A customer journey map supercharges your customer experience (CX) program when leveraged correctly. We’ll show you how to use customer journey mapping (CJM) to enhance customer satisfaction.
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What is a customer journey map?
If you’re exploring customer journey mapping—or would like to optimize your CX program—Symplicity can help. Schedule a free consultation to learn how we can shortcut your process and help you get outsized results, faster.
What Is the Customer Journey?
The customer journey is the full set of cognitive and behavioral steps a person could conceivably take to become and remain your customer. It starts with awareness of a pain point or issue they’d like to resolve, and it never ends unless they stop being your customer.
- The customer journey often starts long before the person is aware of your brand.
- The customer journey (hopefully) continues long after a person buys from you.
Across the customer journey, multiple customer touchpoints occur. Examples include website visits, ad clicks, sales interactions, brick-and-mortar visits, social media interactions, support requests, billing, and more.
What Is a Customer Journey Map?
A customer journey map is a visual representation of the entire experience a customer has with your company. It illustrates the different stages and touchpoints involved, from initial awareness through post-purchase interactions. This visual representation sheds light on the needs, motivations, and potential roadblocks customers face at every step.
Armed with this comprehensive view, you can identify areas to improve the overall experience, drive more conversions, and foster greater customer loyalty.
Leverage Your Customer Journey Map for Better CX
According to Salesforce, 80% of customers view their experience as equally important as the product itself. By mapping this entire journey, marketing, sales, and service teams gain crucial insights into each stage. They can visualize the process, understand motivations and pain points, and identify friction areas.
Here is how customer journey mapping can improve your CX:
- Find the areas to improve
- Focus on customers
- Align your teams
- Drive business growth
- Bring value to all touchpoints
Let’s dive into each of these benefits.
Pinpoint Areas of Improvement
It’s hard to improve if you’re not sure where to focus. A customer journey map often shines a light on customer pain points that you didn’t know existed. Armed with this information, you can focus on weak links in your process so that your entire CX chain becomes stronger.
Used in this way, a customer journey map saves you a lot of time and effort. With insights gained, you can put your team (and your CX budget) on those points that will deliver the most dramatic ROI and the biggest improvements to the customer experience.
Customer-Centric Journey Mapping
The customer journey map puts your actual customers in the spotlight. It gives you a powerful outside-in view, so you can see every interaction through their eyes. What motivates them at each stage? What questions do they have? Where do they get stuck? What makes them frustrated?
With a solid journey map, you’ll identify those important moments you may have missed before. You can find the friction points that are hurting the experience and focus on improvements that matter to your customers.
This way, your entire organization can focus on the right problems and right opportunities. Instead of guessing what customers want, you get a roadmap based on their real needs and pain points.
Aligned Teams, Aligned Focus
When every team has a unified view of the customer journey, it’s much easier to get on the same page. The sales team understands the marketing handoffs, the service sees previous stumbles, and the product gets direct feedback on shortcomings.
With the full journey in front of you, each department can optimize its own piece to create a seamless experience for your customers. But more importantly, teams finally have the right context they need to make smart hand-off decisions to prioritize the customer.
The journey map illuminates how teams are truly interdependent. It highlights when and where collaboration is needed most to push customers smoothly along their path.
Drive Business Growth and Loyalty
It’s simple: fix the biggest customer headaches and they’ll stick around longer. But it’s not just about reducing churn. The map also reveals the biggest upsell opportunities. When you understand customer needs and motivations at each stage, you can insert the right offers at exactly the right moment.
With less churn and more wallet share per customer, lifetime value metrics rise. And those satisfied customers will refer others and help you grow your business. You don’t have to choose between experience and profit anymore.
If your company truly focuses on and optimizes the customer journey, you’ll be set up for long-term growth. Customers will be more loyal, so you’ll get more revenue from each new acquisition. And you won’t have to constantly spend on marketing just to make up for lost customers.
Deliver Value Across All Touchpoints
If your company truly focuses on the customer journey, you’ll see every single interaction a customer has with you—online, in-person, doesn’t matter. The journey map will expose gaps and overlaps in how you’re showing up across all those different channels today.
With that level of insight, you can get strategic to deliver a great experience, no matter where or how a customer chooses to engage. Maybe that means finally nailing mobile optimization. Or smoothing out the hand-off between sales and service that’s been bumpy.
You’ll be able to look at each touchpoint and connect it directly to the overall experience you’re creating. The goal is to make it feel seamless for customers to pick up wherever they want.
Customer Journey Map Template
Here is a simple template you can use to map your customer journey:
| Journey phase | Customer personas | Touchpoints | Customer actions | Pain points | Opportunities | Future state vision | Implementation plan |
| Phase 1 | |||||||
| Phase 2 | |||||||
| Phase 3 | |||||||
| Phase 4 | |||||||
| Phase 5 |
Customer Experience Map vs. Customer Journey Map
The terms “customer experience map” and “customer journey map” are sometimes used interchangeably, but they represent slightly different perspectives. Customer experience maps take a holistic view of the entire customer experience, while customer journey maps zoom in on specific parts of that experience.
The two types of maps differ across the following areas of focus:
- Scope: a customer experience map covers the entire CX across all touchpoints, while a customer journey map focuses on specific stages.
- Depth of emotion: a customer experience map provides deep insight into customer’s feelings, while a customer journey map doesn’t go deeply into the emotional part of CX.
- Customer focus: a customer experience map looks at the experience of a broader customer audience, while a customer journey map focuses more on individual customers.
- Purpose: a customer experience map focuses on understanding and improving the entire CX, while a customer journey map aims to optimize specific customer interactions and touchpoints.
- Level of detail: a customer experience map provides a more high-level broad view, while a customer journey map offers a detailed, step-by-step breakdown of each interaction.
- Business application: a customer experience map helps unify vision and strategy across your entire organization, while a customer journey map is more useful for specific teams or departments to optimize their objectives.
About Symplicity
At Symplicity, we understand the importance of delivering excellent customer experiences. Here’s how we can help:
- Provide comprehensive customer journey mapping to pinpoint friction points
- Identify opportunities to elevate satisfaction through smart technology
- Audit your current customer experience tech stack and spend (and often save you a bundle of money)
- Advise on best-in-class CX platforms tailored to your needs
- Ensure you partner with the right solution providers at optimal pricing
When you partner with us, we take your success seriously. We’ll meet you where you are now, and guide you to reach your full potential.
See our solutions page for the full range of services we offer.
Customer Journey Map FAQ
What is the difference between customer experience and user experience?
Customer experience is the broader concept that encompasses all interactions a customer has with a company or brand over their entire relationship. User experience (UX) is more specific and focuses on the experience a user has when interacting with a particular product or service. CX considers the full customer lifecycle, while UX looks at individual touchpoints.
What are the different types of customer journeys?
There are three main types of customer journeys:
- The interaction-level journey is focused on a single interaction, such as using a website or calling customer support.
- The journey level covers the end-to-end process a customer goes through to complete a goal, which may involve multiple interactions and channels.
- The relationship level encompasses all the interactions and experiences a customer has with a company over their entire lifetime as a customer
Which is the best customer journey mapping tool?
There is no single “best” customer journey mapping tool, as the choice depends on the specific needs and goals of your organization. Some popular and effective options include Miro, Canva, Visual Paradigm, WordStream, and Zendesk, which offer a range of customizable templates and features to create detailed customer journey maps.
What role do business goals play in customer journey mapping?
Business goals are the driving force behind customer journey mapping initiatives. If you align the mapping process to your specific business goals (e.g. increasing customer satisfaction, retention, or revenue), you can prioritize improvements that positively impact those key objectives and desired business outcomes.
How can incorporating user personas enhance customer journey maps?
User personas represent your target customer segments and are important for creating accurate, contextualized customer journey maps. Developing robust personas that capture the motivations, pain points, and user actions of real customers allows you to map user journeys through their lens for elevated experiences.
Why is capturing customer sentiment valuable for journey mapping?
Understanding customer sentiment through voice-of-customer data like customer surveys is invaluable for effective journey mapping. It provides direct feedback from real customers about their perceptions, frustrations, and satisfying moments across different touchpoints. This qualitative customer sentiment fuels maps grounded in reality.
Further Reading
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What are the best business analytics tools?
Resources
What Are Customer Expectations, and How Have They Changed? (n.d.). Salesforce. https://www.salesforce.com/resources/articles/customer-expectations/
