9 Best Real-life Customer Journey Map Examples

The customer journey mapping process is a visual representation of the experiences and interactions customers have with a company, from initial awareness to post-purchase evaluation.

These maps utilize infographics to showcase touchpoints across the customer-brand relationship, revealing strategies for personalized experiences that enhance consumer success and engagement.

By aiding businesses in understanding the customer journey, identifying pain points, and enhancing overall experiences, journey mapping contributes to increased sales, loyalty, cost savings, and team alignment.

How Customer Journey Maps Impact Business Performance?

Customer journey maps serve as invaluable tools for enhancing business performance by facilitating a smoother path to customer satisfaction.

They provide insights into the customer experience, allowing businesses to empathize with customers, identify pain points, and address challenges they encounter along the way.

By pinpointing inconsistencies between touchpoints, such as communication gaps across platforms or departments, customer journey mapping aids in improving service quality and retention. Leveraging customer journey contact center data, these maps optimize genuine customer engagements across all communication channels.

Key Elements of a Customer Journey Map

Numerous customer journey mapping software options exist in the market, each offering unique features. Here are the key elements that characterize these customer journey map templates.

Customer Personas

To create a customer journey map, you first need to know who your potential customer is. This begins with developing customer personas, which are fictional representations of typical customers based on demographics, behaviors, and customer needs.

For instance, Uber has two primary personas: passengers seeking seamless rides from A to B, and drivers desiring flexibility and supplemental income.

Touchpoints

Touchpoints encompass every interaction a customer has with your brand throughout their buying journey. When creating a customer journey map, it's essential to outline these points of contact, information gathering, or interactions with your brand. Typical touchpoints include:

• Marketing emails and newsletters
• Phone calls, service and support lines, online chatbots
• Store staff, checkout registers, service points
• Website, apps, social media platforms
• Packaging, shipping, delivery

Customer Emotions

In this step, you map out the specific emotional experience of the customer at each touchpoint. What are they thinking? What actions do they take? How are they feeling?

Avoid guesswork by gathering real feedback from customers through surveys and, ideally, direct interactions with your customer support team.

Critical Moments

Critical moments are the touchpoints that significantly influence the overall customer experience, whether positively or negatively. These moments of truth provide opportunities for innovation and growth as they represent instances, such as pain points, where people are willing to invest in addressing their critical needs.

Channels and Platforms

Channels and platforms encompass the diverse mediums through which customers engage with your business. These may include traditional channels like in-person visits or phone calls, alongside digital channels such as websites, social media, or mobile apps. Understanding the preferred communication channels of different customer segments helps in effectively engaging with your customers throughout their journey.

From Concept to Reality: Creating Your Customer Journey Map

Customer journey maps are not one size fits all; however, there are fundamental steps that you can take to create your own.

Step 1: Define customer touchpoints

Identify all customer interactions, from ads to website visits, forming the core of your user journey map, illustrating the path from awareness to purchase and beyond.

Step 2: Create customer buyer personas

Develop fictional representations of your target audience, considering demographics and behaviors.

Step 3: Set goals

Establish goals for each touchpoint on your map, whether it's increasing brand awareness, driving sales, or fostering customer loyalty.

Step 4: Conduct user studies and surveys

Conduct user studies and surveys to understand how customers discover products, interact with your brand, and identify pain points or challenges they encounter.

Step 5: Analyze your customer journey map

Evaluate key metrics such as repeat purchases, sales, and customer satisfaction to assess the effectiveness of your customer’s journey map. Use the data to optimize touchpoints and enhance the overall digital customer experience.

Real-life Application: 9 Customer Journey Map Examples Across Industries

Example 1: Consumer SaaS- Spotify

Spotify, a leading audio streaming service, utilized a customer journey map to enhance its music-sharing experience for users. The objective was to determine the optimal integration of music-sharing features within the customer journey.

The map detailed the user experience from opening Spotify on a mobile device to interacting with shared songs. By analyzing each stage and touchpoint, including user actions, thoughts, and emotions, Spotify identified pain points and implemented improvements for a smoother music-sharing experience.

This comprehensive journey map prioritized customer engagement, considered user behavior, and aimed to enhance overall user satisfaction, ultimately encouraging more frequent music sharing among users.

Example 2: Entertainment - Netflix

Similar to Spotify, Netflix's customer journey map incorporates stages, emotions, and thoughts, albeit with a different approach. In Netflix's map, each touchpoint is described in a more goal-oriented manner, focusing on addressing the goals through rows such as 'motivations', 'pain points', and notably, 'opportunities'.

Additionally, this customer journey map is tailored with a clear target persona in mind, likely detailed in their marketing materials, along with a predefined scenario. This approach makes Netflix's customer journey more actionable and focused on achieving its objectives.

Example 3: E-commerce - Amazon

Amazon, a global e-commerce giant, employs sophisticated technology and custom systems to guide customers through the sales journey. While its customer journey map is complex and extensive, it can be broken down into manageable parts for analysis.

For instance, Amazon's customer conversion funnel illustrates how its products facilitate the customer journey, driving engagement and maximizing sales. When conducting your customer journey mapping, remember to incorporate key metrics to monitor success and gain deeper insights into the overall customer experience.

Example 4: B2B - Hubspot

HubSpot opted for a linear design for their customer journey map, organizing common experiences along a timeline and using color coding to denote pain points or moments of delight. This format made the map easy to interpret and actionable for other teams.

Additionally, they incorporated testimonials from customers, categorized based on their position in the journey, to provide firsthand perspectives on interactions. These stories humanized the map, making the identified issues feel more relevant and pressing to employees.

Example 5: SaaS- Zendesk

This customer journey map example from Zendesk uniquely emphasizes customer churn and reconsideration. While it doesn't delve into the specifics of customer activities, thoughts, or emotions, it distinguishes itself by accounting for a range of outcomes, including churn and reevaluation.

For teams prioritizing these aspects, this format offers a valuable framework for gaining deeper insights into the customer's mindset at each stage of their journey.

Example 6: Toy- Lego

LEGO has innovatively crafted a Customer Journey Map using a tool called the "experience wheel." This wheel analyzes a flight to New York City in a simplified manner.

At its core are the persona's characteristics, surrounded by three levels of experience representing the journey's goal achievement. The outer circle details each step of the journey, marked with emoticons reflecting positive, neutral, or negative experiences. This straightforward format allows for easy creation, making it suitable for discussions and idea-generation sessions. It offers a quick way to view products or services from the customer's perspective.

Example 7: SaaS - TurboTax

TurboTax, a leading online tax preparation software, developed a customer journey map to launch its new product, Personal Pro.

The map, created through a blend of data research, customer surveys, and discussions with tax professionals, tracks the customer experience from website entry to tax filing completion. By identifying and addressing customer pain points, the map enables TurboTax to enhance the overall experience, ensuring smoother and more satisfactory interactions.

Example 8: Transport - Uber

Uber's customer journey map not only includes clearly defined stages, emotional waves, and thoughts at each touchpoint but also incorporates additional visuals from their app and descriptive elements.

For instance, the persona is well-defined, eliminating the need to reference external marketing documents for details. Moreover, the critical analysis for action section provides a clear assessment of both positives and areas for improvement at each step of the journey.

Example 9: Retail - Starbucks

Starbucks’ customer journey map, using a timeline style, highlights diverse touchpoints and aims to enhance customer experience. It gathers feedback from outlet visits and categorizes experiences into three components:

• Poached experience: Customers are asked about their overall impression of the outlet they visited, particularly during peak hours.
• Enhanced experience: Starbucks also assesses any negative experiences encountered by customers and seeks resolutions to prevent their recurrence.
• Touchpoints: This refers to the level and extent of interaction the consumer has experienced with the brand, whether in person, through the website, app, etc.

How to Implement Customer Journey Maps Using Five9

Implementing customer journey maps using Five9 is a simple process. With Five9, agents gain access to a unified view of customer history, including interactions from email, web chat, and phone calls.

By integrating all channels into a single interface, Five9 ensures that agents have a clear understanding of the customer journey, enabling them to respond effectively at every stage.

Discover how using Five9 customer journey mapping can boost customer service, helping agents understand and meet customer expectations, leading to increased satisfaction and loyalty.