How to create a customer journey map that works

Ever called a company’s customer service line multiple times and had to re-explain the problem you’re facing over and over again? At a certain point, you’re left feeling more frustrated at the lack of continuity than you are at the problem itself.

A broken customer journey isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s one of the fastest ways to push customers towards your competitors. Our research shows that:

• 88% of customers now consider their experience with a company as important as its products
• 71% of consumers switched brands at least once during the past year
• 73% of consumers expect brands to understand their needs and preferences

Customer expectations are evolving. It isn’t enough to offer a great product. Now, brands need to deliver flawless, personalised experiences across every touchpoint.

So, what can you do to meet these needs? One option is customer journey mapping. In this guide, we’ll explain what it is, why it matters, how to create your own customer journey maps, and how journey orchestration tools can optimise the process from beginning to end.

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the customer journey (also called the buyer journey). It tells the story of your customer’s experiences with your brand across all touchpoints, such as social media, email, live chat, or any other channel.

The goal of the process is to chart how your customers interact with your brand on the path to making a purchase. Here are some customer journey examples to illustrate how this might look:

• In a B2C journey: David sees a stroller ad on Instagram, reads reviews on his phone, asks a friend for advice, and eventually completes the purchase on his laptop.
• In a B2B setting: Sarah reads a whitepaper, attends a webinar, chats with a peer on LinkedIn, and then books a demo with a sales rep.

This turns scattered interactions into an interconnected story. Businesses can then refine their understanding by drilling into emotions, pain points, friction areas, and motivations at each stage. All of this helps them create personalised experiences that build trust at every touchpoint.

Now let’s take a closer look at how it all works. The key thing to remember is that a customer journey map doesn’t just show where customers go on their way to a purchase. It highlights everything they feel, need, and expect at each stage. This transforms it from a basic process diagram into a blueprint of the customer experience.

To elaborate, here’s a table showing how the main components slot together:

You can see how a customer journey starts with a basic overview of the customer and then gradually populates the map with information, from the route they take to a purchase to the emotions and pain points they feel at each stage.

This kind of mapping effectively gives businesses a roadmap of how to improve experiences, reduce friction, and build long-term brand loyalty.

Customer expectations have never been higher, and consumers are willing to jump ship if companies don’t meet their needs.

In our recent State of the AI Connected Customer report, insights from more than 16,000 consumers and business buyers worldwide show that poor customer service experiences and inconsistent service quality rank in the top three reasons people stopped buying from a brand in the last year.

The customer journey mapping process offers a strategic framework for businesses to better understand these evolving expectations and optimise the customer experience. It can help you:

• Identify pain points: understand when customers struggle or drop off and why
• Spot opportunities: uncover moments to alleviate pain points and engage customers
• Optimise products or services: refine offerings based on customer behaviour
• Improve customer satisfaction: capitalise on opportunities to make your CX better
• Fix customer retention issues: proactively address problems that are causing churn
• Build a customer-centric culture: align teams on the customer experience

All of this makes it easier to deliver consistent and seamless customer experiences from the moment they find your brand to the point of purchase and well beyond it.

To show why this approach is so effective, let’s take a look at a customer journey case study. R.M.Williams, one of Australia’s most iconic heritage brands, used journey mapping alongside Salesforce solutions to unify its customer experience and give agents the singular customer view they needed to deliver more personalised support.

Customer journey mapping helped R.M. Williams reduce service friction and achieve greater marketing personalisation, leading to 42% fewer calls, two-times higher conversions, and a 34% increase in online revenue.

We’ve discussed how customer journey mapping works and why it's so impactful. Now let’s get started. We’ve broken the process down into a step-by-step guide for creating your own customer journey map.

1. Define your audience personas and goals
2. Map out your touchpoints
3. Capture emotions and actions
4. Identify pain points and opportunities
5. Add in backstage processes
6. Validate with data and teams

Start by identifying your ideal customers – who is most likely to use your product or service?

You can discover this through competitor research, interviews, surveys, and existing data like CRM records and website analytics. For instance, an accounting SaaS provider might find that small business owners and finance managers are two of their ideal customer profiles.

Next, consider the primary motivation of each audience segment. For example, the small business owner might be aiming to simplify bookkeeping, whereas a finance manager for a large corporation may be looking to support compliance and automation.

Tip: What’s important here is to validate everything with analytics and customer feedback. An evidence-based understanding will lay a foundation for creating personalised journey maps that reflect actual customer needs and behaviours.

Once you know your audience personas and their overarching goals, the next step is to map all the points where they interact with your brand, both offline and online.

Each persona will have a unique set of touchpoints based on their objectives and the channels they frequent. For example, here’s how the basic journey of a small business owner might look when compared with a finance manager:

• Small business owner: LinkedIn ad -> blog posts -> testimonials -> request a demo -> schedule a follow-up with customer support
• Finance manager: Networking event -> attend a webinar -> review case studies -> consult with stakeholders -> schedule a sales call

It’s important to capture every interaction, not just the obvious ones like website visits or emails. Unboxing, returns, product setup, support calls, and even disposal or recycling can all shape the customer experience. These ‘hidden’ touchpoints can reveal friction or additional opportunities for engagement that you might otherwise overlook.

Again, data is king here. You need to combine the information you collect with direct customer feedback and analytics to ensure you can cover and justify every touchpoint. The more accurately you can map each interaction, the better able you’ll be to optimise the entire journey for engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty.

Tip: Sync each touchpoint to customer journey stages. Is it in the awareness, consideration, conversion, or retention phase? This can help you narrow down goals, pain points, and actions for each part of the buyer lifecycle.

Now capture what customers think, feel, and do at each touchpoint.

For each touchpoint, document the actions they take (such as clicking a link, visiting a store, or making a call) and pair these with the emotions they experience. For instance:

With this information, you can begin to pinpoint which actions could frustrate or delight a customer at each touchpoint. This lays the groundwork for identifying pain points and opportunities in the next step.

Now that you’ve fully broken down your customer actions and emotions, you can begin to identify pain points that may engage or cause friction at each stage of the customer journey.

The key here is to take an action like “clicking a link” at the “blog post” touchpoint and consider what could lead to positive or negative emotions. For example, if the hyperlink is:

• Fast and responsive, this keeps the customer engaged
• Genuinely useful, this contributes to satisfaction
• Slow to load, this equals boredom
• Broken, this translates to frustration

As another example, a viewer in a webinar might feel overwhelmed if the content is too dense, disengaged if it’s too dull, or frustrated if the webinar is frequently stuttering.

You can then analyse these areas to identify friction points and opportunities by exploring business data. For instance, noticing that many customers abandon a webinar registration midway proves there’s a pain point within your sign-up process, whereas positive feedback on a blog post points to opportunities for similar content to succeed.

At this point, you should understand the journey each customer takes, the potential friction points along the way, and the opportunities to engage. The next step is to tie all of these pain points and opportunities to business processes. What internal workflows, systems and teams can you optimise to improve the customer experience?

To help, let’s look at some pain points along with the backstage processes that affect them:

This way, you can clearly see how visible customer friction ties back to internal operations, making it easier to prioritise the fixes and improvements that will have the biggest impact on CX.

Lastly, you need to validate everything you’ve learned with data. Take every assumption you’ve made and confirm or deny it through analytics, customer surveys, and performance metrics.

For instance, if you’ve identified a potential friction point within your product pages, do bounce rates and conversion metrics confirm that theory? If customer support wait times could be a pain point, is this reflected in your NPS?

Equally important is to include internal teams who interact with customers daily. Their input can reveal friction areas and opportunities that data alone can miss, like recurring frustrations in calls or unexpected customer behaviours in store.

At this point, you’ve completed your map and can begin to smooth out bumps in the customer journey to create seamless experiences. All that’s left to do is to continually refine your approach as more information becomes available.

Creating a customer journey map isn’t a one-and-done deal. Its true value comes from treating it as a living document that shifts as you gain additional information and customer expectations evolve. Regularly updating your map with fresh data can highlight new patterns, evolving touchpoints, and emerging opportunities as your business scales.

As you make changes to your customer journey map, check whether these improvements are reflected in real metrics. For instance:

• If you’ve improved onboarding, track conversion rates to see if more customers complete sign-ups.
• If you’ve added personalisation to marketing, monitor retention rates and repeat purchases to confirm customers are staying engaged longer.
• If you’ve removed friction at checkout, check abandoned cart metrics and customer satisfaction scores to see if drop-offs decline.
• If you’ve streamlined customer support, measure the average resolution score to determine if satisfaction and loyalty are rising.

This way, you tie every change to a measurable business outcome and can continually make further tweaks as new customer insights become available. Tracking metrics also lets you know when something is going wrong, helping you prioritise adjustments that have the biggest impact.

Today’s consumers want a highly personalised experience, and this includes your marketing and customer service efforts. This interconnected approach is known as omnichannel marketing and omnichannel customer service.

Customer journeys are a powerful foundation for omnichannel marketing because they give teams a clear picture of how customers move between channels. This means a marketer can target one prospect across multiple touchpoints. For example, a customer who browses a product on a website can be retargeted with a social media ad later.

The same applies to omnichannel customer service. By visualising every touchpoint, businesses can create a consistent support experience across any channel, such as on social media, messenger apps or live chat. This consistency breeds trust and ensures customers have a great experience, no matter their preferred channel.

The exciting part is that these capabilities are only growing more powerful. AI and predictive analytics now make journey mapping more dynamic. Instead of a static diagram, businesses will have real-time views that adapt automatically as behaviour shifts, giving them the tools to personalise journeys on the fly, anticipate customer needs and adapt instantly to shifts.

As one example, Reece, a global trade supplier, used Salesforce to connect all of its sales, service and marketing data under one roof. This let them replace fragmented conversations with tailored onboarding journeys, leading to a 53% increase in online sales and an 11% growth in new accounts.

Salesforce makes the shift to real-time customer journey mapping possible through a suite of tools designed to support analytics, automation and personalisation. Here’s how our solutions can support you with a host of customer journey mapping tools:

• Data Cloud for unifying all of your customer and business data, making it easier to build a single, connected customer view.
• Marketing Cloud for building real-time customer journeys and delivering personalised customer communications at scale.
• CRM Analytics to make sense of your business data and turn it into insights that optimise decision-making and strategy.

All of this turns customer journeys into living systems that drive customer engagement and growth, even as expectations continue to evolve.

Customer journey mapping is now essential for meeting the standards customers expect.

By defining personas, laying out customer journey touchpoints, and identifying areas of friction, you’ll put yourself in the best possible position to turn fragmented interactions into a connected journey that consistently guides customers down your sales funnel.

Customer journey map design can be time-consuming. And even once you’ve mapped them out, you still need a way to offer personalised omnichannel customer experiences based on your findings. So, if you’re serious about the process, it may be time to invest in customer journey mapping software that can take the hassle out of the whole process.

Software like Marketing Cloud Account Engagement can help you easily create customised customer journeys and automate marketing actions. This takes your marketing automation efforts to the next level, which in turn helps build long-lasting customer relationships. Watch the Marketing Cloud demo today to learn more.