Customers have distinct preferences for how they interact with your organization, making it tricky to know the best places to focus your customer experience efforts.
As a CX change agent, I’m sure you’ve heard how customer journey mapping is a proven way to bring much-needed order to this potential chaos:
- Journey maps explain how specific personas experience your organization
- They reveal the emotions customers feel at each step of their journey
- And they highlight the most important channels in each unique journey!
When it comes to building those customer journey maps… well, some things are easier said than done. (Which is why we created this customer journey map template you can use.)
Many CX leaders rely on tools to optimize the process, however, there are more than 75 customer journey mapping solutions to sift through. (That’s a job in itself to weigh options and find the best fit for your needs!) And even the most comprehensive, artificial intelligence-powered tools require human input and expertise.
Let’s streamline your customer journey mapping tool search and prime your organization for success. It’s time to explore the essential areas to consider so you can meet your needs now and in the future.
What is a Customer Journey Map?
(Feel free to skip ahead if you are already familiar with the concept of journey mapping!)
If you’re new to the topic, customer journey maps visualize the paths customers take to engage with your organization. And this journey starts before they’re even a customer.
Journey maps identify critical customer touchpoints, including offline and online channels and touchpoints. They’re all about the customer’s perspective, making them different from process maps or product roadmaps, for example.
Teams often start with a general journey map that shows how customers typically engage with them. They then expand the base map to reflect the unique paths of specific customer personas for specific needs.
For example, the CX team at a bank could create journey maps for customers who:
- Are applying for loans for life events like buying a house, going to college, or starting a business
- Prefer mobile options whenever possible
- Access specific services for businesses
Of course, this is an oversimplification of the many customers and how they may interact. However, it could be a perfect starting point if the hypothetical bank is starting from scratch!
Journey Maps Help Achieve CX and Business Goals
The best place to start with any map is to ask: WHY are we mapping this customer journey?
Each time you spend time, energy, effort, and resources on mapping, you need to start with a goal.
The goal to “understand” is typically not enough. What do you want to understand? How to create a more seamless journey to apply for a loan? What obstacles are in the way of a business banking customer who seeks a loan? Are our mobile options offering the right options?
Get clear about your WHY. Then determine your scope, which is where these specific needs and personas will be focused.
Customer Journey Mapping Tools
There are a few types of journey mapping tools you can consider:
- Software made specifically to support journey mapping
- Larger CX platforms that include journey mapping features
- Visual design tools to manually build your journey maps
(Or you can stay scrappy with sticky notes and whiteboards. But tools can help you socialize and visualize in ways that can empower you to evolve over time faster.)
A natural starting point is to review the technology your organization already has and explore what journey mapping features they may include. You might be surprised which capabilities are already at your disposal!
It helps to start a tech inventory (if you don’t already have one) as you review your existing technology stack. Start a spreadsheet listing each tool, what it’s used for, what other tools it connects to, and what features it offers.
If you decide seeking a new tool is the best option for journey mapping, then you should center your search around one question: What goals do I want to achieve through customer journey mapping? You’ll likely have many things you want to achieve, and keep these top of mind as you explore options.
Journey Mapping Tool Recommendations
If you have a robust budget and time to consider options, there are a handful of journey mapping tools we often hear about from our network.
It’s important to note here these aren’t endorsements or in any particular order. Your organization has unique goals, and there are pros and cons to every tool and how it fits into your structure. A few starters include:
- Cemantica: Cemantica is a scalable customer experience management platform created by CCXP professionals, which is a huge plus in our book! The solution is often regarded for its ability to distill complex journeys and support a multitude of integrations. Given its robust feature set, however, it may take a little bit longer to learn how to use, and some people have mentioned the onboarding process can take more time than expected (but this may have been streamlined since we heard this feedback!).
- JourneyTrack: We’ve heard about JourneyTrack from several of our Fortune 500 clients, who appreciate the solution’s ability to break down silos and fit within enterprise needs. If you’re a large organization, JourneyTrack should be on your consideration list.
- TheyDo: This intuitive journey mapping tool is often recommended for its ease of use. Its free version also provides a great set of features for you to experiment with and see the potential value of paid versions. Because TheyDo is primarily billed as a journey mapping solution, not a full-suite CX management tool, it could be uniquely fit for the task!
- UXPressia: This customer experience mapping and management platform enables multiple views, like an integrated multi-persona journey and individual journeys. It offers a free version for you to test out, and we’ve heard the paid version is a bit more affordable than others on this list.
Of course, that is just a small glimpse of the tools you can consider. And if you’ve found a solution you love, please tell us about it so we can keep learning!
If you need to quickly build a journey map or have constrained resources that require you to stay scrappy, visual design tools like Figma, LucidChart, and Mural can all be used to create journey maps. Each name is even linked to their content about how to create a journey map in their tool.
Complementary CX Solutions and Suites
There are also some big platforms that offer a range of customer experience capabilities like customer feedback management and customer support options, which can inform your journey mapping.
Although these providers likely offer more capabilities than you need for just mapping, they can be used alongside your mapping technology to ensure you’re working with your full customer data and insights. These providers also offer integrated suites that could be worth your investment and consolidate other customer experience and marketing solutions:
- Adobe’s Experience Cloud includes a Journey Optimizer product that helps you manage cross-channel campaigns at scale. Adobe, as well as the others listed here, offer AI assistance in many of their offerings now.
- Medallia’s experience management platform is great for building a single source of truth for customers and activating their data to deliver personalized experiences. The solution offers journey visualization tools alongside plenty of other capabilities for dissecting customer journeys and understanding their satisfaction.
- Qualtrics offers three suites for experience management, including CX, employee experience, and strategy and research. The solution is built to empower teams across HR, contact center, and product management alongside CX, including omnichannel analytics and automation to help respond to customers when it matters most.
- Salesforce is undeniably a powerhouse for needs spanning the marketing, sales, and customer experience lifecycle. It integrates with so many other solutions and is used by thousands of teams. It’s worth your consideration, especially if you are a large enterprise organization. However, this may be more marketing-focused than the full customer journey.
Customer Journey Mapping Tool Features
As you assess the right mapping tool to meet your current needs, there are a handful of areas to consider:
- Artificial intelligence: How does the solution incorporate AI to optimize team resources and improve your team’s mapping capabilities? AI can be incredibly powerful for transforming your data into actionable and accurate insights. Ask each vendor about their capabilities and if they can provide a demo that showcases their AI in action.
- Analysis: Building on the AI conversation, some mapping tools analyze your customer data to identify trends and potential areas for improvement. These capabilities can fast-track your ability to remove friction in the customer journey, however, they may come with an added fee.
- Collaboration: Can different teams within your organization work together in the tool to share feedback, align priorities, and collaborate on improving the customer journey?
- Data collection: Which channels can the tool extract data from? Data sources might include a company’s CRM, website, social media, customer feedback channels, and email, so it’s important to find a tool that works with your channels.
- Journey mapping lens: Some providers view journey maps from a different lens, like prioritizing the customer journey from a marketing standpoint. Ask how the provider defines journey mapping and whether there is a specific slant they take.
- Visualization: A key purpose of journey maps is to illustrate the customer journey and the touchpoints at each stage so your team can quickly review and understand the journey. Some solutions provide more intuitive or robust visualization features, so ask for samples of what you can create and the templates they provide.
Keeping Your Customer Data in Order
Adding to the individual tool features, your organization needs a solid customer data foundation with optimal data hygiene to ensure you’re working from accurate and complete customer data.
Collaborate with cross-departmental stakeholders to understand which data solutions they use and how each system integrates and interacts with the others. Too often, individual teams use siloed solutions that operate independently… meaning no team has a complete look at the customer.
Potential solutions for customer data management can include:
- Data integration platforms like MuleSoft, Talend, or Zapier to connect different systems and automate data synchronization
- API integrations to connect different systems and facilitate seamless communications between them
- Customer data platforms (CDPs) or composable CDPs to centralize customer data from multiple sources and activate it across tools
Practical Customer Journey Mapping Use Cases
Remember that your customer journey maps are a tool you can use in so many different ways. As you begin using your maps or making the case to your executives why they’re a priority, consider these valuable applications.
Immersing Your Team in the Customer Experience
Print your journey map and provide it to team members or host a journey map walkthrough to help immerse your team in the customer experience. Dedicate time to explain your journey maps and highlight the highs and lows at each point so team members can feel invigorated to help shape that journey. Some tools provide an interactive way to view the maps, so you can take advantage of different views by persona, channel, product, etc.
Boost Customer Acquisition
Journey maps can identify channels you may be missing, or opportunities to refine how you approach each channel. By understanding what customers need as they begin exploring your solution, you can partner with marketing and content peers to craft experiences that turn potential customers into lifelong fans.
Optimize Cross-Selling and Upselling
Journey maps can show moments where customers are more likely to consider additional products or services—and moments where you should not push too hard. Examine the emotional journey of customers at each step to focus on where it matters most. If customers are stressed or anxious at specific stages, you shouldn’t overwhelm them with unnecessary information or push to make an additional sale. On the flip side, you can find moments where customers are typically open to considering complementary or enhanced solutions.
Improve Customer Retention
If you notice customers frequently drop off during specific parts of the journey, those are great places to examine first. How might your existing experience in those moments fail to meet your customer’s needs? Are you missing a key consideration? Or is drop-off expected at that point because of their shopping habits? Some things are outside of our control, however, you won’t know until you look into the moment.
Make Onboarding Effortless
As customers first get started with your product or service, they may face a few difficulties or confusion in hitting their stride. Journey maps reinforce the importance of every part of the customer’s lifetime with your organization, and you can more quickly improve the onboarding experience with a well-built journey map reflecting individual persona needs.
Build Omnichannel Experiences
Journey maps keep you ahead of the ever-changing landscape of channels customers may use to engage with you. By consistently reviewing and updating your journey maps, you can identify new channels and find ways to seamlessly blend them with your existing journeys.
Related content: Customer Journey Mapping Examples: 4 Use Cases to Inform Your CX Strategy
Tips for Journey Mapping Success
Journey mapping is an iterative process, and it will require help from members across your organization. As we’ve partnered with organizations to advance their journey mapping skills, we often see a few common hurdles.
The following tips can keep you on track and move your maps forward, regardless of which solution(s) you choose:
- Know your goal. Before you start, identify what problem you are solving, what question you are answering, or what action you will be taking. Too many journey maps are created “just because” and end up creating no change. Have a plan and scope so you can focus on real solutions and outcomes.
- Focus on one persona at a time. Have a clear idea of which customer persona you are exploring, and immerse yourself in their experience as you map the paths they may take. You will expand your map as you examine other journeys. It’s easy to get distracted by focusing on too many personas at the same time.
- Keep an agenda during brainstorming sessions. You’ll want to gather representatives from across departments to discuss the customer journey. But as the saying goes about too many cooks… it’s easy for competing priorities and tangential topics to come up during mapping sessions. Start a list of anything extraneous that comes up, and stay focused on your agenda.
- Reinforce the need for customer empathy. Depending on how your journey mapping discussions go, it can help to spend dedicated time exploring the feelings customers experience at each step. What are their perceived challenges, pains, or frustrations? When are they most excited or hopeful? These emotions will guide you in deciding which areas could be most important to focus on first.
- Consider bringing in an outside expert. Some organizational leaders need to hear from an external expert to take some things seriously. An outside perspective often helps identify things that have become “unseen” or assumed. Bringing in a CX consultant can help navigate internal politics and streamline the conversations.
- Create an action plan. Know who on your team will have the power to implement any changes you identify as you build your maps. Understanding the journey is a major accomplishment, and having an action plan will help you make the most of that valuable investment faster.
- Be ready to prioritize. Journey mapping and related sessions will identify a lot of areas you can focus on. But you can’t cover everything all at once! Create a scoring mechanism to identify the most important areas to address, like experiences with high emotional impact or moments that are most important for moving someone from consideration to purchase.
Frequently Asked Questions About Customer Journey Mapping Tools
Are journey maps really necessary?
Customer journey maps are an essential extension of other documents your organization may have, including process maps, product roadmaps, and dashboards. Those tools are often internally focused, not on the customer. As a CX leader, the customer journey map is an essential tool to bridge the gaps between teams and connect how an optimal customer journey will support every department’s goals.
Where should we get started with journey mapping?
If this is your first time creating a customer journey map, build a current state journey map. If you know what your customers are actually experiencing today, you can immediately start improving their journey and apply ideas to an ideal state journey map (which will serve as a roadmap for where to focus).
Why do journey maps include customer emotions?
The emotions customers feel during their journey affect how they will make decisions, receive information, or reach out for support from your team. Frustration is an especially important emotion to get ahead of. We think of frustration as anger without control. When customers don’t have control over something that is affecting them, it’s a frustrating feeling. Customer journey maps can identify moments to give customers more control.
If customers are surprised by invoice fees, for example, there could be ways to address that in the journey: Be more proactive in explaining fees, bundle fees differently, or provide more communication about what customers can do about their fees. When you find points of frustration, look to points earlier in the journey to give customers more control. When they get to the point of frustration, what can you do to help them take control?
How do you get executives involved in journey mapping?
If journey mapping sounds too overwhelming from the start, it can be a nonstarter for executives. Start by identifying a single pain point that you know will resonate with your leaders, and spotlight that as a place to start. Explain how journey mapping will help figure out what is currently happening for the customer and identify ways to fix it. Start small and get the executives on board with something they already know is painful for customers. And as always, tie business results to these efforts. For example, journey mapping can help identify ways to sell more, keep more customers, or improve efficiencies. Get specific about what you think journey mapping will do!
Resources like a CX Success Statement can also be an essential way to work through goals with individual leaders to guide your efforts.
Who should be involved in a journey mapping session?
Identify individuals from across your organization who will be instrumental in helping apply any experience changes you identify. Bringing in as much leadership as possible is helpful, as well as people who engage directly with customers—customer support agents, salespeople, tech support, social media, community forum moderators, for starters! They will have stories and insights that won’t show up in the data.
How can you get deep insights to fill in a journey map?
Speak directly with your customers and conduct qualitative interviews where customers explain what they need throughout their journey. It may help to focus on one area for the conversation—How did you find us? What challenge were you facing? Which channels did you use to try to find a solution?—or speak about the entire journey with customers who are willing to go deep. Pair these insights with passive listening channels and analyze your customer data to learn how customers navigate from your store, website, or app to purchase and beyond.
Getting Started with Journey Mapping
It’s easy to let journey maps slip down your list of priorities, but these maps can be your key to leading a strategic and high-impact CX program.
Whether you’re working with existing maps or starting a new one from scratch, take it one persona at a time. If you carve out a few hours each week, you’ll have a handful of maps ready before you know it.
And by using the tools we explored above, you can quickly accelerate your success and apply your insights immediately. You’ve got this!
Customer Journey Mapping Expert Resources:If you’re seeking additional customer journey mapping resources, check out our two LinkedIn Learning courses, which have helped more than 250,000 learners: Our team is also passionate about helping organizations like yours with hands-on support for the entire journey mapping process. Reach out today to let us know how we can help. |
Jeannie