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The 7 best research methods for customer journey mapping

Getting authentic insights from customers is essential to effectively map out their journey. And understanding how users really interact with your product is the best way to provide tailored experiences that fit your customers’ diverse needs.

But it’s often hard to know where to begin the customer journey mapping research process and which methods to use.

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This article outlines the seven most effective research methods for customer journey mapping. Use our guide to prioritize the right qualitative and quantitative research processes for your needs—and implement them right away.

Use product experience insights to map your customer journey

Hotjar helps you understand your users by combining observational data with voice-of-the-customer (VoC) insights

7 effective customer journey mapping research methods

A customer journey map is a visual representation of how your users engage with your brand, from initial discovery—like searching online for a solution to their problem—to browsing your site, trying out your product, making a purchase—and beyond. 

Make sure your customer journey maps are informed by user-centric research rather than assumptions and guesswork.

Carry out both qualitative and quantitative research using the methods below to create a map that accurately represents your users' product experience (PX):

Qualitative research methods

Quantitative research methods are essential for effective customer journey mapping: they provide hard data that’s easy to track and compare over time. But qualitative methods uncover the how and the why behind the numbers, helping you deeply understand your customers' experience.

Hotjar Product Designer Iga Gawronska stresses the importance of diving into customer emotions in research:

"I think it’s important to map out the actions, and also the emotions and thoughts of the people that perform the actions, your users."

Use the following four qualitative research methods to get an in-depth understanding of how customers engage with your brand online.

1. Customer interviews

Customer interviews are one-on-one conversations with people who actually use your product or service. Conducting them in-person often yields the best results because it’s easier to pick up on non-verbal cues and the interview can flow more naturally—but video conferencing with tools like Zoom is a good secondary option.

By engaging in an open-ended conversation with customers, you’ll get unexpected insights and granular details about your customer’s journey, which helps you empathize with the user experience (UX).

Structuring your user interviews in different stages can help get the conversation going. Start with a warm-up that establishes trust and builds rapport, then home in on your core questions, and end with more informal, concluding thoughts from both parties.

Input your results into a user research repository as you go, so you don’t get overwhelmed at the end of the interview process. Some researchers make simple spreadsheets in Google Sheets or Excel, while others use dedicated tools like EnjoyHQ or Dovetail .

Once you’ve aggregated your interview data, you’ll start to notice trends and commonalities between interviewees and understand how they’re engaging with key touchpoints in your customer journey and what’s most important to them.

Pro tip : use a transcription tool like Otter.ai to stay focused on conducting your interview without having to take detailed notes. Having a written record of interviews at your fingertips also speeds up your data organization and analysis later.

2. Remote observation

Remote observation lets researchers see how users are behaving using online tools like video calling and screen recordings.

Remote research is convenient for both researchers and participants—neither party has to leave the comfort of their home or workspace and they can do what they need to do when it suits their schedule. Using remote research gives you insights into how your customers interact with key touchpoints on the customer journey in their everyday environment and context.

Here are two effective ways to observe your customers’ journey remotely:

Use a video conferencing tool like Zoom or Google Meet and ask users to share their screen with you while they’re interacting with your site, app, or product. Draw on the data you gather to inform your customer journey map.

Use a product experience insights tool like Hotjar Session Recordings and watch playbacks of real users interacting with your site or product across an entire session, as you observe how they scroll, what attracts attention, and where they backtrack or bounce.

Recordings are particularly valuable tools to understand the customer journey because they let researchers observe users remotely without them feeling ‘watched’ and behaving differently than usual.  

Filter your Hotjar Recordings to show certain user sessions based on referrer URL, the landing page they visited, whether they’re a new or returning customer, their session, the specific action they take, their location, and u-turns. This helps you spot trends, understand behavior patterns for different user personas , and dig deeper into the customer journey.

#Hotjar Session Recordings are a great way to remotely research how people engage with your site as part of their customer journey.

3. Lab observation

In lab observation, the researcher observes the participant in person, either in a formal ‘lab’ setting or another professional, controlled environment.

Lab observation can be complicated to carry out because of the cost and logistics involved, and it’s often more time-consuming than remote methods. But it’s a valuable research technique, with a reduced risk of technical difficulties and a great opportunity to build a friendly rapport with participants.

If you op for lab observation, record your conversations with participants or use a note-taking tool like Notion or Evernote to write down your observations while the participant is interacting with the site or product, so it’s easy to find the data later. As the participant explores key customer journey touchpoints , take the opportunity to ask follow-up questions to understand why your test customers are making certain choices.

4. Qualitative surveys

Qualitative surveys usually involve asking open-ended questions that prompt detailed, long-form user responses. They give you great customer insights to inform your journey map, are easy to put together, inexpensive, and work well with large numbers of participants.

The success of your survey depends on the UX research questions you ask . 

It’s important not to (knowingly or unknowingly) ask leading questions, as you’ll likely get biased responses from your participants, which won’t help you in accurately mapping out your customers’ journey. Let’s imagine you ask a research participant the following survey question:

“Did our ‘sign up for a free trial’ button catch your attention on our homepage? Why?”

This doesn’t work because the participant can’t really answer your question freely: you’re implying that your homepage CTA button should have caught their attention, so they’re more likely to answer ‘yes.’ 

Instead, you should ask:

“What site element attracts your attention most on our homepage? Why?”

Or, if they’ve already converted:

“What made you decide to click the ‘sign up for a free trial’ button on the homepage?’

Here, you’re letting the research participant fill in the blanks on their own, which will get you a more accurate picture of their user experience.

Pro tip: use Hotjar’s Survey tool and s urvey templates to quickly and easily create your own qualitative surveys and get all the details about your customers’ journey—in their own words. Filter responses and set up automations for your team to receive alerts when you get certain survey responses to uncover trends in your user data all in one place.

#Use Hotjar Surveys to connect with customers and hear about all the stages in their journey with your brand.

Use Hotjar Surveys to connect with customers and hear about all the stages in their journey with your brand.

Quantitative research methods to complement qualitative data

While qualitative research is the best way to build empathy with your customers and get a holistic view of their product experience, you also need quantitative data to get an objective, granular understanding of key moments in the customer journey.

Use these three quantitative research methods to gather precise information about your customers’ digital journey with your product:

5. Website analytics

Because website analytics show you hard data about how people are interacting with your site, they’re a great resource for customer journey mapping research. Investigate these key metrics to better understand how your users move across touchpoints:

Traffic source: are customers searching for your site on Google, clicking on a landing page, or visiting from a social media channel?

Bounce rate : do visitors arrive on your site and navigate away soon after? Or do they stay for a while, browse, and take a conversion action, like making a purchase?

New vs. returning customers: how many users are new leads and how many are existing customers?

Session duration: how long do customers spend engaging with your site on average?

While website analytics don’t explain why your users are taking certain actions, they clearly show what customers are doing on your site —and how they got there .

For best results, use a PX insights platform like Hotjar to fill in the gaps between the numbers with rich qualitative insights.

Matthew Nixon, managing director of  Molzana , illustrates how teams can combine website analytics and qualitative research tools for optimal customer journey mapping:

"Using tools like Hotjar adds color to our quantitative analysis. Before, events like button clicks, scroll rate, and video plays might not have been tagged. This is where Hotjar comes in; click and scroll maps allow us to quantify user behavior in a much more granular way, which complements the trend data we collect from web analytics."

Google Analytics is a great option for quantitative website or app data: it’s both powerful and relatively easy to set up and navigate. Use Hotjar’s Google Analytics integration to go deeper and gather both qualitative and quantitative insights to inform your customer journey map .

6. Quantitative surveys

Quantitative surveys ask customers closed-ended questions that can be answered quickly—by checking yes or no, typing in one word, or selecting a multiple-choice answer.

Quantitative surveys can take a bit longer to put together, but they’re quick and easy for customers to fill out. With Hotjar, you can quickly create quantitative surveys by modifying questions from our question bank, and build surveys your users can address in a click or two, without disrupting their experience. 

While quantitative surveys don’t give you the same level of in-depth information as qualitative, open-ended questions, they’re helpful to get a statistical overview on the customer journey, or if you’ve already identified a potential problem and want to better understand the issue.

Imagine you've discovered, through qualitative research, that several customers report difficulties browsing your website. Place a quantitative survey on key web or product pages to get more details about the exact issues they’re experiencing with questions like:

Did you experience friction when browsing our website?

What was the biggest problem you experienced when browsing our website:

Difficult to navigate on mobile

Bugs or glitches

Confusing navigation menu

Pages loaded slowly or incorrectly

I had trouble finding what I wanted

Collecting enough responses to quantitative questions helps you prioritize the most important elements of the customer experience to map out an improved user journey.

7. Customer satisfaction scores

#Use Hotjar’s Feedback widgets to conduct on-site NPS surveys without disrupting UX.

Measuring customer satisfaction is important to understand which touchpoints are working well for your users, and which you need to improve. In particular, Net Promoter Score® (NPS) is a great indicator of overall customer loyalty and satisfaction. 

Researchers calculate this metric by asking existing customers how likely they are to recommend your product to their network on a scale of 1 to 10. Their ratings help you understand overall customer satisfaction levels, and also split users up into specific groups:

Promoters (9-10): your biggest fans. They’re highly likely to stay loyal to your company and recommend you far and wide.

Passives (7-8): middle of the road. These customers are more or less satisfied with your brand but would consider jumping ship to a competitor who meets their needs better.

Detractors (0-6): these users may have had a negative experience with your company that’s made them unlikely to return—they may even write negative reviews or testimonials about your product or services. However, negative feedback is also useful as it helps you understand which parts of your customer journey you need to focus on and fix.

While NPS scores give you an idea of how well your brand is serving your customers, they don’t tell you why customers are so loyal they regularly recommend your company. That’s why it’s a good idea to ask a couple of quick follow-up questions in your NPS survey , like “What can we do to improve your score?”

Use Hotjar’s non-intrusive Feedback widgets and Survey tools to get NPS survey responses from customers while they’re navigating your site.

Once you’ve calculated your NPS score, use your findings to identify how you can improve the customer experience and where the customer journey needs updating. For example, if many customers complained about friction in the checkout process, that’s a good indication you should focus on optimizing that part of your on-site customer journey.

Deep customer knowledge makes for easy journey mapping

Thorough research is the best way to build a customer journey map that lets you truly understand your customers and their user experience. It’s essential to use a mix of qualitative and quantitative research methods to dig deep into how customers are behaving on your site and understand why and how they’re carrying out certain actions.

Combine these methods to understand your customers’ experiences from different perspectives and prioritize creating a stellar user journey.

Hotjar helps you understand your users by combining observational data with voice-of-the-customer (VoC) insights.

FAQs about customer journey mapping research

Why is customer journey mapping research important.

Customer journey mapping is important because it helps teams understand how customers interact with their brand in the wild. Customer journey mapping research makes sure your maps are based on accurate user data rather than guesswork and assumptions. By doing research, teams dig deep into the customer experience, uncover the touchpoints that are most impactful, and optimize their products or services accordingly.

What methods are good for customer journey mapping research?

Use a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to get a full picture of how customers experience brand touchpoints and engage in strong customer journey mapping research. Here’s what we recommend:

Qualitative methods: customer interviews, remote observation, lab observation, and qualitative surveys

Quantitative methods: website analytics, customer satisfaction scores like Net Promoter Scores®, and quantitative surveys

Is quantitative or qualitative research better for customer journey mapping?

Neither quantitative nor qualitative research is better for customer journey mapping—both approaches complement each other and should be used together to get a full picture of how customers are behaving—and why they’re behaving that way. While qualitative research excels in uncovering genuine customer feelings and emotions, quantitative research is valuable because it gives research teams hard data that’s easily measurable and useful for analytics and spotting trends.

CJM examples

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Customer Journey Maps: How to Create Really Good Ones [Examples + Template]

Aaron Agius

Updated: April 17, 2024

Published: May 04, 2023

Did you know 70% of online shoppers abandoned their carts in 2022? Why would someone spend time adding products to their cart just to fall off the customer journey map at the last second?

person creating a customer journey map

The thing is — understanding your customer base can be very challenging. Even when you think you’ve got a good read on them, the journey from awareness to purchase for each customer will always be unpredictable, at least to some level.

Download Now: Free Customer Journey Map Templates

While it isn’t possible to predict every experience with 100% accuracy, customer journey mapping is a convenient tool for keeping track of critical milestones that every customer hits. In this post, I’ll explain everything you need to know about customer journey mapping — what it is, how to create one, and best practices.

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

What is a customer journey map, benefits of customer journey mapping, customer journey stages.

  • What’s included in a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Steps for creating a customer journey map.

  • Types of Customer Journey Maps

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

  • Customer Journey Design
  • Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

customer journey research questions

Free Customer Journey Template

Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free templates.

  • Buyer's Journey Template
  • Future State Template
  • Day-in-the-Life Template

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

The customer journey is the series of interactions a customer has with a brand, product, or business as they become aware of a pain point and make a purchase decision. While the buyer’s journey refers to the general process of arriving at a purchase, the customer journey refers to a buyer's purchasing experience with a specific company or service.

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

Many businesses that I’ve worked with were confused about the differences between the customer’s journey and the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey is the entire buying experience from pre-purchase to post-purchase. It covers the path from customer awareness to becoming a product or service user.

In other words, buyers don’t wake up and decide to buy on a whim. They go through a process of considering, evaluating, and purchasing a new product or service.

The customer journey refers to your brand’s place within the buyer’s journey. These are the customer touchpoints where you will meet your customers as they go through the stages of the buyer’s journey. When you create a customer journey map, you’re taking control of every touchpoint at every stage of the journey instead of leaving it up to chance.

For example, at HubSpot, our customer’s journey is divided into three stages — pre-purchase/sales, onboarding/migration, and normal use/renewal.

hubspot customer journey map stages

1. Use customer journey map templates.

Why make a customer journey map from scratch when you can use a template? Save yourself some time by downloading HubSpot’s free customer journey map templates .

This has templates that map out a buyer’s journey, a day in your customer’s life, lead nurturing, and more.

These templates can help sales, marketing, and customer support teams learn more about your company’s buyer persona. This will improve your product and customer experience.

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

Before you dive into your customer journey map, you need to ask yourself why you’re creating one in the first place.

What goals are you directing this map towards? Who is it for? What experience is it based upon?

If you don’t have one, I recommend creating a buyer persona . This persona is a fictitious customer with all the demographics and psychographics of your average customer. This persona reminds you to direct every aspect of your customer journey map toward the right audience.

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

Next, you should conduct research. This is where it helps to have customer journey analytics ready.

Don’t have them? No worries. You can check out HubSpot’s Customer Journey Analytics tool to get started.

Questionnaires and user testing are great ways to obtain valuable customer feedback. The important thing is to only contact actual customers or prospects.

You want feedback from people interested in purchasing your products and services who have either interacted with your company or plan to do so.

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

  • How did you hear about our company?
  • What first attracted you to our website?
  • What are the goals you want to achieve with our company? In other words, what problems are you trying to solve?
  • How long have you/do you typically spend on our website?
  • Have you ever made a purchase with us? If so, what was your deciding factor?
  • Have you ever interacted with our website to make a purchase but decided not to? If so, what led you to this decision?
  • On a scale of 1 to 10, how easily can you navigate our website?
  • Did you ever require customer support? If so, how helpful was it, on a scale of 1 to 10?
  • Can we further support you to make your process easier?

You can use this buyer persona tool to fill in the details you procure from customer feedback.

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

Once you’ve learned about the customer personas that interact with your business, I recommend narrowing your focus to one or two.

Remember, a customer journey map tracks the experience of a customer taking a particular path with your company. If you group too many personas into one journey, your map won’t accurately reflect that experience.

When creating your first map, it’s best to pick your most common customer persona and consider the route they would typically take when engaging with your business for the first time.

You can use a marketing dashboard to compare each and determine the best fit for your journey map. Don’t worry about the ones you leave out, as you can always go back and create a new map specific to those customer types.

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

A touchpoint in a customer journey map is an instance 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.

For example, if I were to view a display ad, interact with an employee, reach a 404 error, or leave a Google review, all of those interactions would be considered a customer touchpoint.

Your brand exists beyond your website and marketing materials, so you must consider the different types of touchpoints in your customer journey map. These touchpoints can help uncover opportunities for improvement in the buying journey.

Based on your research, you should have a list of all the touchpoints your customers are currently using and the ones you believe they should be using if there’s no overlap.

This is essential in creating a customer journey map because it provides insight into your customers’ actions.

For instance, if they use fewer touchpoints than expected, does this mean they’re quickly getting turned away and leaving your site early? If they are using more than expected, does this mean your website is complicated and requires several steps to reach an end goal?

Whatever the case, understanding touchpoints help you understand the ease or difficulties of the customer journey.

Aside from your website, you must also look at how your customers might find you online. These channels might include:

  • Social channels.
  • Email marketing.
  • Third-party review sites or mentions.

Run a quick Google search of your brand to see all the pages that mention you. Verify these by checking your Google Analytics to see where your traffic is coming from. Whittle your list down to those touchpoints that are the most common and will be most likely to see an action associated with it.

At HubSpot, we hosted workshops where employees from all over the company highlighted instances where our product, service, or brand impacted a customer. Those moments were recorded and logged as touchpoints. This showed us multiple areas of our customer journey where our communication was inconsistent.

The proof is in the pudding — you can see us literally mapping these touch points out with sticky notes in the image below.

Customer journey map meeting to improve the customer journey experience

Avoid clutter to create balance.

To reiterate, everyone skims. And just like you want to avoid too much text, you want to avoid a page filled with color, icons, words, and other elements. Adequate whitespace will help keep your document organized.

Maintain consistency.

Your customer journey map should be consistent throughout. Pick a font family, color palette, and font sizes. Then, make sure you follow these guidelines throughout your journey map. Bonus points if your elements align with your company branding.

Customer Journey Mapping Examples

To help guide your business in its direction, here are examples to draw inspiration from for building your customer journey map.

1. HubSpot’s Customer Journey Map Templates

HubSpot’s free Customer Journey Map Templates provide an outline for companies to understand their customers’ experiences.

The offer includes the following:

  • Buyer’s Journey Template.
  • Current State Template.
  • Lead Nurturing Mapping Template.
  • Future State Template.
  • A Day in the Customer’s Life Template.
  • Customer Churn Mapping Template.
  • Customer Support Blueprint Template.

Each of these templates helps organizations gain new insights into their customer base and help make improvements to product, marketing, and customer support processes.

Download them today to start working on your customer journey map.

free editable customer journey map template to improve customer journey experience

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Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free customer journey map templates.

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How to Research and Build a Customer Journey Map: 201

Colourful post-it notes against white background for design workshop

In this three-part blog series, we’re breaking down one of our favourite service design tools: Customer Journey Maps! We cover:

Customer Journey Mapping 101: What are customer journey maps, and why do you need them?

Customer Journey Mapping 201: How to Research and Build a Customer Journey Map (this post)

Customer Journey Mapping 301: Designing for the future, evolving your map, and making it actionable

In this post, we’ll really get into the “nuts and bolts” of customer journey research and map building.

We will explore:

The best mixed method research to collect data for your journey map

Goal-setting and research questions to ask to get at the data points you need

Anatomy of a good journey map

How to visually bring it all together

Full customer journey map

Begin with the end in mind, before you start.

It’s very important to identify and set clear goals to truly reap the benefits of customer journey mapping. The clearer and more precise your research goals are, the clearer your findings will be.

A few examples of strong research goals include:

To better understand the factors that contribute to first-year renewal of an online membership/subscription

To better understand the decision-making process for first-time home buyers seeking a mortgage provider

To uncover why such a high volume of customers are making calls to a company’s support centre

Remember to also strategically select the type of journey map you’d like to build (we explore this at length in Part One of this series ), and the user groups/personas you should be targeting with your research.

Research and Data Collection

Conducting mixed methods research is the best way to gather information from and about your customers to build an effective and insightful journey map. As you conduct user research, try to ensure that, as much as possible, you are capturing their journey––the step-by-step process that each individual user takes during their day (or month/year) as they interact with a service or product.

As a rule of thumb, you should also seek to engage in “data triangulation”. This means using three (or more) data sources (e.g. a survey, user interviews, and a workshop) to ensure your findings are robust.

Here are the five top research methods we recommend for building journey maps:

Surveys are great when you have easy access to a large pool of target participants (e.g. through a newsletter or mailing list). Surveys also allow you to gather quantitative as well as qualitative feedback all at once.

User Interviews (in-depth and one-on-one) will allow you to flesh out journey maps in detail. In another blog post , we explore how to conduct effective and well-organized one-on-one interviews with users/customers.

Observations (contextual research) involve observing participants in their “natural habitat”, like a fly on the wall. We highlight our best practices for conducting observations here .

Diary studies involve giving participants a “diary” or workbook to complete on a daily or weekly basis. Read more about how to conduct an effective diary study here .

Participatory workshops involve hosting a workshop with users where you have them actually map out the journey themselves. We explore best practices for holding a design workshop in a previous post , as well.

Asking the Right Questions

Once you’ve selected the research methods you’ll use to collect data for your journey map – what questions should you ask? This will depend on your goals.

In general, the key information you’ll need to collect from the research activities to build your journey map includes:

Demographic and segment information

User goals, motivations, and needs

Journey Information: Questions related to specific touchpoints, activities, and tasks, e.g. “Please describe a typical day in your life”, “Tell me about your experience with X,Y, Z”, or “Can you describe the steps you took to ….”

User Pain Points: What are the most frustrating parts of their journey? How do users feel, and what are they thinking? Try to capture verbatim quotes here from users, as well as images/video if you are shadowing or conducting a diary study.

A few more things to consider as you conduct research:

Consider the time interval you would like to map. Are you seeking to map a user’s interaction with a brand over a year? A few months? One day?

Consider the level of detail you need to show in the map. For example, if you are trying to understand a “day-in-the-life” of a user (e.g. a person’s experience arriving at and watching a sporting event), you could shadow them and capture their day in a lot of detail. But if you are mapping a journey over three months, the level of detail will naturally be less (otherwise the map will be too long and overwhelming for readers). Remember that participants will also have more difficulty recalling high levels of detail from activities they engaged in one week vs. one month ago.

Journeys are easier to map in chronological order . As you ask questions and observe users, consider the order in which they perform activities/tasks.

User Interview Workbook - This image directs you to Outwitly's free workbook that prepares and teaches UX designers how to conduct interviews like a pro.

Anatomy of a Journey Map

Journey map framework

Let’s break down the components of a strong customer journey. While each journey map and project is different, there are certain pillars we typically include:

Personas –– Whose journey are you mapping out ?

Phases –– Are there any distinct phases in the customer journey, or a collection of tasks that mark a transition? For example, for a first-time home buyer, phases may include “Researching Mortgages”, “House Search”, “Financing” “Offer and Purchase”, and “After Purchase”.

Motivations –– What are the users’ motivations as they go through each phase? For a house purchaser, a motivation may be “Find the best financing deal”.

Tasks and activities –– What are all of the tasks users need to complete in order to accomplish their goal?

Thoughts and Feelings –– How do users feel as they go about their tasks and proceed through each phase? Stressed, anxious, excited? You can include verbatim quotes from your research here.

Touchpoints –– What are the users’ points of interaction with the organization? (E.g. website, in-person meeting, phone call with an agent, and so on).

Tools and technology –– What apps are customers using for a particular task?

Pain points –– What challenges are users experiencing as they accomplish certain tasks?

Key Moments –– What are pivotal moments in the user’s journey that make or break their experience? Similarly, what are the happy and memorable moments?

Opportunities –– Ideas, solutions, and improvements to the pain points.

Note: Adding “Opportunities” to your journey map is important. Each pain point in theory could be turned into an opportunity. Yet, to be truly useful, we recommend running a co-design workshop or brainstorming session with stakeholders and/or users to come up with valuable solutions to the pain points and real opportunities for innovation.

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Click through to explore a detailed customer journey map…

Building your Journey Map

Now that you’ve completed the research, there are FOUR key steps to building your customer journey map.

1. Sketch out individual journey maps for your users, based on the research. Ideally, you’ll do this as a debrief after each interview and/or observation session 
. No two journeys are exactly alike, and as you perform more research and talk to more customers, their journeys will certainly begin to blur. By sketching and mapping out individual journeys after each interview or observation session, you can more easily compare and contrast individual journeys and locate patterns (see Step #2 below) to create your final customer journey map, which will be a representation of all customer journeys combined.

2. Pull out the tasks/pain points/etc. users went through to accomplish their goal
. As you read through interview transcripts or research notes, identify commonalities in the journeys. What were the common tasks, pain points, thoughts, and feelings users experienced? Then, determine in chronological order all of the tasks and activities that your final journey will include IN DETAIL.

3. Start building your journey map! We recommend using a spreadsheet for this step in the process. In your spreadsheet:

Journey map planning spreadsheet

The first column should include the following headers: Phases, Motivations, Main Tasks, Sub-Tasks, Touchpoints, Tools & Tech, Pain Points, and Opportunities (plus any other pieces of information you want to include).

Start filling out the “Main Tasks” row in chronological order for the entire journey. Each task should take up one cell (you can place Sub-Tasks in the row below a main task).

Once your tasks are filled in, go back to the beginning and add in other details, like which pain points users experienced for a particular task, which touchpoints they interacted with for that task, and so on.

Determine your high-level phases and list them out across the top of your spreadsheet (each phase will include multiple tasks).

Complete your spreadsheet by filling out as much detail as you can in each of the rows.

4. Visualize the journey map and bring it to life. Now that you have a skeleton of your journey map (in the form of a spreadsheet), you’re ready to visualize it. Use a program like Adobe Illustrator, or have a graphic designer help.  To ensure your journey map is not overly text heavy, make sure readers can look at the journey and understand its overall meaning “at-a-glance”, with added details for readers who look more closely.

Use icons where possible to represent things like tools and technology, touchpoints, and pain points––or even smiley/sad faces next to the thoughts and feelings. This will make your map more readable at a glance. Ensure to include a legend that explains each icon.

Use colours for each phase or row/section . For large journey maps, you’ll want readers to be able to easily identify different sections: colour is a good way of segmenting the map.

Connect the dots. Use lines or arrows to indicate the order of steps, and to tie tasks together so that it is clear which tasks are completed first, second, third, and so on.

Highlight key moments or critical pain points. Make pivotal moments in the journey, both good and bad, stand out from the rest of the map. When a reader is quickly scanning, they will immediately notice these key moments and stop to read more.

Tip: Print out a large version of your customer journey map. We can confirm that there are few documents more impressive and show-stopping in an office than a 10 ft. customer journey map banner. Everyone will stop as they walk by, and this will build interest. Printed journey maps can also serve as an “anchor” for teams when they need inspiration, or when they have trouble remembering the research insights. 

In the third and final segment of our Customer Journey Mapping blog series , we explore how to make your journey map highly actionable and how to evolve your map as your organization or team moves forward.

Resources we like…

Typeform and SurveyMonkey are tools we like for digital surveys

Capital One Design’s Guide to Experience Mapping and Baseline Journeys

Mapping Experience: A Complete Guide to Creating Value through Journeys, Blueprints, and Diagrams by Jim Kalbach. Outwitly CEO/founder Sara Fortier’s work is featured on page 97!

Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning by Dan M. Brown

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The complete guide to customer journey stages.

12 min read If you want to turn a potential customer into a lifetime one, you’ll need to get to know every step of the entire customer journey. Here’s why the secret to customer retention lies in knowing how to fine-tune your sales funnel…

What is the customer journey?

What do we actually mean when we talk about the customer journey? Well, the simplest way to think about it is by comparing it to any other journey: a destination in mind, a starting point, and steps to take along the way.

In this case, the destination is not only to make a purchase but to have a great experience with your product or service – sometimes by interacting with aftersale customer support channels – and become a loyal customer who buys again.

stages of the customer journey

And, just like how you can’t arrive at your vacation resort before you’ve done you’ve found out about it, the customer journey starts with steps to do with discovery, research, understanding, and comparison, before moving on to the buying process.

“Maximizing satisfaction with customer journeys has the potential not only to increase customer satisfaction by 20% but also lift revenue up by 15% while lowering the cost of serving customers by as much as 20%”

– McKinsey, The Three Cs of Customer Satisfaction

In short, the customer journey is the path taken by your target audience toward becoming loyal customers. So it’s really important to understand – both in terms of what each step entails and how you can improve each one to provide a maximally impressive and enjoyable experience.

Every customer journey will be different, after all, so getting to grips with the nuances of each customer journey stage is key to removing obstacles from in front of your potential and existing customers’ feet.

Free Course: Customer Journey Management & Improvement

What are the essential customer journey stages?

While many companies will put their own spin on the exact naming of the customer journey stages, the most widely-recognized naming convention is as follows:

  • Consideration

5 customer journey stages

These steps are often then sub-categorized into three parts:

  • Sale/Purchase

It’s important to understand every part of the puzzle, so let’s look at each sub-category and stage in turn, from the awareness and consideration stage, right through to advocacy:

Customer journey: Pre-sale

In the pre-sale phase, potential customers learn about products, evaluate their needs, make comparisons, and soak up information.

Awareness stage

In the awareness stage, your potential customer becomes aware of a company, product, or service. This might be passive – in that they’re served an ad online, on TV, or when out and about – or active in that they have a need and are searching for a solution. For example, if a customer needs car insurance, they’ll begin searching for providers.

Consideration stage

In the consideration stage, the customer has been made aware of several possible solutions for their particular need and starts doing research to compare them. That might mean looking at reviews or what others are saying on social media, as well as absorbing info on product specs and features on companies’ own channels. They’re receptive to information that can help them make the best decision.

Consider the journey

Customer journey: Sale

The sale phase is short but pivotal: it’s when the crucial decision on which option to go with has been made.

Decision stage

The customer has all the information they need on the various options available to them, and they make a purchase. This can be something that’s taken a long time to decide upon, like buying a new computer, or it can be as quick as quickly scouring the different kinds of bread available in the supermarket before picking the one they want.

Customer journey: Post-sale

Post-sale is a really important part of the puzzle because it’s where loyal customers , who come back time and again, are won or lost.

Retention stage

The retention stage of the customer journey is where you do whatever you can to help leave a lasting, positive impression on the customer, and entice them to purchase more. That means offering best-in-class customer support if they have any issues, but it also means being proactive with follow-up communications that offer personalized offers, information on new products, and rewards for loyalty.

Advocacy stage

If you nail the retention phase, you’ll have yourself a customer who not only wants to keep buying from you but will also advocate on your behalf. Here, the customer will become one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal, in that they’ll actively recommend you to their friends, family, followers, and colleagues.

What’s the difference between the customer journey and the buyer’s journey?

Great question; the two are similar, but not exactly the same. The buyer’s journey is a shorter, three-step process that describes the steps taken to make a purchase. So that’s awareness , consideration, and decision . That’s where things stop, however. The buyer’s journey doesn’t take into account the strategies you’ll use to keep the customer after a purchase has been made.

Why are the customer journey stages important?

The short answer? The customer journey is what shapes your entire business. It’s the method by which you attract and inform customers, how you convince them to purchase from you, and what you do to ensure they’re left feeling positive about every interaction.

Why this matters is that the journey is, in a way, cyclical. Customers who’ve had a smooth ride all the way through their individual journeys are more likely to stay with you, and that can have a massive effect on your operational metrics.

It’s up to five times more expensive to attract a new customer than it is to keep an existing customer, but even besides that: satisfied customers become loyal customers , and customer loyalty reduces churn at the same time as increasing profits .

So companies looking to really make an impact on the market need to think beyond simply attracting potential customers with impressive marketing, and more about the journey as a whole – where the retention and advocacy stages are equally important.

After all, 81% of US and UK consumers trust product advice from friends and family over brand messaging, and 59% of American consumers say that once they’re loyal to a brand, they’re loyal to it for life.

Importantly, to understand the customer journey as a whole is to understand its individual stages, recognize what works, and find things that could be improved to make it a more seamless experience. Because when you do that, you’ll be improving every part of your business proposition that matters.

How can you improve each customer journey stage?

Ok, so this whole customer journey thing is pretty important. Understanding the customer journey phases and how they relate to the overall customer experience is how you encourage customers to stick around and spread the news via word of mouth.

But how do you ensure every part of the journey is performing as it should? Here are some practical strategies to help each customer journey stage sing…

1. Perform customer journey mapping

A customer journey map takes all of the established customer journey stages and attempts to plot how actual target audience personas might travel along them. That means using a mix of data and intuition to map out a range of journeys that utilize a range of touch points along the way.

customer journey map example

One customer journey map, for example, might start with a TV ad, then utilize social media and third-party review sites during the consideration stage, before purchasing online and then contacting customer support about you your delivery service. And then, finally, that customer may be served a discount code for a future purchase. That’s just one example.

Customer journey mapping is really about building a myriad of those journeys that are informed by everything you know about how customers interact with you – and then using those maps to discover weaker areas of the journey.

2. Listen like you mean it

The key to building better customer journeys is listening to what customers are saying. Getting feedbac k from every stage of the journey allows you to build a strong, all-encompassing view of what’s happening from those that are experiencing it.

Maybe there’s an issue with the customer sign-up experience, for example. Or maybe the number advertised to contact for a demo doesn’t work. Or maybe you have a customer service agent in need of coaching, who only makes the issue worse. By listening, you’ll understand your customers’ issues and be able to fix them at the source. That customer service agent, for example, may just feel disempowered and unsupported, and in need of the right tools to help them perform better. Fixing that will help to optimize a key stage in the customer journey.

Qualtrics in action with sentiment analysis

The key is to listen at every stage, and we can do that by employing the right technology at the right customer journey stages.

Customer surveys, for instance, can help you understand what went wrong from the people who’re willing to provide that feedback, but conversational analytics and AI solutions can automatically build insights out of all the structured and unstructured conversational data your customers are creating every time they reach out, or tweet, or leave a review on a third party website.

3. Get personal

The other side of the ‘listening’ equation is that it’s worth remembering that each and every customer’s journey is different – so treating them with a blanket approach won’t necessarily make anything better for them.

The trick instead is to use the tools available to you to build out a personalized view of every customer journey, customer journey stage, and customer engagemen t, and find common solutions.

Qualtrics experience ID

Qualtrics Experience iD , for example, is an intelligent system that builds customer profiles that are unique to them and can identify through AI, natural language processing , and past interactions what’s not working – and what needs fixing.

On an individual basis, that will help turn each customer into an advocate. But as a whole, you’ll learn about experience gaps that are common to many journeys.

Listening to and understanding the customer experience at each customer journey stage is key to ensuring customers are satisfied and remain loyal on a huge scale.

It’s how you create 1:1 experiences, because, while an issue for one person might be an issue for many others, by fixing it quickly you can minimize the impact it might have on future customers who’re right at the start of their journey.

Free Course: Customer Journey Management Improvement

Related resources

Customer Journey

Buyer's Journey 16 min read

Customer journey analytics 13 min read, how to create a customer journey map 22 min read, b2b customer journey 13 min read, customer interactions 11 min read, consumer decision journey 14 min read, customer journey orchestration 12 min read, request demo.

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Using In-depth Interviews to Build a Customer Journey Map for Your Product: the Complete Guide

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In order to find ideas, you need to find problems. To find problems, talk to people. This golden rule applies to the initial stages of your startup development, namely the creation of a customer journey map. You surely know what it means for the success of your product. In this guide you’ll find the useful hints on building your CJM with the help of in-depth interviews.

This is comprehensive guide is based on the Fulcrum’s experience of developing startup projects , where a thought-through map of interactions with customers is crucial for product to thrive.

This guide will be helpful for:

  • Business owners in search of a  product-oriented software development company . It will help to understand what a truly interested in the client’s success company can do for them.
  • Business owners who are determined to do the research themselves.
  • Product managers who have to do everything themselves.

What is CJM and What Do We Use It for

A customer journey map, or CJM for short, is a visualization of a customer’s interactions with a brand. CJM encompasses every step a customer or user takes. Every point of interaction they have with your business is accounted for. The customer’s thoughts, emotions, and difficulties on every step are documented.

Knowing the customer’s journey allows us to gain an accurate understanding of the things we need to do to improve the product. And the service the customers get while buying and using the product. CJM provides precise data that help fine tune the marketing strategy. Emphasizing the wow-effect aspects of the product and service is also easier when you know the user’s journey. As well as eliminate the negative aspects that affect the sales.

Before building the customer journey map our UX designer conducts in-depth user interviews. These interviews allowed us to define customers’ profiles. Their gains and pains. What they lack now and might need in the app.

Applying the interview insights, we create detailed user journey map:

customer journey research questions

What is an In-depth Interview

An in-depth interview is a qualitative research method. It implies a conversation between two or (rarely) three people. The interviewee is a customer or user. Depending on the situation, there could be two interviewees. But this is very rare. The interviewer(s) is the company’s representative(s). If there are two interviewers one of them usually takes notes and doesn’t ask the questions. The interviews are of course recorded so you could analyze them later.

The subject of the conversation is the experience of solving the problem your product or service is meant to solve. The goal is to find the unembellished truth from the customer. The real state of things, not assumptions. You need the user to tell you their real pains, where exactly the issues occur, and why.

What makes an interview an in-depth one? The length of the conversation. It usually takes from 1,5 to 4 hours . The in-depth interview is meant to get first-hand knowledge of the  REAL user experience . The conversation is not about your product or service. It’s about your user and their experience. And it takes time to delve deeper and truly understand that.

What the conversation allows to discover:

  • pain points;
  • behavioral patterns;
  • expectations.

Who to Talk to

Who you interview depends on the idea you have in a discovery of your project. Or the hypothesis you are validating. Your goal is to get as complete a picture as possible. So the more diverse sources of information you can get the better. But if you are interested in the experience of a particular type of customer it makes sense to ask that particular group and no one else.

For example, your focus is on the customers that pay more than $100 a month. Use your analytics tools to single them out. Then contact all of those people and nicely ask if they would like to be interviewed. About 5-10% will agree to talk to you.

And if your focus engulfs the whole user base you need to ask as many different user groups as possible. If you provide a freemium service you can ask paying customers and those who use the service for free. If you run a marketplace you can interview the vendors and the buyers.

To understand what types of customers you have and which of them you need to interview you can create  user personas .

How to Conduct the Interview

With a list of questions on hand to refer to you are less likely to forget something important. You will be able to phrase better, clearer questions if you have time to think about them. You will be able to get your team’s feedback on the questions beforehand. And you are likely to feel less stressed while conducting the interview if you come prepared.

Also, make sure to anticipate different responses and come up with follow-up questions.

Which questions NOT to ask

1. Leading Questions:

  • What do you like about our service?
  • Why do you use our service?
  • How would this save your time?
  • How does this affect your productivity?

2. Questions that simulate the experience, questions about the future:

  • Would you use…
  • Would it be convenient…
  • Could you imagine…

Don’t ask your interviewees to imagine the experience, appeal to their real experience. If there’s none you need to conduct a usability test first.

3. Closed-ended questions:

  • Do you use our product daily?
  • How often do you use our product?

4. Questions that guess the user’s emotions:

  • Does the word “urgent” make you uneasy?
  • How do you feel about the word “urgent” in the notification?

5. Questions containing professional jargon:

  • How would you describe the experience of choosing bundles on the website?
  • How would you describe the experience of choosing the paid services on the website?

Which questions are good to ask

1. Dialogue provoking questions that will lead the customer to tell their story.

2. Questions about the real experience. It’s imperative you ask questions about the real things that really happened. Not hypotheticals that could happen. It’s ok for the customers to have limited knowledge. They can forget some things or don’t have the experience you are asking about, it’s ok too.

Interview structure

You need to make your interviewee comfortable, build a rapport with them. So starting with lightweight, simple, and friendly questions is a good idea. Generally, we divide an interview into these stages:

Stage 1. Empathy and contextualization . Here we ask questions like:

  • Tell us a bit about your day/yourself.
  • When, where, and how do you use the product/service?
  • What is your experience with using the product/service?
  • How did you start using the product/service?
  • What do you think about the brand/product/service?

Stage 2. Evaluation of the present. We proceed to the questions like:

  • Could you describe your latest experience with every detail?
  • What did you like/not like?
  • What was good/bad?

Stage 3. Dreams of the future.  It’s time to enquire:

  • What does the perfect product/service looks like for you?
  • If you were the owner of this brand what would you change?

Analyzing the Interview Results for Building a Customer Journey Map

It’s important to understand that data analysis won’t give you ready solutions for the problems you need to fix. What it will give you are the answers to the research questions or goals.

There are a number of frameworks and tools you can use the gathered data for:

  • Customer journey map (CJM)
  • Point of view (POV)
  • Jobs to be Done  (JTBD)
  • Value proposition canvas  (VPC)
  • How Might We (HMW)

Since we are focused on CJM here and the article is long as it is, let’s not delve into details on other frameworks. But we strongly recommend reading upon them as well.

The research questions already hint at the way to organize the data you received from your users.

  • What is the flow for users in a specific category? →  CJM
  • What motivates the customers to use the service/product? →  POV, JTBD, VPC
  • How can we improve the current experience for users in a specific category? →  CJM, VPC
  • What hinders the customers while using the service/product? What blockers are there? → Pains, JTBD, POV
  • Do customers understand the new/specific feature? Are they interested in it? →  VPC, CJM
  • Does the feature affect the choice of an item? →  CJM, VPC
  • What makes the offer relevant to the user? →  POV

customer journey research questions

Analysis process

This is a rather straightforward process. First, we need to digest the information we received. Here we listen to the records we made, read through transcripts and notes.

The next stage of analysis is a discussion. We discuss with the team the insights we received from the customers. And the notes we made while digesting the info. Tools like affinity diagrams are a great help at this stage. At this stage, we also create further notes. We write down all the pains, gains, and jobs we were able to pick out. Then we categorize the insights.

Clasterization comes next. We search the customers’ answers for patterns. We need to find pains/gains/jobs/insights/routines common for at least 3 interviewed customers.

Finally, we structure the data into the framework we’ve chosen to work with (CJM, VPC, POV, HMW, etc.).

Well, as you can see CJM and in-depth interviews are amazing methods. They help you gain insights and deliver better products. A truly product-oriented company doesn’t make whatever it wants, it creates exactly what the users need. If you are looking for such a company, we’re just one call away !

customer journey research questions

Million Dollar Journey

3 steps to go from customer interviews to a customer journey map

customer journey research questions

All marketers have been there: You know you need to build a customer journey map to align your entire marketing team on a customer-centric experience. You did the work to understand your customer — what are their pain points? Where do they seek out information? What tools do they use? You have gathered quantitative metrics, as well as conducted over a dozen customer interviews to collect qualitative data. But now it’s time for the hard part: bringing all of it together to create a customer journey map.

Synthesizing all of this data into a useful customer journey map can seem daunting. There are so many stakeholders involved, a range of varying inputs, and even different tools that have been used to collect all of this information. But fear not: with Miro’s practical, accessible approach to customer journey mapping, the process is made simple, even for those of us who are not anthropologists.

Simply follow these three steps to build a great customer journey map.

Shipra has been running workshops for two decades. Before coming to Miro, she lended her expertise to companies like Upwork, Apple, and Microsoft. She’s passionate about running engaging meetings and helping teams generate better solutions than any single person could achieve on their own.

  • 1. Envision your end result

Qualitative research can generate tons of insights, and it can be tempting to hold onto all these nuggets because they each feel important. But the truth is, you really only need to capture the most important, relevant information. That’s where the art of synthesis comes in.

The first step is to pick a customer journey map template . This will provide structure and focus for your synthesis. Once you know what your finish line looks like, you can zero in on relevant information and confidently ignore data that doesn’t fit your framework.

How to pick your journey framework:

  • Revisit your goals for creating a customer journey map, and remind yourself about the types of outcomes that will be actionable for you and your team.
  • Look at some examples of journey maps online, collect the 4-5 that resonate with you on a Miro mood board for inspiration, and select one to use. Here is my favorite journey template.
  • Modify the rows of the template to capture the pieces of information that are most interesting to you and your team that will help you reach your goals.
  • Enter the phases of the journey you want to capture into the columns at the top. It’s ok to start with your gut feeling, and add or combine phases as you proceed along your synthesis.

See how Miro empowers marketing teams

A reminder: Pick your template early, but stay flexible. You can always add additional rows or columns as needed.

  • 2. Get messy with the data, but stay within your framework

Now it is time to synthesize and get messy. Throw all your data on the board, and identify the salient points. Sorting through all the information might make you feel like you’re going nowhere at first, but stay the course and you will eventually start to see trends and themes emerge. Here are some tips for the synthesis phase:

  • Transcribe all your interviews. Zoom has an auto-transcription option, or you can use services like rev.com.
  • Read through the interviews one-by-one. Every time you see an interesting quote, copy and paste it into a sticky note and add it to the appropriate box in your journey map.
  • After reading through 4-5 interviews, go into your journey map and group similar sticky notes to find high-level insights. You may have some miscellaneous insights that require creating new rows or phases on your journey map. Modify your map structure if needed.
  • As you read through your other interviews, only add a sticky note to your journey map if you find new information or some conflicting quotes.
  • Finish with another round of grouping any wayward stickies, writing new insights or editing previous insights based on your new knowledge.
  • 3. Edit, edit, edit: clean up and share

No journey map can accurately represent every possible customer story.

The purpose of the journey map is to provide an abstracted, simplified, and somewhat linear version of your customer experience in order to help drive internal strategy and discussions.

Trust your editorial instincts to focus the map on the most salient points. The simpler your journey map is, the easier it will be to inspire action and roadmaps that matter. Here’s how to get your journey map ready to share with your entire team:

  • Make a copy of your journey template (so you don’t lose your beautifully messy synthesis work).
  • Delete redundant information and keep only key insights on this new map. Be ruthless.
  • Share with some of your colleagues asynchronously and ask them to review and add comments. Their questions will help you ensure that you are providing the right level of context, and that your writing is crisp and comprehensive.

Remember, no customer journey map is ever “finished.” Maintain your journey map as a living document by getting your team to comment on it, add opportunities to it, brainstorm any identified problems, and update the phases regularly.

Embed your living journey maps where your team documents work, such as Microsoft teams or Confluence, with Miro’s Live Embed integration . This way everyone will stay aligned and documentation will always be up-to-date.

Customer journey maps are an engaging visual way to align your team, frame customer problems and brainstorm solutions. Building one of these might look daunting at first, but using Miro can make the process easier (and more fun!). Find a customer journey mapping tool that meets your needs, and enjoy the freedom of using Miro’s infinite canvas to analyze and present your findings.

Marketing teams across the world rely on Miro to build journey maps and get work done.

Miro is your team's visual platform to connect, collaborate, and create — together..

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