How to Create a Customer Journey Map: Template & Guide

​​There’s a common saying that you can’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes. 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.

What is a customer journey map?

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’re created with real customer data that you collect and analyze. The insights are usually organized into a map (hence the name), diagram, or flowchart, 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 customer journey map in 6 steps

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 two and half working days.

Pro tip: want to make things even simpler? Contentsquare’s Customer Journey Analysis can do all the hard work for you. It aggregates data from 100% of customers to give you a comprehensive picture of how users navigate your site.

Quickly find optimization opportunities and pain points (like bottlenecks or looping behavior), and use segments to zoom in on specific user personas or audiences to get granular insights.

Identify your most valuable journeys and work backward to encourage all new users to follow the same path, leading to long-term satisfaction and loyalty.

Plus, jump straight from Customer Journey Analysis to Zone-Based Heatmaps and Session Replay to get even more insights about the real user behavior behind the journey.

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Screenshot of Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis capability with sunburst diagram

Customer Journey Analysis in Contentsquare lets you visualize the customer journey to make data-driven optimizations

Step 1: define the goal and scope of your customer journey map

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, specific persona, 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

At the end of this stage, you should have a one- or two-sentence description of what your map will cover, and why, that 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: define touchpoints

Once you know who your customers are and what they need, you can start plotting the touchpoints they have with your business.

These touchpoints will depend on what industry you work in and how your specific customers interact with your brand.

For example, the first few touchpoints for a coffee shop might look like this:

• The customer sees a geo-targeted ad

• The customer visits your shop

• The customer buys coffee

• The customer follows your brand on Twitter

Whereas for an ecommerce clothing company, it might look like this:

• The customer sees a social media promotion

• The customer clicks on your website

• The customer browses your site

• The customer adds an item to their basket

The stages of the customer journey are different for everyone, but here are the most commonly used stages to get you started:

Stage

Touchpoint examples

Awareness

Social media ad, PPC

Consideration

Blog post, buying guide

Conversion

Product listing page, landing page

Retention

Email nurture

Advocacy

Social media posts, user-generated content (UGC), customer stories

For each touchpoint, identify your customer’s goals, needs, and pain points. What are they trying to achieve? What information do they need? What challenges are they facing?

Step 3: collect customer data and insights

Once you identify your goal, scope, and touchpoints, collect the 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 Contentsquare) that show you how people interact with your site. For example, Zone-Based Heatmaps give you an aggregate view of how users click, move and scroll on specific pages, and Session Replay captures a user’s entire journey as they navigate your site

• Voice of the Customer (VoC) insights like answers to 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

This stage provides you with the necessary 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.

Session Replay gives you invaluable, in-depth user data for your customer journey map

Step 4: create your customer journey map template

If you’re doing this as an in-person workshop, use a large sheet of paper to create a grid you'll stick to the wall and fill in; otherwise, you can use a digital tool to create your journey map template. (A Google Sheet is a great place to start.)

On the horizontal axis, write the customer journey steps you identified during your previous 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

An example of a customer journey map template with different stages and themes

Step 5: populate the customer journey map

Now, fill in parts of the map grid with available information. Add in details about how your customers are feeling at each stage of their journey, plus what pain points they might have.

If you’re doing this collectively, start by filling in the first row together, so everybody understands the process, then do each row individually.

Step 6: identify areas for improvement

Once you have a good understanding of the customer journey, you can identify areas for improvement. This could be as simple as making it easier for customers to find the information they need, streamlining the checkout process, or providing better customer support.

As part of your next steps, you should:

• Digitize your customer journey map if it wasn’t digital already, 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.

• Provide a quick summary (like a write-up or short video video) explaining what you did and your key takeaways, to provide context for stakeholders

• Clearly state the follow-up actions. For example, 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 user tests first.

Best practices to keep in mind when creating your customer journey map

The customer journey mapping process takes time, effort and research—you can’t (and shouldn’t) do it alone. Here are a few key things to keep in mind.

Use data throughout the process to inform your journey map

It’s important to use real customer journey data and insights from analytics platforms (like Contentsquare), customer surveys, and social media to make informed decisions.

Get input from your teams across your organization

Your journey map should be a collaborative effort. Get input from your sales, marketing, customer support and product development teams.

Pro tip: 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

Review and update your journey map regularly

Your customers are constantly evolving, so your journey map should be too. Ensure it’s accurate and up to date by reviewing it on a regular basis.

Layer your audiences

If you want to go one step further, you can layer more specific audiences. For example, you may want to create customer journey maps for different job roles or industries to make sure you’re delivering the right messages to them at the right time.

Whether you decide to segment your audience by most common pain points, job title, or industry, your customer journey map will help you spot points of friction and content gaps to ensure a smooth customer experience for everyone.

3 benefits of customer journey mapping

We all know by now 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

Here are three more powerful reasons to start using journey maps.

1. Almost instantly improve your CX

Journey mapping is an eye-opening process. Once you start digging into your customer journeys, you’re likely to identify areas of frustration pretty quickly.

For ecommerce businesses, for example, retail customer journey mapping is beneficial for pinpointing areas where they might be losing customers or where cart abandonment is high.

And knowing where customers struggle will help you prioritize the right optimizations, improve your customers’ experience and even fuel ideas for your experimentation strategy.

2. Optimize your marketing campaigns

Marketers can use the insights from the journey mapping process to create targeted campaigns that promote products to the right audience, at the right time, and in the right way.

Journey mapping can help you level up your marketing strategy by helping you:

• Identify different customer segments

• Coordinate efforts across multiple channels

• Set specific objectives aligned with customer goals

• Improve campaign measurement

3. Develop new products and services

Journey mapping isn’t just for marketing teams. It can play a key role in identifying new product and service opportunities that meet the needs of your customers.

Product owners and dev teams that closely align product development to their customer journeys can reduce the risk of product failure and increase the likelihood of successful adoption.

It’s also a great way to gather customer feedback, which can be invaluable in shaping new product development and identifying unmet needs or areas for improvement.

See it in action: learn how a data-driven site redesign led to a +30% conversion site-wide for De Beers.

Create a journey map that drives results with Contentsquare

Contentsquare’s digital experience analytics platform provides qualitative and quantitative insights into your customers’ online behavior in real time—and provides you with a range of tools to help you build a comprehensive customer journey map, including:

• Customer Journey Analysis: discover how users progress through your site and app page by page, from entry to exit

• Session Replay: watch real-time recordings of how your customers interact with your website to instantly see where your customers struggle the most

• Zone-Based Heatmaps: see exactly where customers are clicking, scrolling, and hovering on your website to understand what content is most engaging and where you can make improvements

• Form Analytics: learn how customers interact with your website’s forms to identify what’s working and where customers get stuck or abandon them

• Voice of the Customer: use tools like surveys, interviews, and feedback to capture real user sentiment and work with deeper empathy

Zone-Based Heatmaps reveal which parts of your page capture user attention (and which parts need a boost)

Remember, journey mapping is not a one-time process. With Contentsquare you can create a comprehensive journey map and continuously improve on it—helping you stay agile and responsive to ever-changing customer needs.

FAQs about customer journey mapping

How do I create a customer journey map?

To manually 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.

To streamline the customer journey mapping process, you can use Contentsquare’s Customer Journey Analysis to capture data from 100% of customers and create intuitive visualizations of the customer journey—so you can jump straight to making data-driven optimizations that improve CX and business growth.

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.