping: The Complete Guide + Free Template

Businesses need to be aware of their target market to provide the best possible customer journey. The customer journey mapping touchpoints should be as general as possible to create and retain the greatest number of repeat consumers.

At times, the process of figuring out what your customers want, what problems they have, and how they interact with your business can feel overwhelming and unnecessary.

LEARN ABOUT: Time to Value

In this blog post, we’ll explain why a customer journey map is important and how to create one. This will help you build trust, engagement, and loyalty with new and returning customers or clients. To begin, let’s define what the customer journey and customer journey map are.

LEARN ABOUT: Client Management

Content Index

• What is a Customer Journey?
• What is a Customer Journey Map Templates??
• Benefits of creating a Customer Journey Map

Starting from scratch: Build your Customer Journey Map

The 5 stages to create a customer journey map, how questionpro cx can help you create customer journey map templates, questionpro components for customer journey mapping, what is a customer journey .

A customer journey refers to the entire set of experiences that a customer goes through when interacting with a business or brand, from initial awareness to post-purchase interactions. It encompasses all customer touchpoints and interactions with the industry, including marketing, sales, customer service , customer feedback, and support.

A customer journey is the series of interactions and experiences that a customer goes through when engaging with a company or brand. 

This can include everything from initial awareness of a product or service, to research, purchase, and post-purchase engagement. 

The customer journey is often visualized as a customer journey map or flowchart, with different stages and customer touchpoints along the way. Understanding the customer journey is important for businesses as it allows them to identify areas for improvement and optimize the overall customer experience.  

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

A customer journey mapping visualizes the steps a customer takes as they interact with a company or organization to achieve a specific goal. It is a tool used to help businesses understand their customers’ experiences and identify areas where they can improve those experiences.

The journey mapping is also known as a customer experience map or customer service map. Creating a customer journey map allows businesses to see their customers’ experience from their customers’ point of view, allowing them to make adjustments that will increase customer happiness and loyalty.

Check out the following video if you want to learn what is the framework and the goals when creating a customer journey map. 

Benefits of Customer Journey Map ping

Customer journey mapping enables businesses to comprehend the viewpoint and experiences of the customer throughout their interactions with the brand. It may offer insights into areas for customer experience improvement and pain points. Creating a customer journey map has major benefits, such as:

Businesses can find ways to improve the customer experience by understanding the customer’s needs and emotions at each stage of the journey. This will lead to more satisfied and loyal customers.

Businesses can find ways to improve the customer experience by understanding the customer’s needs and emotions at each stage of the customer journey. This will lead to more satisfied and loyal customers.

Businesses can increase their conversion rates and boost their income by finding and fixing pain points in the customer journey.

Businesses can reduce customer churn and improve customer retention by pinpointing and fixing the weak spots in the customer experience.

Businesses can discover and eliminate bottlenecks and inefficiencies in their operations by understanding the customer journey, which leads to cost savings.

A customer journey map can provide a comprehensive view of the customer’s demands, which can be used to guide product development and service design .

It is important to remember that customer journey mapping is a continuous process that should be examined and modified regularly as customer demands and corporate objectives change.

LEARN ABOUT:  Customer Experience vs. Customer Service

A customer journey map that converts prospects to loyal customers starts with a stellar strategy. Follow these five steps to make sure your customers get the most relevant products and resources for their needs with a user experience that will bring them back for more.

• Understand what you have to offer and who benefits from it

Every member of your team should know how to communicate the benefits of your offerings. You can’t share something as effectively when you don’t know what it is! Likewise, you need to know who your ideal customer is. Ask yourself, “Who needs this solution the most?” This is a good opportunity to leverage easy online surveys that reveal your target demographic, their primary needs related to your offerings, and any other considerations you need to make to attract prospective customers.

• Create personas of your ideal customers

Once you have a general idea of who your ideal customers are, create a few buyer personas to give these customers a name and a face. When you have a well-developed sense of who to include in your key demographic, you’ll have a more nuanced understanding of the variations that will take place in their customer journeys.

For example, you may discover that your reusable water bottles will solve problems for athletes of all ages, sustainability-conscious millennials, and adults with limited mobility. Avoid broadening your market too much, because that can take focus and efficiency away from your marketing tactics. Create a customer persona for each of these groups within your target market, accounting for these imagined but realistic variables.

Create a persona for each of these groups within your target market, accounting for these imagined but realistic variables:  

• Economic status/income range
• Interests and hobbies
• Main sources of media and information
• Daily habits
• Consistent pain points
• Favored brands and products
• Spending habits
• Any details specific to your industry or offerings

While the general stops on their customer journey maps will be similar, each persona’s specific needs should influence your value propositions and the assets you create for marketing your product.  

• Refine your value propositions

Customer journeys are personal, but your value propositions need to remain consistent through every encounter with consumers to improve their customer experience. As you become more familiar with your target market and your customer personas, refine your value props to be inclusive, communicative, and aspirational. You will use these statements as guiding pillars in your customer journey map and marketing assets across your company.

If you like reading about what is customer journey, you might find interesting learning about  customer journey vs customer experience: the difference .

• Conduct research and gather data

Gather data about your customers and their interactions with your company or product. Surveys, interviews, focus groups, and customer service customized reports can all be used to accomplish this.

It’s crucial to choose real customers or the intended ones. You need the opinions of individuals considering using your goods and services which have already done business with you or intend to.

Here are a few sample questionnaires you may use to conduct  research and collect data:

• How did you hear about our company or product for the first time?
• What made you decide to purchase from us?
• How easy was it for you to find what you needed on our website?
• How easy is it for you to find your way around our website on a scale of 1 to 10?
• How long have you spent on our website on average?
• Were you able to find the goods or services you needed?
• Have you ever bought something from us? If so, what made you choose that?
• Were there any problems or points of pain during the process of buying?
• Is there anything else we can do to make things easier for you?

Customizing the survey questions to your unique consumer groups and the journey touchpoints for each group is crucial. Understanding the customer’s emotions, desires, and actions at various points along the journey should be the main goal of these inquiries. Open-ended questions can also be used to ask clients for more in-depth feedback.

• Identify touchpoints

Make a list of all the significant points at which a customer interacts with your business or its offerings. This includes face-to-face meetings, phone calls, website and social media use, and electronic mail and messaging exchanges.

You can better understand the usability and goals of customer journeys by understanding the touchpoints. You may learn more about the numerous channels via which customers communicate with your business. You need to consider every possible web channel your customer could use to find you.

• Build assets for each touchpoint in the customer journey

As you map out the customer journey, you’ll have a clearer picture of what your ideal customers will be asking, which brands they might be considering, and the types of content they will most likely consume to move them from one phase to the next. Depending on your industry, that content may include the following types of assets as well as others: 

• Partnered or influencer content
• Print or email newsletters
• Infographics
• Paid media and social media copy and graphics
• Videos (ad spots, tutorials, webinars)
• Promotional flyers
• Sample kits or demos

It’s time to put your strategy and careful planning onto an actual customer journey map. At each step in the customer journey mapping process, it helps to list the following elements that will satisfy prospects and compel them to move forward. Consider these examples:

• Consumer activities and questions
• Touchpoints like websites, review forums, and advertisements
• Assets like paid media, blog posts, videos, and webinars (some assets are touchpoints)
• Strategies like SEO, social media and community management, and referral programs
• Tools like engagement reports and online surveys  

Consider what your customer personas would need and do throughout the entire process as you assign these elements to each phase in the customer journey map.  

• Analyze the map

Review the journey map to find any problems or areas where the consumer experience could be enhanced.

Identify what the client does, thinks, feels, says, hears, etc., in a certain circumstance. Next, ascertain their needs and how they are feeling at this time. Put your attention on barriers and inconveniences.

• Make the necessary changes

Make the necessary changes to the average customer experience using the journey map as a guide. If you analyzed the data, you’d get an idea of what you’re looking for. Then, you’ll be able to make the necessary adjustments to reach your objectives.

Changes will be beneficial, no matter how large or small, since they directly link with what customers identified as their pain areas. You can ensure that those needs and pain areas are always handled with the help of your visualized customer journey map.

• Monitor and review

Constantly review and monitor the customer’s journey, collect feedback, and adjust the journey map as necessary.

Do you want a head start on building your customer journey? Here you will find a completely free customer journey map templates:

Download Customer Journey Canvas

It’s time to take a closer look at what you can do to engage with prospective and new customers at each step in their customer journey.  

During the customer Awareness phase of the customer journey, consumers are searching for solutions and encountering multiple brands, products, and even DIY options. This is the time to shine if you want to grab their attention for any further consideration when they first encounter your brand.  

What consumers are doing: During this step in the customer journey map, consumers are likely conducting research. This can include keyword searching for solutions to problems online, reading blog posts and news articles, browsing online forums and print promotions, and encountering brands for the first time .  

What brands can do: You might think that consumers are doing all the heavy lifting in this stage because they’re asking questions and browsing content. However, you don’t want to approach brand awareness passively. Capture inbound search queries with a strong SEO strategy. Build your presence on social media. Start a blog or partner with content creators to address the critical concerns of your target market. Consumers will come to you when you provide engaging and informative assets about what matters to them.  

Consideration 

Once you’ve caught a prospect’s attention, either with your content or through other sources, you need to hold onto it. This is the Consideration phase. At this point, they move from looking for answers about potential solutions to looking for your answers about solutions. Most likely, your brand will be considered alongside other contenders, so ensure every impression you make is a strong one. At this point, customers are interacting directly with your brand, and you want customers to stick around for the next step in their customer journey.  

What consumers are doing: Researching specific brands and products, comparing competitors, and assessing their own priorities. This might include taking a closer look at your product and service specifications, looking into customer care policies, and turning to direct comparison reviews, such as “Brand X vs. Brand Y.” The consideration phase varies because consumer-focused media comes in many forms.  

What brands can do: Continuously optimize the user experience (UX) on all your touchpoints, including description and e-commerce transaction pages. Learn from the user data you gain each day to improve future encounters with your brand. Small things like making sure descriptions and processes are clear and all buttons function properly to make a big difference when someone is considering you against a competitor.  

The Decision (or Conversion) phase is your make-it-or-break-it moment in the customer journey. Once prospective customers are satisfied with researching and comparing their options, they will eventually make a decision. Sometimes they find that none of the brands they’ve been considering offer what they are looking for. But often they do make a positive choice; when they do, you want to make it easy to choose your brand and products with confidence.  

What consumers are doing: They are looking at “deal-breaker” factors, such as price vs. value, customer support responsiveness, company values, and policies. By the time they are at the decision phase, it’s not just about product specifications or the shopping experience. Consumers want to support a brand they can trust to deliver a quality solution to their problems.  

What brands can do: To anticipate this step, go the extra mile. This could include remarketing strategies that offer incentives to prospects who have already visited your website or engaged with your company. Make sure your return and refund policies are easy to find (and competitive), and coach your customer service team to answer key decision-making questions. Responsive community management and a dedicated email address, phone line, and chat feature are essential.  

At this junction on your customer journey map , you have a new customer. Congratulations! All that thoughtful planning and asset creation is paying off when they reach the Action phase. The consumer has decided to make their purchase with you (or convert in another way), but don’t assume this is a done deal. They still need to be able to complete the transaction and start using your offering. Like all other steps in the customer journey, this moment needs to be easy and intuitive for the user, as well as enjoyable or engaging.  

What consumers are doing: Depending on your business model, customers are taking this moment to purchase your products online or at a physical retailer, or are booking a service that they plan to experience soon. Once they have the product or service, they will start putting their purchase to use and — if you navigate the phase successfully — starting to interact with your brand as a loyal customer.  

What brands can do: Optimize the transaction experience on your customer journey map. QA your own e-commerce site or physical store, and regularly see how retailers on your stock list are optimizing the experience for consumers who take action at one of their touchpoints. Once the transaction is complete, follow up with your new customer immediately with the information they may need to care for their purchase and correspond with your team .  

If you are on you’re way to start building your customer journey, you might find it useful to review the 10 best customer journey mapping tools .

Guiding prospective customers through their customer journey takes a lot of work and careful planning. Once you’ve established a relationship with a new customer, nurture it to build customer loyalty and expand your reach. Enthusiastic customers are more likely to recommend your brand and products to a peer, which, for many, can be a deciding factor. When you keep current customers happy and exceed their expectations with innovation and excellent customer service, their journey map is shorter and your costs per transaction are lower.  

What consumers are doing: At this point, your customers are using your offerings to improve their lives. The better the results and experience they get with your product, the more likely they will be to repurchase and refer a peer. They may also start engaging with your brand more casually on social media and planning their next purchase.

  What brands can do: Take the initiative to check in with your customers in a friendly, supportive way. A brief survey about their experience navigating your customer journey map is a good way to let them know you care about their feedback. Consider offering a loyalty club for referrals and future transactions. This is also an excellent opportunity to bring consumers back to some of the relevant assets you create to build brand awareness and authority. This could include blog content with tips to enrich their experience with the product, a newsletter with updates and promotions, occasional opportunities to provide further feedback. Start a conversation with your customers .  

It’s important to note that customer journeys can also loop back to the awareness stage as they may consider your product or service again in the future.

Learn more about customer loyalty and your N et Promoter Score (NPS) to boost referrals and retention.

QuestionPro CX is a customer experience management software that may assist businesses in creating a customer journey map by offering a variety of features such as:

QuestionPro CX enables businesses to create surveys and questionnaires to collect customer feedback at various touchpoints of the customer journey, such as website visits, in-person interactions, and post-purchase follow-up.

The software enables organizations to capture real-time customer data and store it in a centralized location for simple access and analysis.

QuestionPro CX includes visual representation tools that allow businesses to generate a visual representation of the customer journey, including all interactions and the customer’s emotions and demands at each stage.

The software delivers comprehensive analytics and reporting capabilities that help companies pinpoint pain points in the customer experience and chances for improvement.

QuestionPro CX allows businesses to track critical metrics, such as customer happiness, loyalty, and conversion rates, and build reports and dashboards to communicate with stakeholders.

QuestionPro CX allows organizations to track customer feedback over time, identifying trends and optimizing the customer journey map.

Businesses may use QuestionPro CX to understand the customer journey better and make data-driven decisions to enhance customer experience.

QuestionPro is the only CX solution in the market to have all 3 components of the CX ecosystem, including the customer journey mapping, journey measurement and all-the-loops systems:

• Experience and Journey Mapping
• CX Consulting
• Voice of the Customer
• Change Management/Implementation
• Reputation Management

Every consumer is different. Even the most reliable demographic data or carefully planned strategies will miss an occasional twist or turn on your customer journey map. You do not need to set these customer journey maps in stone. It’s vital to revisit them regularly and compare your strategy with real-life results. And above all, listen to your ideal customers.

LEARN ABOUT: Consumer Decision Journey

If you’d like to learn more about this tool, we invite you to request a free demo or create a free account to take advantage of everything QuestionPro CX has for you.

FREE TRIAL         LEARN MORE

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Venngage Customer Journey Mind Maps

Learn the value of your user's pain points and needs, and improve the experience of your customers with Venngage's customer journey mind map templates.

Not a designer? Not a problem. With Venngage's beginner-friendly user journey map tool, making a journey map has never been easier. 40,000+ businesses trust Venngage to improve their marketing strategies!

Design from one of our customer journey mind map templates

Customize one of our professionally-designed templates. see all customer journey mind map templates, design an effective customer journey mind map on venngage by following these steps:.

Add different target customer profiles by accessing our library of illustrations and stock photos to represent different types of users.

Browse our library of 40,000+ icons and illustrations. Select the ones that emphasize key steps in your customer's journey.

Use a consistent theme. All of our user journey maps were designed with a central theme in mind, making it easy to create a professional-looking design.

Customize our customer journey mind map templates in a snap. Drag and drop new elements and share engaging visuals with your team using Venngage's smart editor.

How to create customer journey mind maps in 5 steps:

Understand how your clients interact with your brand

User Customer Journey Mind Map Templates

Plot this journey using Venngage's customer journey map tool. Our professional designs will help you create a resource that you and your team can refer to.

User-Friendly Editor

Venngage is an online drag-and-drop graphic design tool for people with little to no design experience. Swap out text, images, icons, and add data to your user experience map!

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Download your user journey design in high-quality PNG or PDF formats, or share it on social media directly from Venngage with just a few clicks.

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Working with a team? Make your teamwork seamless by having multiple people within the same design. Write comments and helpful feedback.

Choose the customer journey mind map that best represents your users' experiences

• Choose a template that best fits the process you want to improve. Also, you can ask our team to recommend one to you.
• Customize design assets by adding, editing, dragging or deleting shapes, lines and colors with a few clicks.
• Quickly add branding to any process map with My Brand Kit. Save your brand's color palette, fonts and images and apply them to every graph you create.

Design the perfect visual representation of your user journey

Collaborate with your team and stakeholders in real-time

Download or share your customer journey mind map with a click.

• Download your document as a PDF or Interactive PDF (to use hyperlinking).
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Blog / Journey Tools

11 Customer Journey Mapping Tools to Navigate & Analyze User Experiences

• February 29, 2024

Table of Contents

Understanding your customers can be challenging when dealing with a vast amount of unstructured data.

On average, businesses source their customer data from 28 different channels and house it in 17 different applications. This data may help to gain insights about their customer experience and meet their expectations, but a lack of control over siloed data fails to serve the purpose.

That’s where data visualization comes into play.

Using customer journey mapping tools, you get a comprehensive view of how your customers interact with your brand and identify the different touchpoints and conversion paths they take to convert. More importantly, you can put all your collected customer data into use by visualizing it into customer journey maps without having to navigate through different platforms.

We’ve compiled a list of 11 customer journey mapping tools to help you get started and create the most accurate and data-backed maps to help with your marketing decisions.

Key Takeaways

Optimize the customer journey with real-time analytics

Visually understand the customer journey from start to finish- and how it can be improved

1. Funnelytics

Funnelytics is a customer journey mapping tool that uses whiteboard technology to help you draw your entire customer journey on a canvas.

“ I am able to show my clients exactly how their funnel will look in a clean visual way. This is a great sales tool. ” – Sam K .

Integrations with top analytics software allow for real-time, in-depth sales funnel data on an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. You can present this data visually to your clients and stakeholders with ease, which is very handy for agencies.

Even better, using funnel simulations, you can forecast the results of your funnel plan before implementing it. This allows you to test out the probability of success vs failure for every approach you take, and an opportunity to optimize for best results.

The learning curve to start with Funnelytics can be a little steep for people who are new to creating visual maps to track and understand customer journeys. This is why our team created a great resource in our vault of funnels (essentially templates.) You can import these funnels into your builder easily, which will jumpstart your project whether you’re a beginner or a visualization veteran.

Moreover, you’ll enjoy our onboarding process, where we help you get acquainted with the tool while also offering clients optimization workshops and same-day support to get you unstuck whenever you need.

“ Tracking multiple traffic sources across multiple domains is not easy. This is why I use Funnelytics. ” — Quentin P.

Understand your user flow with Funnelytics

We help performance-driven marketing teams plan and improve the customer journey at every level

Pricing : $199–$999 per month

Key features :

• Highly intuitive.
• Easy-to-use interface with visual drag-and-drop features for easy mapping and customer journey tracking .
• The traffic explorer feature allows you to map backward.

Smaply is a customer journey mapping platform that allows you to centralize and digitize your customer experience insights. Its simple drag-and-drop features help you visualize different types of data to review your customer experience and identify key friction points.

You can see a lot of customer data at once in Smaply, because it displays multiple channels and customer journeys simultaneously. This allows you to show the differences between the two tracks for better decision-making.

Smaply also offers customizable templates that can be duplicated and re-used and collaboration features, which allow sharing of customer journey insights to the team in real-time.

A downside to Smaply is that its users find the cost on the higher end compared to the features it offers, which can be off-putting for those with tighter budgets.

Pricing : $0 – $29 EUR per month, offers custom pricing

• Simple drag-and-drop editor
• Feedback mode and sharing to help with collaboration
• Customizable templates

3. Custellence

Custellence allows you and your team to collaborate and combine your customer journey efforts into a single dashboard. It helps you create your customer journey map in minutes, which allows you to present a strong customer case and get a buy-in from stakeholders.

With Custellence, you can create elaborate customer journey maps, easily share them with your teams, and collaborate with them on your workspace. Like Smaply, it offers a stack of templates you can adapt and tailor for your own purposes.

However, when it comes to adapting the tool for more complex journey maps, many users find it difficult to apply customer journeys for different use cases.

Pricing : $0 to $34 per member per month, offers custom pricing

• Churn management
• Intuitive, lane-based interface,
• Flexible map structure

4. UXPressia

UXPressia is more of an all-in-one tool that helps you create customer journey maps, user personas and impact maps—that means all your customer experience assets stay in one place. See statuses, tags, and ownerships of each journey map you create and visualize everything from the big picture to the micro journeys.

This makes it easier to align your team and stakeholders from different parts of your organization for better collaboration. You can create designer-quality journey maps and tweak them to present to different people, which can save you a lot of time and effort.

Moreover, you can embed website, product, or service prototypes, marketing presentations, survey results, etc. into your journey map so you don’t leave out any crucial information.

Given the vast variety of features UXPressia offers, it can be a little clunky and complex, which often bugs users looking for simpler solutions.

Pricing : $0 to $36 per user per month, also offers custom pricing

• 100+ free customer journey mapping templates
• User roles and teams for access control
• Version history
• Branding elements to help you stay on brand always

5. Lucidchart

Lucidchart is a visual whiteboard tool that allows teams to collaborate seamlessly—from initial ideas to successful delivery. This tool’s user-friendly interface and diverse tools make it easy to create diagrams.

Unlike tools like Funnelytics, it’s not specifically designed for mapping customer journeys around marketing and sales funnels. It’s more of a general intelligent diagramming tool that helps you assemble funnel maps, customer journeys, and flow charts.

However, that makes it suitable for any team for different purposes—the marketing team can create elaborate funnel maps while the design team can create flowcharts for their processes.

As a general-purpose tool, Lucidchart lacks several advanced features compared to its competitors, making it less of a versatile option for users looking for high-end functionalities.

Pricing : $0 to $9 per user per month, also offers custom pricing

• Virtual whiteboard to bring your ideas to life
• Intelligent diagramming to visualize complex data
• Cloud visualization to optimize your cloud environments

Figma is more of a general-purpose design tool that has different modes with different purposes—development, design, whiteboard, and prototyping—all in one platform. It’s mainly an all-in-one tool for product teams to create, test, and ship better products faster and more efficiently.

While the prototyping mode helps you create realistic prototypes to test the interactive experience before launching, the FigJam (whiteboard) is the one you can use to create your customer journey mapping while collaborating with your team on an intuitive interface.

However, one of the limitations of this tool is the lack of advanced prototyping features, which can be a challenge for those looking to build complex customer journey maps.

Pricing : $0 to $75 per editor per month

• Easy collaboration allowing brainstorming and working on complex workflows.
• Open sessions that allow you to invite anyone for 24 hours.
• Live audio calls on the board.
• Timer and voting options.

Miro is a multi-purpose online collaborative whiteboard that can be used to build funnel maps, plan marketing campaigns, develop a roadmap, and more.

It allows distributed teams to come together, work on a common goal and manage the processes throughout different lifecycle stages.

The interactive and easy-to-use whiteboard platform allows you to strategize new initiatives while considering your customers’ needs and designing customer-centric solutions.

Miro offers six core capabilities to help you with a layout to get started under different scenarios such as process mapping, workshop collaboration, product development workflows, etc. However, users find it difficult to follow through, considering its vast range of features and workflows.

Pricing : $0 to $16 per user per month, custom pricing also available

• Miro Assist to help you automatically generate mind maps, diagrams, and codes for you.
• Multiple solutions include mind mapping, flowcharts, wireframing, process mapping, technical diagramming, and more.
• Easy to collaborate

8. Visual Paradigm

Visual Paradigm is a development tool suite consisting of design, analysis, and management tools to help you manage your projects. Its customer journey mapping tool allows you to study customer experience and illustrate customer relationships with your brand.

The interface you get on creating a new customer journey map isn’t very intuitive, and some might find it pretty basic compared to other tools mentioned in this list. However, fewer features and simplicity mean the tool is easy to learn and grasp, and you can create simple customer journey mapping within minutes.

Pricing : $6 to $89 per month

• Visual modeling
• Business analysis and design
• Drag-and-drop editor

Sketch is another multi-purpose collaborative tool like Miro that markets itself as the complete design platform. It’s available as a web app and a Mac app. While you can build websites, icons, apps, illustrations, and design systems using Sketch, you can use its prototyping feature for customer journey research and mapping.

It comes with a powerful vector editor and built-in prototyping, so it’s easy to create stunning journey maps. It also allows you to collaborate with your team using its workspace feature, where you can share designs and prototypes and offer feedback.

Since it’s not specific to customer journey mapping or sales funnel, many advanced features are lacking. To get started, you’ll need to build your journey maps from scratch without the support of dedicated templates.

Pricing : Starting from $10 per month

• Powerful vector editing
• Easy, intuitive prototyping
• Shared Libraries, styles, and components
• Reusable design templates

10. Flowmapp

Flowmapp is a UX design platform popular among startups, agencies, designers, developers, and other teams. Though it’s specifically designed for end-to-end website design and development, it can be easily used for creating customer journey maps with its prototyping and wireframing features.

Using its pre-made templates, workspaces, and collaboration features, you can create stunning customer journey maps while keeping everyone on your team on the same page.

One of the main drawbacks of this tool is that it doesn’t offer a customization feature for adding specific elements to the journey map. For example, information from the SERP will be added as a text block, not a screenshot.

Pricing : $0 to $126 per month

• Visual sitemaps
• Prototyping tools with many templates
• Import and export diagrams

11.  Microsoft Visio

A diagram and flowchart tool by Microsoft, Visio helps you visualize your ideas with dozens of ready-to-use templates and thousands of customizable shapes. You can either choose to purchase Visio directly or get it as part of your Microsoft 365 subscription.

You can create flowcharts, org charts, floor plans, network diagrams, customer journey maps, and more with Visio and its simple user interface. You get all the latest diagramming features such as layers, containers, validation reports, shape sheets & drawing explorer, which allows you to create elaborate journey maps.

Some users find the pricing more costly than its competitors, which can affect those with budget constraints.

Pricing : $5 to $530 per month

• Easy to set up and use
• Workflow automation
• Comprehensive template library

How to choose the right customer journey mapping tool

With these many options, making a choice can be overwhelming. You need to consider your business requirements and the following factors.

• Visual/design capabilities : You should be able to design your customer journey maps in the way you desire—be it flowcharts, value ladders, or elaborate mindmaps.
• Intuitive/easy-to-use platform : You and your team should find it easy to navigate through and put the tool to proper use for creating and analyzing journey maps.
• Collaborative capabilities: The tool should allow you to invite your team members to collaborate and leave comments and feedback.
• Integrations with other tools : You need a customer journey mapping tool with integration capabilities to collect data from multiple platforms.
• Templates : You also need multiple templates to save time on creating maps.
• Customer pain point and journey optimization analytics: Your tool should offer detailed insights into the friction points in the customer journey. For example, in Funnelytics, you can analyze page insights in an elaborate form, which acts as an excellent heatmap alternative .
• Segmentation features : You should be able to segment journey maps into different groups based on the journey stage, touchpoint, channel, etc.
• Customer success team powered by experts : Access to customer support whenever you’re stuck is an absolute must.

Map your customer journey with real-time data

Customer journey mapping is a fun and extensive process that offers great insights into customer behavior and thought process, and Funnelytics is an excellent choice for a mapping tool.

We’ve put it as number one on the list because it connects whiteboarding technology to the user’s data. This allows you to map customer journeys, visually see how well they perform using split testing across the customer journey , and identify what portions of the journey or product to optimize. Moreover, it’s excellent for visual learners—you can visually see how people get to their site, move across pages, and where they drop. This allows for continuous improvement.

Funnelytics also has:

• A thorough onboarding process
• Customer journey experts who host optimization workshops
• Same-day support, as well as weekly live sessions where users can ask platform or strategy questions.

Learn more about customer journey tracking through Funnelytics’ blog , or get started today .

Implement your ideas faster with Funnelytics

Our visual platform makes it easy to see where customers need the most help in their journey

● What does customer journey mapping software do?

● what features do you need in a customer journey mapping software, ● why is a customer journey visualization platform a must-have.

Related resources

Sales Funnel vs. Customer Journey: What are the Differences?

Cracking the Code: Funnel Reporting for Marketers

The Customer Lifecycle Journey: What it is and How to Use it to Create Repeat Customers

9 Best Funnel Tracking Software Tools to Streamline Your Sales Success

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Call Center Automation: Your Guide To Help You Make The Most With Every Call

Vault’s viewpoint.

• Call center automation can assist in effective business scaling and growth.
• Call center automation tools result in lower costs and fewer error occurrences for many companies.
• Consider additional tools that offer holistic support for every customer touchpoint.

Steps For Call Center Automation And Optimization

Here are expert suggestions to help you get started.

1. Customer Journey Mapping

We recommend beginning with customer journey mapping before shopping and purchasing tools. A customer journey map is a visual representation of the customer’s interactions with your company. This often-overlooked, critical step guides you to the best purchase decision possible.

By identifying each customer touchpoint in the context of their most common needs, you can proactively meet and exceed client expectations , resulting in more immediate results.

2. Shopping and Researching

Next, we recommend shopping and researching before making your final decision regarding platforms. Beyond reviewing platform websites, we recommend speaking to sales reps and booking demos. Read up on customer review sites and forums (such as Trustpilot or Reddit).

Taking time to complete these extra review steps provides the most accurate view into your possible customer experience, helping you choose the right tool for your needs more effectively.

3. Outlining Your Onboarding Strategy

This step can occur before or after you choose your call center automation tool of choice and serves to make your launch more efficient. Questions to consider and answer in this step include:

• Which steps must you take to be launch-ready?
• What does the ideal client outcome look like?
• What does the perfect staff outcome look like?
• What key performance indicators (KPIs) will you track through the rollout and iteration process?
• How will you track and record KPIs as permanent reference points for team members and stakeholders?
• What does a complete call automation launch look like?
• What are the next growth steps after the initial automation launch process is complete?

Of course, launch processes and experiences are unique to each organization. However, using the questions above as a guide can give you the momentum you need to start this step.

What Do I Look For In A Call Center Process Automation Tool?

Call center automation tools are critical to successfully launching your automated flow. Here are features to seek in your automation tool of choice.

Call Scheduling Features

Scheduled calling allows your team to triage incoming calls, redirecting their time to higher-level, more complex calls and needs. Using predefined criteria, your team can route manual calls to certain times of day, agents or process steps, saving time and enhancing the client callback experience.

Customer Interaction Options Including SMS Support

Ideally, your call center automation tools can launch across your channels and platforms, harnessing customer input to smartly redirect calls to the proper area of service or agent. Options available include chatbots, interactive voice response, and social media channels.

Your tool should also support SMS outreach and automation pathways. This option lets your team reach out anytime via message, immediately supporting clients with manual and complex needs. The tools can also arrange automatic texts, possibly triggered by client input, a sale, or another related initiation point.

Forecasting Tools

Data is the lifeline of any well-run business. As you scale and grow, your call volume increases. Forecasting tools allow you to harvest customer and team member data, siloing it for later decision-making.

For example, your team may review data points from last quarter, seeing sign-on trends rise when calling during evenings instead of business hours. Or, more customer sign-ons occur year over year during certain months, leading you to increase the team’s size to meet demand proactively.

Generative AI

Generative AI can authenticate customers, create call summaries and provide follow-up recommendations. According to the previously mentioned survey, call centers currently using generative AI are experiencing improved customer effort scores and higher call agent productivity than those that don’t.

Virtual Queue Support

Long hold times can be frustrating for customers. Virtual queue support enables clients to use interactive voice response systems (or IVR) to either hang up and wait for an available agent’s call or self-direct to the next available agent in the desired department.

Your Launch Experience: Tips & Tricks For A Smooth Transition

Launching isn’t easy. However, we can tell you that it’ll be worth it. Here are quick tips and tricks to consider as you begin your transition process.

• Don’t be afraid to take it slow. While it’s important to move at a pace that positively impacts the business, it’s perfectly fine to slow down and perform quality checks at each step of your launch.
• Keep your team in the loop. Frequent check-ins help you to efficiently determine what works (and what doesn’t). While the feedback can sometimes be difficult or overwhelming, it is important.
• Feel free to pivot or iterate. If something isn’t working, turn it off. If you need a customized solution, reach out or research application programming interface (API) tools for support. Automated solutions are meant to help you remain dynamic and adaptable to a changing market’s needs—not keep you tied down in inefficiency.

Frequently Asked Questions

How is ai used in call centers.

In a modern-day call center setting, AI is often seen in chatbot support options, interactive voice response (IVR) management, predictive reporting tools and smart routing options. You might also find it in your tool’s scriptwriting features.

What Technology Is Used In Call Centers?

The answer to this question depends on the type of call center tool you’re using. Common examples of technology used include IVR, pre-recorded responses, queue management tools and softphone systems, which allow you to make telephone calls over the Internet with a computer.

What Is An Example of An Automated Call Center?

An automated call center can be as small or as complex as you need it to be. For example, your “center” may only have a predictive dialer, or you may set up an entire network of automation options based entirely on IVR technology.

Article Sources

Balancing priorities in a new era of contact center transformation . Deloitte Digital. Accessed May 21, 2024.

The post Call Center Automation: Your Guide To Help You Make The Most With Every Call first appeared on Newsweek Vault .

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The state of AI in early 2024: Gen AI adoption spikes and starts to generate value

If 2023 was the year the world discovered generative AI (gen AI) , 2024 is the year organizations truly began using—and deriving business value from—this new technology. In the latest McKinsey Global Survey  on AI, 65 percent of respondents report that their organizations are regularly using gen AI, nearly double the percentage from our previous survey just ten months ago. Respondents’ expectations for gen AI’s impact remain as high as they were last year , with three-quarters predicting that gen AI will lead to significant or disruptive change in their industries in the years ahead.

About the authors

This article is a collaborative effort by Alex Singla , Alexander Sukharevsky , Lareina Yee , and Michael Chui , with Bryce Hall , representing views from QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, and McKinsey Digital.

Organizations are already seeing material benefits from gen AI use, reporting both cost decreases and revenue jumps in the business units deploying the technology. The survey also provides insights into the kinds of risks presented by gen AI—most notably, inaccuracy—as well as the emerging practices of top performers to mitigate those challenges and capture value.

AI adoption surges

Interest in generative AI has also brightened the spotlight on a broader set of AI capabilities. For the past six years, AI adoption by respondents’ organizations has hovered at about 50 percent. This year, the survey finds that adoption has jumped to 72 percent (Exhibit 1). And the interest is truly global in scope. Our 2023 survey found that AI adoption did not reach 66 percent in any region; however, this year more than two-thirds of respondents in nearly every region say their organizations are using AI. 1 Organizations based in Central and South America are the exception, with 58 percent of respondents working for organizations based in Central and South America reporting AI adoption. Looking by industry, the biggest increase in adoption can be found in professional services. 2 Includes respondents working for organizations focused on human resources, legal services, management consulting, market research, R&D, tax preparation, and training.

Also, responses suggest that companies are now using AI in more parts of the business. Half of respondents say their organizations have adopted AI in two or more business functions, up from less than a third of respondents in 2023 (Exhibit 2).

Gen AI adoption is most common in the functions where it can create the most value

Most respondents now report that their organizations—and they as individuals—are using gen AI. Sixty-five percent of respondents say their organizations are regularly using gen AI in at least one business function, up from one-third last year. The average organization using gen AI is doing so in two functions, most often in marketing and sales and in product and service development—two functions in which previous research  determined that gen AI adoption could generate the most value 3 “ The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier ,” McKinsey, June 14, 2023. —as well as in IT (Exhibit 3). The biggest increase from 2023 is found in marketing and sales, where reported adoption has more than doubled. Yet across functions, only two use cases, both within marketing and sales, are reported by 15 percent or more of respondents.

Gen AI also is weaving its way into respondents’ personal lives. Compared with 2023, respondents are much more likely to be using gen AI at work and even more likely to be using gen AI both at work and in their personal lives (Exhibit 4). The survey finds upticks in gen AI use across all regions, with the largest increases in Asia–Pacific and Greater China. Respondents at the highest seniority levels, meanwhile, show larger jumps in the use of gen Al tools for work and outside of work compared with their midlevel-management peers. Looking at specific industries, respondents working in energy and materials and in professional services report the largest increase in gen AI use.

Investments in gen AI and analytical AI are beginning to create value

The latest survey also shows how different industries are budgeting for gen AI. Responses suggest that, in many industries, organizations are about equally as likely to be investing more than 5 percent of their digital budgets in gen AI as they are in nongenerative, analytical-AI solutions (Exhibit 5). Yet in most industries, larger shares of respondents report that their organizations spend more than 20 percent on analytical AI than on gen AI. Looking ahead, most respondents—67 percent—expect their organizations to invest more in AI over the next three years.

Where are those investments paying off? For the first time, our latest survey explored the value created by gen AI use by business function. The function in which the largest share of respondents report seeing cost decreases is human resources. Respondents most commonly report meaningful revenue increases (of more than 5 percent) in supply chain and inventory management (Exhibit 6). For analytical AI, respondents most often report seeing cost benefits in service operations—in line with what we found last year —as well as meaningful revenue increases from AI use in marketing and sales.

Inaccuracy: The most recognized and experienced risk of gen AI use

As businesses begin to see the benefits of gen AI, they’re also recognizing the diverse risks associated with the technology. These can range from data management risks such as data privacy, bias, or intellectual property (IP) infringement to model management risks, which tend to focus on inaccurate output or lack of explainability. A third big risk category is security and incorrect use.

Respondents to the latest survey are more likely than they were last year to say their organizations consider inaccuracy and IP infringement to be relevant to their use of gen AI, and about half continue to view cybersecurity as a risk (Exhibit 7).

Conversely, respondents are less likely than they were last year to say their organizations consider workforce and labor displacement to be relevant risks and are not increasing efforts to mitigate them.

In fact, inaccuracy— which can affect use cases across the gen AI value chain , ranging from customer journeys and summarization to coding and creative content—is the only risk that respondents are significantly more likely than last year to say their organizations are actively working to mitigate.

Some organizations have already experienced negative consequences from the use of gen AI, with 44 percent of respondents saying their organizations have experienced at least one consequence (Exhibit 8). Respondents most often report inaccuracy as a risk that has affected their organizations, followed by cybersecurity and explainability.

Our previous research has found that there are several elements of governance that can help in scaling gen AI use responsibly, yet few respondents report having these risk-related practices in place. 4 “ Implementing generative AI with speed and safety ,” McKinsey Quarterly , March 13, 2024. For example, just 18 percent say their organizations have an enterprise-wide council or board with the authority to make decisions involving responsible AI governance, and only one-third say gen AI risk awareness and risk mitigation controls are required skill sets for technical talent.

Bringing gen AI capabilities to bear

The latest survey also sought to understand how, and how quickly, organizations are deploying these new gen AI tools. We have found three archetypes for implementing gen AI solutions : takers use off-the-shelf, publicly available solutions; shapers customize those tools with proprietary data and systems; and makers develop their own foundation models from scratch. 5 “ Technology’s generational moment with generative AI: A CIO and CTO guide ,” McKinsey, July 11, 2023. Across most industries, the survey results suggest that organizations are finding off-the-shelf offerings applicable to their business needs—though many are pursuing opportunities to customize models or even develop their own (Exhibit 9). About half of reported gen AI uses within respondents’ business functions are utilizing off-the-shelf, publicly available models or tools, with little or no customization. Respondents in energy and materials, technology, and media and telecommunications are more likely to report significant customization or tuning of publicly available models or developing their own proprietary models to address specific business needs.

Respondents most often report that their organizations required one to four months from the start of a project to put gen AI into production, though the time it takes varies by business function (Exhibit 10). It also depends upon the approach for acquiring those capabilities. Not surprisingly, reported uses of highly customized or proprietary models are 1.5 times more likely than off-the-shelf, publicly available models to take five months or more to implement.

Gen AI high performers are excelling despite facing challenges

Gen AI is a new technology, and organizations are still early in the journey of pursuing its opportunities and scaling it across functions. So it’s little surprise that only a small subset of respondents (46 out of 876) report that a meaningful share of their organizations’ EBIT can be attributed to their deployment of gen AI. Still, these gen AI leaders are worth examining closely. These, after all, are the early movers, who already attribute more than 10 percent of their organizations’ EBIT to their use of gen AI. Forty-two percent of these high performers say more than 20 percent of their EBIT is attributable to their use of nongenerative, analytical AI, and they span industries and regions—though most are at organizations with less than $1 billion in annual revenue. The AI-related practices at these organizations can offer guidance to those looking to create value from gen AI adoption at their own organizations.

To start, gen AI high performers are using gen AI in more business functions—an average of three functions, while others average two. They, like other organizations, are most likely to use gen AI in marketing and sales and product or service development, but they’re much more likely than others to use gen AI solutions in risk, legal, and compliance; in strategy and corporate finance; and in supply chain and inventory management. They’re more than three times as likely as others to be using gen AI in activities ranging from processing of accounting documents and risk assessment to R&D testing and pricing and promotions. While, overall, about half of reported gen AI applications within business functions are utilizing publicly available models or tools, gen AI high performers are less likely to use those off-the-shelf options than to either implement significantly customized versions of those tools or to develop their own proprietary foundation models.

What else are these high performers doing differently? For one thing, they are paying more attention to gen-AI-related risks. Perhaps because they are further along on their journeys, they are more likely than others to say their organizations have experienced every negative consequence from gen AI we asked about, from cybersecurity and personal privacy to explainability and IP infringement. Given that, they are more likely than others to report that their organizations consider those risks, as well as regulatory compliance, environmental impacts, and political stability, to be relevant to their gen AI use, and they say they take steps to mitigate more risks than others do.

Gen AI high performers are also much more likely to say their organizations follow a set of risk-related best practices (Exhibit 11). For example, they are nearly twice as likely as others to involve the legal function and embed risk reviews early on in the development of gen AI solutions—that is, to “ shift left .” They’re also much more likely than others to employ a wide range of other best practices, from strategy-related practices to those related to scaling.

In addition to experiencing the risks of gen AI adoption, high performers have encountered other challenges that can serve as warnings to others (Exhibit 12). Seventy percent say they have experienced difficulties with data, including defining processes for data governance, developing the ability to quickly integrate data into AI models, and an insufficient amount of training data, highlighting the essential role that data play in capturing value. High performers are also more likely than others to report experiencing challenges with their operating models, such as implementing agile ways of working and effective sprint performance management.

About the research

The online survey was in the field from February 22 to March 5, 2024, and garnered responses from 1,363 participants representing the full range of regions, industries, company sizes, functional specialties, and tenures. Of those respondents, 981 said their organizations had adopted AI in at least one business function, and 878 said their organizations were regularly using gen AI in at least one function. To adjust for differences in response rates, the data are weighted by the contribution of each respondent’s nation to global GDP.

Alex Singla and Alexander Sukharevsky  are global coleaders of QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, and senior partners in McKinsey’s Chicago and London offices, respectively; Lareina Yee  is a senior partner in the Bay Area office, where Michael Chui , a McKinsey Global Institute partner, is a partner; and Bryce Hall  is an associate partner in the Washington, DC, office.

They wish to thank Kaitlin Noe, Larry Kanter, Mallika Jhamb, and Shinjini Srivastava for their contributions to this work.

This article was edited by Heather Hanselman, a senior editor in McKinsey’s Atlanta office.

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