5 Examples of a Customer Journey Map

John Spacey, July 28, 2018

A customer journey map is a visualization of experiences that influence customer actions and perceptions. This can include media, social, product, service, environment and communication related experiences. Such experiences can be tracked through a number of chronologically ordered phases including need formation, brand recognition, brand awareness, research, discovery, purchase decision, customer experience, customer loyalty, advocacy and lead users. The purpose of all of this is to understand the processes that a customer goes through when they take positive actions or become dissatisfied and leave. The following are illustrative examples of a customer journey map.

The Big Picture

Customer journey maps are often expansive diagrams that depict the entire process of a customer first hearing about your brand, developing an opinion about your products, buying, experiencing your products and services and going on to participate in your brand by becoming an advocate. This can involve dozens of stages but these are usually some variation of five basic stages: awareness, discovery, purchase, experience and participation.

While big picture maps are useful for illustrating the marketing concept of the customer journey, they are usually too big and broad to identify meaningful change for your brand, sales and customer experience.

Branding

Marketing teams may look at the customer journey in terms of how customers feel about a brand. This involves stages such as brand recognition, awareness and image.

Brand recognition is the process by which an individual learns to recognize a brand by its name or visual symbols. This is important as individuals tend to prefer products they recognize. Brand awareness is the process of learning to associate a brand with its attributes such as realizing that a particular brand of coffee is organic. Brand image are the ideas that customers form about a brand such as an opinion about its quality and reputation.

Sales

A sales team may be concerned with the part of the customer journey from establishing contact with the customer, to answering their questions and discovering their needs and finally to closing a deal.

The example above is quite brief as there are hundreds of potential interactions at the opportunity and closing stages of sales. For example, a team might model how customers react to a particular negotiation strategy such as door in the face.

Product Design

A product development team may examine the customer journey in terms of the learnability, usability and the customer's overall engagement and feelings about the product. For example, the following customer journey for a television design.

Service Experience

The experience of a service such as the end-to-end set of interactions and impressions of a customer who stays at a hotel.

Notes

Customer journey maps typically draw upon business data such as records of digital interactions with customers. They may also be heavily based on market research. For example, ladder interviews may be used to discover interactions that influenced a particular customer. The goal is to identify strategies that can be scaled such as promotion that is working well and to identify gaps and problems that are causing customers or prospective customers to drop off.

Overview: Customer Journey Map
Type	Customer Journey
Definition	A visualization of experiences that influence customer actions and perceptions.
Related Concepts	Customer Journey » Brand Recognition » Brand Awareness » Customer Experience » Customer Loyalty » Brand Advocate »