How to Create a Customer Journey Map: Template and Guide

A customer journey map is a visual overview of how customers experience your business across multiple touchpoints. Here’s how to get started.

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.

Start Mapping Your Customer Journey

Contentsquare lets you visualize the customer journey and experience it through your users’ eyes, so you can see what’s working and what needs improvement.

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.

Advantages of Each Type:

• Narrow Focus: Allows you to zero in on an issue and effectively problem-solve.
• 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. It could take days or even weeks and months of work depending on how many touchpoints there are across the business. If you’re new to customer journey mapping, start from a narrower scope before moving on to mapping every single customer touchpoint.

Here’s a beginner customer journey mapping framework to help you create your first complete map in two and a half working days.

1. Define the Goal and Scope of Your Customer Journey Map

   • Clarifying what part(s) of the journey you're focusing on helps you stay focused.
   • 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.”

2. Define Touchpoints

   • Plot the touchpoints that customers have with your business. Examples include seeing ads, visiting a website, making a purchase.

   Stage	Touchpoint Examples
   Awareness	Social media ad, PPC
   Consideration	Blog post, buying guide
   Conversion	Product listing page
   Retention	Email nurture
   Advocacy	Social media posts

3. Collect Customer Data and Insights

   • Gather metrics and behavior analytics data. For example, use tools like Google Analytics, voice of the customer insights, and demographic information to help map from a real customer perspective.

4. Create Your Customer Journey Map Template

   • You can create a grid either on paper or digitally. List the steps of the customer journey on the horizontal axis and themes to analyze on the vertical axis. Themes can be actions taken, questions asked, or pain points faced.

5. Populate the Customer Journey Map

   • Fill in the map with information about customers’ feelings and pain points.

6. Identify Areas for Improvement

   • After understanding the journey, you can identify areas for improvement like ease of navigation or streamlining the checkout process.

Best Practices to Keep in Mind

• Use Data: Ensure you’re using real customer journey data to inform your map.
• Collaborate: Involve team members across your organization for comprehensive insights.
• Review Regularly: Update your map frequently to keep it relevant as customer behaviors change.
• Layer Your Audiences: Create customer journey maps for different audience segments to tailor experiences.

3 Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping

1. Improve Customer Experience: Identify frustration sources and prioritize optimizations.
2. Optimize Marketing Campaigns: Utilize insights for targeted marketing efforts.
3. Develop New Products: Uncover new opportunities aligned with customer needs.

Contentsquare’s digital experience analytics platform provides tools to build and continuously improve customer journey maps, helping you stay responsive to customer needs.