How to map your customer journey (and build a better customer experience)

Customer journey. It's one of those buzzwords marketers obsess over—and for good reason. It zooms in on the overall customer experience to understand:

• Your customers' needs

• What their path to becoming a customer looks like

• Any friction that could prevent them from converting or encourage churn

Not only does a stellar customer journey contribute to a better customer experience (CX), but you'll see it in your bottom line, too.

Forrester found that 41% of customer-obsessed companies saw 10% revenue growth in their previous fiscal year. And a joint survey from Forbes and Treasure Data showed that 74% of consumers are at least somewhat likely to buy based on the customer experience alone.

Brands prioritizing the customer journey and truly understanding their customers are winning. We'll show you how you can, too—we're walking you through how to map out your customer journey to help you get to know your customers better and contribute to a better CX.

What is the customer journey?

Wouldn't it be nice if your customers saw a single social media post or ad and immediately bought one of your products? While this does happen sometimes, it's far more likely your customers will experience multiple touchpoints with your brand before pulling out their credit cards.

That's the customer journey—the series of interactions customers take before, during, and after buying from you.

It can often look something like:

Many companies organize their journey into different stages—like HubSpot, which has a simplified customer journey with only three stages:

1. Pre-purchase/sales

2. Onboarding/migration

3. Normal use/renewal

Every business will have its unique customer journey.

Why you should care about the customer journey

You already know that understanding your customers is the foundation of an outstanding CX. And that one of the best ways to get to know your customers is by understanding their journey.

Here's what designing a comprehensive journey map does for your business:

1. Uncovers customer expectations so you can meet and exceed them—73% of customers will leave you for a competitor after multiple bad experiences

2. Shows you how customers interact with your brand, which helps you understand why they engage the way they do so you can better support them

3. Visualizes every step of the journey to provide insights for sales, marketing, and customer service teams who can use these insights to create a better, more optimized CX

4. Reveals customer motivations, needs, and pain points so you can fix any points of friction or create more personalized marketing messages by understanding your customers' needs

5. Identifies your most valuable touchpoints, like a sales page that consistently generates revenue—once you know which are the most valuable, you can optimize your funnel to guide customers there

6. Shows unknown touchpoints like a chatbot that drives traffic to your pricing page or a help center article that improves retention—use these insights to leverage these assets or tools more effectively

7. Creates an overall better customer experience by providing insights into customers, their journeys, and what you need to do to support them at every step along the way

What is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping is the process of mapping out how your customers experience your business. The resulting customer journey map visualizes every touchpoint customers have with you—from when they become aware of your brand through purchase and post-sales actions, like repeat purchases or becoming a brand champion.

How to create a customer journey map

You know why the customer journey matters and how your journey map will help you create a better CX. Up next? Build out your customer journey map.

Here's how.

1. Do your research

Before you build out your customer journey map, start with customer data. Customer interviews and feedback surveys provide data—straight from the source. It reveals customer pain points, their experiences at different stages along the journey, and how they use your products.

Semrush's sample questions are a good place to start:

• Where did you first hear about our company?

• What's the main problem you want to solve?

• What are the most important factors when you make a purchase decision?

• How helpful is our customer service team?

• How likely are you to recommend our brand?

2. Set clear objectives

Why are you creating a customer journey map? Is it a to-do to check off your list or do you have a clear goal? HubSpot suggests asking these questions before you create your map:

• Why are we creating this?

• Who is it for?

• What goals are we trying to achieve?

Understanding your goals helps you figure out which touchpoints you need to focus on. For example, if you want to increase retention in enterprise customers, shift your focus from a broad customer journey map to a specific one focused on post-sales experiences.

3. Build your customer personas

If you haven't created your customer personas, use the customer research you just did to build them out.

It'll help you understand basic demographic and psychographic information about your customers, plus their pains, needs, and how you can help. Personas are one of your best tools for learning how to empathize with your customers.

Keep your customer personas in mind as you map out the journey—direct every part of your map to the right audience (your persona).

Tip: Limit your journey map to one or two personas to avoid muddying the journey. You can always go back and create additional persona-specific customer journey maps.

4. Map touchpoints 

HubSpot defines customer touchpoints as any interaction "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." They include:

• Social media content

• Help desks

• Phone calls and support emails

• Email newsletters

• In-store activity

• Blogs

• Product demos

• Chatbots

• And more

After you identify all the touchpoints, consider their impact on your customers. If they reach out for support on social media, but then have to call in, wait on hold, and get transferred a few times before actually getting help, it creates a fractured, aggravating experience.

For each touchpoint, Semrush recommends noting a few details, like:

• Channel (website, social media, etc.)

• Content type (blog, sales page, etc.)

• How the touchpoint addresses customer needs

• How the customer should feel at that touchpoint

• What you expect the customer to do next

Identifying these touchpoints and how your personas interact with them reveals where you can improve, what's working well, and where you can optimize.

5. Audit your assets

Resources—like blogs, marketing messages, and tools—all aid in creating a wonderful (or awful) customer experience. Your customer journey map will show you which resources are working overtime to close new leads or what you're lacking to create a better CX.

Let's say your help center content is reducing the number of support tickets by 25%. Do you have the resources to keep up with the content? Are there other places along the journey where this content might be useful? Are there any tools that'd make it easier for customers to access that content? Your customer journey map will show you.

6. Take the journey yourself

What better way to empathize with your customers than to walk them through the journey they go through with your business? It gets rid of assumptions and gives you the real experience—the good and bad—your customers take. You'll see:

• Where customers experience friction

• Where they fall off

• What moves them through the journey

• And more

Make sure you follow the same journey your customer personas take—from social to emails to website activity—to get an accurate view of the journey.

7. Analyze results

You’ve designed your customer journey map—yay! But you're not quite done. Analyze your map to answer critical questions, especially those related to your objective. They could include:

• How many people are visiting your pricing page but not completing their purchase?

• Do we have too many (information overload) or not enough resources?

• Do our touchpoints work the way they should?

• Is the journey easy to follow? Is there a lot of friction?

• How can we fully support our customers?

• Do our customers have access to the right information... at the right time?

A deep analysis of your map should answer questions like these and uncover where you're falling short. Think of it as identifying where you're not properly serving customers and an opportunity to fix those touchpoints to create a better customer experience.

8. Update over time

Over time, how your customers find, engage, and purchase from you will likely change. Their journey isn't a one-and-done, static path. Update it regularly, especially when you release new products or add or remove touchpoints.

An updated map that accurately reflects your customers' journeys keeps your customers at the center of your business—this way, you can stay focused on creating an extraordinary customer experience.

Go on a journey with your customers

Companies with ‌outstanding customer experiences are winning—that's nothing new.

If you want to be one of those businesses that puts customers first and understands them deeply, it starts with your journey map. And once you understand and empathize with your customers' journeys, you have the key to unlocking a superior CX.