<h2>What is a customer journey map?&nbsp;</h2>A customer journey map brings your customers’ journeys to life in a visual way, making it easier to see and understand how their experiences flow across your brand’s touchpoints. It’s a strategic approach to improving your customer experience and can be more effective than trying to understand and improve individual touchpoints at a tactical level.&nbsp;<h2 style="text-align: justify;">What are the benefits of a customer journey map?&nbsp;&nbsp;</h2>It can improve your overview of the strengths and weaknesses in your current customer journey. By analysing the journey your customers take when interacting with you and purchasing from you, as well as their needs, thoughts and feelings along the way, you’ll better understand what your customers want from you at each stage and whether you’re meeting those needs.&nbsp;

<h2>When and why is a customer journey map used?&nbsp;</h2>Here are some of the most popular examples of when and why you might want to use a customer journey map.&nbsp;<h3>To help better understand your customers</h3>Creating a customer journey map can be a good way to help your business better understand how customers engage with your brand. It can help colleagues across the business see how each touchpoint contributes to the customer journey.&nbsp;<h3>To identify gaps in the customer experience</h3>Dedicating time to a customer journey mapping project and visualising the journeys your customers take can help you review and understand them and their experiences. Customer journey mapping can shed light on pain points or experience gaps you might not be aware of.&nbsp;<h3>To improve your products and processes</h3>By plotting out the various touchpoints in a customer’s journey with your brand, you can highlight problematic or inefficient processes that might lead to drop-offs or complaints. It can also help you to refine and enhance your products and services.&nbsp;<h3>To deliver relevant and effective communications</h3>Creating a customer journey map can help you to recognise your customers’ wants, needs, questions, and expectations. Use this information to create an insight-led marketing and communications plan. Delivering targeted and relevant messages at key stages throughout the customer journey can help them feel appreciated as consumers.&nbsp;<h3>To prevent churn</h3>Every business has a churn rate – the rate at which customers stop doing business with your brand. Customer journey mapping can offer insight into where and why your customers might encounter problems or frustrations. By plotting out your customers’ experiences, you can identify areas of concern and plan to improve them.&nbsp;<h3>To close the deal</h3>Mapping out the customer journey will provide a clear indication of the touchpoints and experiences that lead up to the point of conversion. By matching your prospects’ needs to how they’re fulfilled in the moments before conversion, it becomes easier to exceed their expectations and deliver experiences that convert to sales.&nbsp;&nbsp;<h2>How to create a customer journey map&nbsp;</h2>Follow our four-step guide to learn how to create a customer journey map.&nbsp;<h3>List your customer touchpoints</h3>Touchpoints are all the places that your customers can interact with you, both online and offline. Start by creating a list of every touchpoint for your business. Consider where each touchpoint sits in the customer journey – from brand awareness through to loyalty – and organise them accordingly. Think about how your audience might feel at each touchpoint and consider each one in terms of potential obstacles.&nbsp;<h3>Identify your customer personas</h3>Use business data, market research and your target audience characteristics to segment your customers into important groups and create customer personas. Select a persona to be the focus for your customer journey map. Each persona will have a different journey so try not to tackle too many personas with one map. Choose your most common persona (i.e. the one that represents most of your customers) and start from there.&nbsp;&nbsp;<h3>Gather research&nbsp;</h3>It’s important to make the most of the insights, feedback and data you have about your customers. The more data-driven your customer journey map is, the more useful it will be in meeting your journey mapping goals. Use several data sources to gather information for your customer journey map, including:&nbsp;<h3>Customer satisfaction surveys&nbsp;&nbsp;</h3>Use existing responses or create new surveys to get targeted insights into your customers’ experiences. Look for touchpoints that are mentioned often or themes that occur across multiple touchpoints.&nbsp;<h3>Customer reviews&nbsp;&nbsp;</h3>Customers usually leave reviews if they are happy or frustrated. Analyse your reviews to see where these moments take place.&nbsp;<h3>Customer experience metrics&nbsp;&nbsp;</h3>If you already use Net Promoter Score, Customer Effort Score or another method of collecting customer feedback, analyse the data you receive to look for themes or popular topics.&nbsp;<h3>Surveys&nbsp;&nbsp;</h3>Reaching out to existing customers can be useful for gathering research for your journey mapping project. On-page surveys can collect insights to better understand your website experience.&nbsp;<h3>Website analytics&nbsp;&nbsp;</h3>Analyse how touchpoints are contributing to your website traffic, which ones drive sales, where the most drop-offs occur, and which pages are causing frustration.&nbsp;<h3>Website searches&nbsp;&nbsp;</h3>If your website has search functionality, review the results to see which topics or questions your customers are looking for.&nbsp;&nbsp;<h3>Competitor research&nbsp;&nbsp;</h3>Research your competitors and their touchpoints to identify areas where they outperform you and could potentially win business from consumers.&nbsp;<h3>Conducted interviews&nbsp;&nbsp;</h3>Sitting down with a panel of your customers or target audience can be invaluable. Ask questions to understand what their expectations of your brand are, or how they found the customer journey.&nbsp;<h3>Site navigation maps&nbsp;&nbsp;</h3>Analyse your website navigation, looking at how people move from page to page to complete their goals. It should provide a logical and simple experience that turns website visitors into customers.&nbsp;<h3>Chatbots and FAQs&nbsp;&nbsp;</h3>Use analytics to see which FAQ pages get the highest engagement to better understand where your customers are struggling in their experience with your brand. Chatbot queries also provide valuable insight.&nbsp;Insights from sales&nbsp;&nbsp;Conduct research with your sales team to find out the most common customer and prospect questions, frustrations, expectations and needs.&nbsp;<h3>Identify elements to include in your customer journey map</h3>Your customer journey map can represent different stages in the customer journey. Start by analysing the current state of your customer journeys to highlight how your prospects and customers are interacting with your business in real-time. We’ve identified the key journey mapping elements:&nbsp;<h3>Current state&nbsp;</h3>Current state journey maps offer insights into how things are currently working and flag any issues or areas for improvement. By starting with the current state, you’ll create a benchmark map to improve on, helping you to track any wins from the improvements you make.&nbsp;<h3>Day in the life&nbsp;</h3>Day in the life customer journey mapping plots the typical day of your focus persona. This type of map shows you when your customers interact with your brand, when they might engage with your products or services, and which problems they might face as the day progresses.&nbsp;<h3>Future state&nbsp;</h3>If you know the current state of your customer journeys, it’s much easier to plan ahead and identify how to deliver new experiences for customers. Future state journey maps are driven by your brand’s vision for customer experience, focusing on creativity, ideal scenarios, and ideation.&nbsp;&nbsp;<h3>Service map&nbsp;</h3>Service maps focus on what happens behind the scenes in terms of delivery and operations. They combine the scenarios faced by the customer with scenarios affecting your organisation, and are most effective when created by colleagues from different areas of your business.&nbsp;

<h2>What are customer touchpoints?&nbsp;</h2>Put simply, a customer touchpoint is every moment a customer encounters your business. Every interaction they have with your brand is a touchpoint, even if it’s not a physical interaction. You find them at every stage in the customer journey and they can have a significant impact on how customers feel about your business.&nbsp;Examples of touchpoints include a customer scrolling through social media and seeing your posts, receiving a text message to inform them their order is out for delivery, or visiting a physical store. There are endless customer touchpoints and every single one is critical to your business, as they can change impact customer loyalty, sales and lifetime value.&nbsp;<h2>Customer touchpoints and the customer journey&nbsp;</h2>Customer touchpoints can be collated and used to create a touchpoint map. This differs from the customer journey, which looks at how customers transition from one touchpoint to another, and the steps they take to become a paying customer.&nbsp;&nbsp;In most cases, a customer will not experience every single touchpoint – their journey will usually be made up of a select few. Each customer will experience a different customer journey, as they come across varying touchpoints and have different interactions with your brand.&nbsp;<h2>What’s the difference between a customer touchpoint and a channel?&nbsp;</h2>Customer touchpoints and channels are both important elements within a customer journey. A touchpoint is when a customer interacts with your business, for example, watching a product demonstration, completing a website form or booking a table in a restaurant. A channel is the environment in which a customer touchpoint happens. This could include your website, a social media channel, or an advertising leaflet.&nbsp;&nbsp;<h2>Why are customer touchpoints important?&nbsp;</h2>Customer touchpoints play a crucial role in defining the experience for your customers. Knowing what your touchpoints are can help you improve them and identify areas where you might be missing out on business opportunities.&nbsp;The way that consumers shop and interact with businesses has changed dramatically over the years. For example, 15 years ago the average customer would use just two touchpoints when making a purchase, with just 7% of consumers using over four touchpoints. Today, customers are using an average of 5-6 touchpoints.&nbsp;&nbsp;This increase is largely due to advances in technology, which have provided consumers with more ways to interact with a business. Having effective customer touchpoints can not only improve sales, but it can also boost customer loyalty. Retaining an existing customer is <a href="https://www.huify.com/blog/acquisition-vs-retention-customer-lifetime-value" target="_self">more valuable than acquiring a new one,</a> and touchpoints can help with this.&nbsp;<h2>How to identify customer touchpoints&nbsp;</h2>Your business will have a unique set of customer touchpoints. If you have touchpoints you’re not aware of, you could be missing out on revenue by failing to capitalise on these interactions. Here are some steps you can take to identify your customer touchpoints:&nbsp;<h3>Put yourself in your customers’ shoes</h3>The most effective way to identify your customer touchpoints is to put yourself in their shoes. Ask yourself what you would do if you were looking to solve a problem or needed to make a purchase decision about your products. Put yourself on your customer journey and make a note of every touchpoint you find along the way.&nbsp;Follow this process until you’ve completed a purchase. You can align your thoughts on what customer touchpoints might be for your business with feedback from existing customers. Reviews and surveys can help you to understand consumers’ real-life experiences with your business.&nbsp;<h3>Map your customer journey and customer experience</h3>A customer journey map is essential because it outlines all the touchpoints that a customer could experience while interacting with your business. Take it one step further by creating a customer experience map, which will analyse every aspect of customer experience with your brand and highlight multiple touchpoints.&nbsp;Customer journey and customer experience maps are both useful for identifying customer touchpoints. A journey map is best for focusing on a specific path that a customer might take and the touchpoints they encounter along this path. A customer experience map can help you visualise every customer journey and gain a deeper understanding of how customers interact with your business.&nbsp;&nbsp;<h3>Categorise your touchpoints</h3>Once you’ve identified your customer touchpoints, categorise them so that you can better understand the customer experience. Typically, touchpoints will fall into one of four categories:&nbsp;<ul><li>Products: These include software, hardware and services. Depending on your business, your website might fall into this category because it may be a part of your product or service.</li></ul><ul><li>Interactions: Any customer touchpoint that is a two-way interaction should fall under the interactions category. This could be online (such as live chat), on the phone, or in person.&nbsp;</li><li>Settings: These are places where your products or services might be seen or used by customers, for example, in-store, at an event or on TV.&nbsp;</li><li>Messages: Any one-way communication is a message touchpoint. This could be advertising, product packaging, or any touchpoint where you are communicating with customers, but where they cannot communicate back.</li></ul>

<h3>Customer touchpoint examples&nbsp;</h3>Customer touchpoint examples can provide useful insight into the common touchpoints that most businesses will have. These are some of the most popular customer touchpoints, categorised into pre-purchase, during purchase and post-purchase touchpoints.&nbsp;<h3>Pre-purchase touchpoints&nbsp;</h3><ul><li>Online advertising, including display advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) and social media adverts</li></ul><ul><li>Social media channels</li><li>Digital marketing, including blogs, infographics and promotional videos</li><li>Word of mouth, including referrals from friends and family.</li></ul><h3>During purchase touchpoints&nbsp;</h3><ul><li>Conversations, including those in-store or at an event</li></ul><ul><li>Product pages</li><li>Reviews, including review platforms and on-page reviews</li><li>Point of sale (POS), including merchandising in-store or speaking with a sales representative</li><li>Ecommerce.</li></ul><h3>Post-purchase touchpoints&nbsp;</h3><ul><li>Feedback surveys</li><li>Thank you email, including handwritten notes sent with products</li><li>Cross-selling and upselling, for example, selling a new phone case when a customer buys a new phone</li><li>Loyalty programmes, including exclusive discounts and offers</li><li>Billing, as a negative billing experience could deter customers and result in negative feedback.</li></ul><h2>What is a customer purchase journey?&nbsp;</h2>A customer purchase journey is the path a consumer takes from identifying a problem or need they have through to purchasing from a brand and becoming a loyal customer. There are different versions of the customer purchase journey, which you can visualise as a funnel, but we’ve identified the five stages as:&nbsp;<ul><li>Problem or need</li></ul><ul><li>Search&nbsp;</li></ul><ul><li>Consideration</li></ul><ul><li>Purchase</li></ul><ul><li>Brand loyalty</li></ul>Our <a href="https://www.feefo.com/en/business/resources/reports/the-2019-feefo-consumer-report" target="_self">survey of 2,000 UK shoppers</a> found that businesses must listen, learn and engage consumers at every stage of the customer purchase journey. The infographic below shares the findings of the survey, aligning key statistics with the five different stages to help you understand how consumers think and behave across the purchase journey.&nbsp;

<h3>Customer journey analysis&nbsp;</h3>Whether you use Google Analytics on your website, Facebook Analytics for social media, or track your customer data using another platform, it’s important to analyse your customers’ journeys. If you have multiple sources of website and marketing tracking, you should be able to collate the data to identify:&nbsp;<ul><li>Your customer demographics, including age, gender and interests</li><li>Common customer website journeys</li></ul><ul><li>The best-performing sources of traffic and referrals to your website</li><li>Customer contact volumes.</li></ul>To find out what customers are saying about your brand, look at your customer reviews and use social listening tools to track conversations that involve your brand name. You can also set up short surveys, email follow-ups, or interviews to better understand the journey your customers take with you.&nbsp;

<h3>Top seven customer journey mapping tools&nbsp;</h3>Customer journey mapping tools can help you maximise every touchpoint that a prospective customer has with your brand before buying, helping to improve your conversion volumes and ultimately your bottom line. Here are seven customer journey mapping tools to get you started:&nbsp;<h3>Smaply</h3>One of the top mapping tools is <a href="https://www.smaply.com/" target="_self">Smaply.</a> It offers three tools – journey mapping, persona mapping, and stakeholder mapping – helping you get to grips with the entire customer journey.&nbsp;&nbsp;<h3>Lucidchart</h3><a href="https://www.lucidchart.com/pages/examples/customer-journey-mapping-software" target="_self">Lucidchart</a> is a purpose-built customer mapping tool, used by 99% of Fortune 500 companies. It offers a range of integrations, helping you to import data automatically from your website, social media channels and analytics.&nbsp;<h3>Canvanizer</h3>If you’re looking for a simple, straightforward and free to use tool, <a href="https://canvanizer.com/" target="_self">Canvanizer</a> is a good choice. Choose from a wide range of templates to help with customer feedback, SWOT analyses and social media strategy planning.&nbsp;&nbsp;<h3>OmniGraffle</h3>Although it’s not purpose-built for journey mapping, <a href="https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle" target="_self">OmniGraffle</a> helps you create diagrams that explain complicated ideas. You’ll need to manually add information from your own data sources, but the tool will simplify your customer journey mapping process.&nbsp;&nbsp;<h3>PowerPoint</h3>Customer journey maps are usually presented as flow charts or diagrams, which you can create with ease using PowerPoint. The template below is a good example of how simple your customer journey map can be.&nbsp;Credit: <a href="https://pslides.com/templates/customer-journey-map-for-powerpoint/" target="_self">PSlides.com</a><h3>Google Analytics</h3>If you’re new to customer journey mapping, <a href="https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/" target="_self">Google Analytics</a> has information to get you started. For example, it can show you your customer behaviour flow, which explores how people make the most common journeys on your website.&nbsp;&nbsp;<h3>UXPressia</h3>Finally, <a href="https://uxpressia.com/" target="_self">UXPressia</a> is another purpose-built software solution that uses customer personas and journey maps in tandem to create a storyboard with commentary, quotes, problems and customer experiences at each point in their journey.&nbsp;&nbsp;Collecting customer feedback is a key part of your customer journey mapping process. To find out more about how you can use your customers’ opinions to understand them – and your business – better, <a href="https://www.feefo.com/en/business/contact" target="_self">get in touch</a> with a member of our team.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

If you want a demo of how Feefo could work for you, or discuss our solutions and opportunities further, get in touch and one of our friendly team will be happy to answer any queries.

Want to find out more about Feefo?

Reviews are just the beginning. At Feefo, we build lasting relationships with brands around the world who choose us to help translate customer feedback into actionable insight. Fill out your details below and one of our friendly experts will be in touch to show around Feefo

Start collecting trusted reviews with Feefo 

At Feefo, we help you choose with confidence because behind every right decision is a reliable review. 

The ultimate guide to customer journey mapping

Want to find out more about Feefo?