The Basics of Customer Journey Mapping — CJM

How to keep customers coming back? And how to understand why people choose competitors? Is there something that might be turning them away?

A Customer Journey Map (CJM) can help you find answers to these and many other questions. Let’s explore how to create one and review a few examples.

Yuri Morozov, an instructor for the “Customer Journey Map (CJM)” course at PMCLUB, Product Manager at the international AI-powered photo and video editing solution Lightricks, Product Director at the global location analysis platform GetPlace.io, and co-founder of the product experience agency Ways & Grace, helped us navigate this topic.

What Is a Customer Journey Map?

The CJM replicates the real experience of a customer—someone who has already used the product or service, lived through the experience, and felt the emotions that came with it.

Customer journey maps are built on insights from a series of interviews. The gathered information is then visually represented, reflecting both the positive and negative aspects of the user experience. This visualization helps you process large amounts of data and spot potential pain points.

❗️ A CJM is meant for an existing product. Creating a customer journey map for a product that’s still in development is like drawing a map of a city that doesn’t yet exist. While it’s possible to do, it will only serve as a draft or a blueprint.

Why CJM Is Important for Business

Helps You Understand How Customers Discover Your Product

The map captures how a person behaves before they even recognize a need for your product, how they choose the right one, when and why they decide to make a purchase, and more. The map provides a clear and concise overview of the customer’s entire journey, making it easier to analyze and comprehend.

Helps Collect a Large Volume of Feedback

CJM reflects the emotions customers experience while interacting with your product—both positive and negative. It offers a snapshot of customer pain points and illustrates how well your product addresses them.

Identifies Key Touchpoints with Your Product

A CJM marks the moments where customers engage with your product offering. These touchpoints could include targeted ads, email campaigns, blog integrations, and more. The map helps you identify which touchpoints are most effective and why they resonate with customers.

Improves Processes and Identifies Weaknesses

For example, customer interviews might reveal that your app has an overly complex interface. It’s crucial to note all details, including asking users to compare it with competitor platforms that are more intuitive. You can document all of this on the CJM and use it for further research and process improvements.

Aligns Your Team

The team gathers to review the map. Every department—from marketing to development—sees how their work influences customer actions and impacts the product overall.

The customer journey map can also be used to present the product to other team members and management. If there are issues within the company, the map can help communicate them clearly, allowing the team to focus on the right areas for improvement.

Yuri Morozov

Product Manager and PMCLUB Instructor

CJM is not a methodology, it’s a tool. The map helps visualize the information you already have, allowing you to improve processes and products as a result. It can be used in both research and presentations. CJM should be shown not only to top managers but also to developers. It gives them a different perspective on the product, changes their motivation, and shifts their approach.

Lightricks GetPlace.io

Evaluates Product Quality

A company’s perception of product quality may differ from the customer’s. No matter how brilliant an idea may be, it needs to align with user experience. CJM analysis visually captures customer feedback and helps pinpoint areas that need improvement.

Structure of a Customer Journey Map

A CJM consists of key elements that form its foundation. These components are fairly universal and can apply to any business or product:

Stages of Interaction

These are the steps a potential customer goes through in their journey with the product, from realizing a need to the post-purchase experience (which can still involve the product in some way).

This part of the map is generally standard—most CJMs will include similar stages: recognizing the need, searching for a solution, making a purchase, and post-purchase interactions (such as returns or recommendations).

Customer Goals

Customer goals refer to the needs, problems, or pain points that a person aims to solve with the product or service. This section shows whether the product or business aligns with what the customer is seeking.

This part of the map requires close attention, and any issues should be quickly addressed.

Actions

This represents the steps customers take when interacting with the product to achieve their goals. It’s crucial to describe each action in detail. For example, ordering a pizza for delivery might involve the following steps:

Open the app or website → Select a pizza → Add to cart → Enter payment details → Complete the order → Wait for the delivery and receive the pizza

By asking users to retrace these actions, you can uncover reasons for negative experiences. Perhaps the courier was rude or the pizza arrived cold. This feedback can help improve customer experiences and prevent future issues.

Touchpoints

These are the places where the customer interacts with the product, whether it's through ads, an app store, a website, a billboard, a physical store, or email campaigns. The type of product or service determines the relevant touchpoints.

Emotions

In this section, both positive and negative user experiences are captured. It's important to focus on the quality of the experience, not just the surface-level emotions, which are often depicted with emojis.

Yuri Morozov

Product Manager and PMCLUB Instructor

Personally, I avoid using 'emotions' in the customer journey map because some customers may just be generally negative, and that can skew the analysis. I focus on mapping 'experiences'—whether they’re positive or negative. A person's mood might be negative, even if they’ve had a positive experience. For instance, if they visit a buggy website, it’s a negative experience, even if they somehow find it amusing.

Lightricks GetPlace.io

Questions

Here, you document any questions the customer might have about using the product. During interviews, users might raise questions about features or services they don’t fully understand. It’s important to record these questions, as they could reveal why customers are dropping off.

Barriers

This section highlights anything that prevented the customer from reaching their goal, at which stage this occurred, and at which touchpoint. A typical barrier could be a complicated registration process in an app. For many users, this could be a reason to give up and leave. Barriers are crucial parts of the map, and addressing them promptly is key to improving the overall experience.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map

Analyze Your Audience and Build a Customer Profile

Creating a customer profile is essential for segmenting clients into target groups, which helps develop personalized strategies. Customers vary in their problems, lifestyles, and needs, so each group should have its own CJM, allowing you to work more effectively by targeting each segment.

To build a customer profile, you can use the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) method, which breaks down the specific tasks your product solves. This helps focus on what the user is truly seeking.

Yuri Morozov

Product Manager and PMCLUB Instructor

Sometimes, you can’t rely solely on basic characteristics like age groups. A product may have a diverse audience—such as students aged 18–23 and adults over 50. In this case, segmenting by age or gender won’t work. Instead, segment by the problem your product solves for each group.

For example, some people drink milk on its own, while others add it to coffee or cereal. In this case, the CJM should not focus solely on milk but on the different scenarios that these user groups follow.

Lightricks GetPlace.io

💡 If you need more detailed information about your customers, use tools like Google Analytics. It can provide insights into what devices or browsers customers are using, where they’re from, how much time they spend on your site, and at which stages.

Yuri Morozov

Product Manager and PMCLUB Instructor

When my team and I conducted training for Leroy Merlin, we helped customers choose furniture. We followed them around to observe how they found the right section, located a sales assistant, and interacted with them.

Alternatively, you can call customers and ask them to walk you through their experience. For example, ask them how they ordered a bank card—what prompted them to start, and why they made that decision. They’ll walk you through their steps.

Lightricks GetPlace.io

Conduct a Series of Interviews

There are two main ways to find respondents for specific inquiries:

Conduct one-on-one interviews. Typically, it’s enough to ask three key questions for each group: How? Why? Tell me more?

Here are some examples:

Their answers will guide you through the customer’s journey and provide the most complete information for each section of the map.

Identify Stages, Goals, Actions, and Touchpoints

After the interviews, you’ll have a lot of information—customer steps, the problems they wanted to solve, what actions they took, and how they interacted with the product. Group this feedback and start mapping it.

Reflect the Data on the CJM

You can create the map using diagrams, infographics, or tables. The CJM should be updated iteratively after each interview:

Interview the first respondent → Add their data to the CJM → Talk to the second respondent → Update the map → Continue until all interviews are complete

Yuri Morozov

Product Manager and PMCLUB Instructor

CJM is a tool to achieve goals, but the map itself shouldn’t be the goal. It needs to be as simple and clear as possible. Everything depends on the task at hand.

If the CJM is long, it’s easy to break it into smaller sections. However, dealing with depth is more challenging. When you’re faced with a huge amount of information, it’s hard to consolidate it all. So, the depth of the map should be just enough to provide the necessary insights for the task you’re tackling.

Lightricks GetPlace.io

Present the CJM to Your Team and Partners

The goal of the CJM is to benefit the business, so the completed map should be used to guide product development. Share the map with your team and explain your findings, such as which touchpoints were identified and what aspects generated the most positive feedback.

The customer journey map should be clear, straightforward, and highly informative. We’ve identified several tools that make visualizing the CJM easier, and we’ll go into detail about each one, including how to integrate them into the task manager WEEEK.

Top 5 Tools for Creating a Customer Journey Map

Figma and FigJam

This is one of the most popular graphic editors. FigJam, an internal tool for visualization, offers a ready-made CJM template.

Features for CJM creation

Drawbacks

Miro

This service is perfect for creating CJMs. It feels like working on a real whiteboard—stickers of any color can be added, moved around, and written on as needed.

Features for CJM creation

Drawbacks

UXPressia

A simple tool designed specifically for creating CJMs. It offers a detailed guide for beginners and a set of templates for various types of businesses.

Features for CJM creation

Drawbacks

Touchpoint Dashboard

Another tool built specifically for creating CJMs. It allows you to create persona profiles and design anything from simple graphs to complex visualizations.

Features for CJM creation

Drawbacks

Google Sheets

A simple and completely free service for creating CJMs. While not everyone is familiar with Figma, nearly everyone knows Google Sheets. This tool can serve as a functional draft for teams, thanks to its familiar interface.

Features for CJM creation

Drawbacks

Customer Journey Map for This Text

✔️ A Customer Journey Map (CJM) is a tool used to diagnose how a customer interacts with a product. It visually presents the steps the customer takes while using the product.

✔️ CJM is usually created through interviews and can be formatted as a table, diagram, graph, or infographic. It replicates the experience of a real customer—someone who has used the product, lived through the process, and experienced emotions related to it.

✔️ CJM helps you understand how the customer discovered the product, identify key touchpoints, collect feedback, improve weak areas, evaluate product quality, and align your team.

✔️ Steps for creating a CJM: analyze the audience, create a user profile, conduct interviews, define stages, goals, actions, and touchpoints in the customer’s journey, document the findings on the map, and present it to the team.

✔️ Top tools for creating a CJM: Figma, Miro, UXPressia, Touchpoint Dashboard, and Google Sheets. These can be integrated into WEEEK’s Applications section to keep everything in one place and avoid switching between tabs.

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