What is a customer journey map? (With examples)
By The Journey Maps team · · 5 min read
A customer journey map is a picture of what one type of customer goes through to reach a goal with your organisation, step by step, showing where each step happens, how it feels and what goes wrong.
Most organisations see their customers one department at a time. Marketing sees the campaign, sales sees the deal, support sees the ticket. The customer sees one long experience. A journey map puts that experience on a single page, in the order the customer lives it, so that everyone looks at the same thing.
What does a customer journey map show?
A journey map follows one type of customer through one journey, from the moment they have a need to the moment it's met, or they give up. It's told from the customer's side: what they actually do, not what your process says should happen.
Most maps are laid out as a grid. The journey runs from left to right in steps, grouped into a few larger phases. Under each step are rows for the details: where it happens, how it feels and what goes wrong. A line through the feelings row shows the ups and downs of the whole journey at a glance.
Two things sit above the grid: who the customer is (a short description, often called a persona) and what they're trying to do (the scenario, such as "make a claim after a car accident").
What goes in a customer journey map?
| Part | What it is | Example from a car insurance claim |
|---|---|---|
| Phases | The big stages of the journey, in the customer's words | Incident, Claim Filing, Assessment |
| Steps | What the customer does, in order, within each phase | Submits the Claim |
| Touchpoints | Where each step happens: a channel, a person or a document | Claims portal, claims hotline, email |
| Feelings | How the customer feels at each step, often drawn as a curve | Frustrated |
| Pain points | What goes wrong or gets in the way | The form times out and all entered data is lost |
| Ideas | Changes that could fix a pain point | Auto-save the form with session recovery |
Here is one phase of a real map, as it looks in Journey Maps:
- Online form is long, technical, and not mobile-friendly
- Form times out and all entered data is lost
- Supporting documents must be emailed separately — there is no upload function in the form
- Acknowledgement email is a generic system message with a reference number and nothing else
- No indication of how long the assessment will take
- No named point of contact assigned to the claim
- Redesign the claims form for mobile-first completion with clear progress indicators
- Auto-save form progress every 60 seconds with session recovery
- Build a document upload function into the claims form
- Send a personalised acknowledgement email with the policyholder's name, claim details, and what happens next
- Include a clear processing timeline in the acknowledgement — e.g. 'initial assessment within 5 business days'
- Assign a named claims handler and include their direct contact details in every communication
A few notes on each part:
- Phases keep a long journey readable. Three to six is usually enough.
- Steps are things the customer does or things that happen to them, such as "Waits for a decision". Include steps outside your own channels too, like asking a friend or comparing prices.
- Touchpoints show the handovers. When a step moves from an app to a phone call to an email, that's often where things get lost.
- Feelings are the part people skip and the part that makes a map useful. A step can work exactly as designed and still feel terrible, for example a long wait with no news.
- Pain points should be specific: "the form times out and loses what was typed", not "bad website".
- Ideas sit next to the pain point they fix, so it's clear what each change is for.
When should you use a customer journey map?
A journey map is most useful when a journey crosses several teams and nobody owns it from start to finish. Common moments to make one:
- Before you redesign something, such as a checkout, an onboarding flow or a claims process, so the change starts from the customer's problems rather than from your organisation chart.
- When a number moves and you don't know why: complaints go up, sign-ups stop turning into active users, or customers leave after their first renewal.
- When teams disagree about priorities. A shared map turns opinions about "the real problem" into a picture everyone can point at.
- When new people join a team that serves customers, as a quick way to see the whole experience.
A journey map is less useful when you need a detailed specification of what staff and systems do. That's the job of a service blueprint, which adds the work behind the scenes under each step. Many teams make the journey map first, then a blueprint for the parts they decide to change.
Should you map the journey as it is, or as it should be?
Start with the journey as it is today, often called a current-state map, based on what customers actually experience. It shows where the problems are. A future-state map shows the journey you want to create. It's more useful once you know what you're fixing, and it works best next to the current one, so the differences are easy to see.
Customer journey map examples
Each example below is a template you can open and change. They describe typical journeys, so replace the example feelings and pain points with what your own customers tell you.
A service journey: car insurance claim
A claim starts at a low point, the accident, and the first phone call often makes it worse. The map shows that the moment that matters most isn't the payout but the assessment, where a disputed offer turns a neutral process into an angry one. See the car insurance claim journey map template.
A buying journey: e-commerce purchase
From the inside, an online purchase looks smooth: product page, basket (cart, in US terms), payment. The customer's map shows the frustration before checkout, when they can't easily find delivery times, costs or the returns policy.
A software journey: SaaS onboarding
For software, the map often shows that the hard part comes after sign-up: the first login, with no guidance on where to start, and a free plan limit that arrives at a bad moment. See the SaaS onboarding journey map template.
More examples
- Hotel guest journey map: from booking to the email after check-out.
- Patient journey map: from first symptoms to the follow-up appointment.
- Candidate journey map: from finding a job to the weeks before the first day.
- B2B customer journey map: a business purchase, from first contact to the first business review.
- Returns customer journey map: from a faulty product to the refund.
- SaaS customer journey map: from the free plan to the first month on a paid plan.
- Content marketing journey map: from reading an article to recommending you.
Or browse all customer journey map templates.
How do you make one?
The short version: pick one customer and one journey, list the steps they take, add where each step happens and how it feels, check it against real evidence, then decide which low points to fix first.
For the full method, read how to create a customer journey map, step by step. If you're making it with colleagues, how to run a customer journey mapping workshop has an agenda for a 90-minute session.
More guides
- How to create a customer journey map, step by step: A practical method for creating a customer journey map: choose the journey and the customer, map the steps and feelings, check the evidence, decide what to fix.
- How to run a customer journey mapping workshop: How to run a customer journey mapping workshop: who to invite, how to prepare, a 90-minute agenda, common mistakes and what to do after the session.