Learn how to map your customer journey by identifying touchpoints, aligning emotions and enhancing experiences to build lasting loyalty.
Mapping a customer journey involves creating a visual representation of the steps a customer goes through when interacting with a company, from the initial awareness of a product / service to the final purchase and beyond.
Each phase of your map follows the marketing funnel to help guide you in creating the right message at the right time to encourage conversions.
EXPOSURE > DISCOVERY > CONSIDERATION > CONVERSION > RELATIONSHIP > RETENTION
Create Personas: Develop detailed profiles of your typical customers to better understand their motivations and experiences.
Understand Customer Goals: Determine what customers aim to achieve at each touchpoint, such as gathering information, making a purchase, or seeking support.
Gather Data: Collect qualitative and quantitative data through surveys, interviews, and analytics to understand customer behaviours, pain points, and emotions at each stage.
Map the Journey: Organise the touchpoints and customer goals into a chronological sequence, creating a visual map that outlines the customer’s experience from start to finish.
Analyse and Improve: Identify areas where the customer experience can be enhanced, addressing pain points, and optimizing interactions to ensure a smoother and more satisfying journey.
Attracting a new customer can cost 5 times more than
keeping an existing one.
RESEARCH > AWARENESS > DECISION > PURCHASE > FOLLOW UP > ADVOCACY
At each step of the Customer Journey consider what your customer is:
At each touchpoint in the journey what:
A touchpoint is a moment in time when an interaction happens between a customer and your product, service, or business in general.
Situations that happen on your website, through marketing, in person interactions, or a phone call.
If customers find out something about your product, sign up for a newsletter, buy something, or give feedback, they do this by “touching” your business.
And that’s why they’re called touchpoints.
The number of touchpoints a customer has with a brand is increasing with the proliferation of technologies and channels.
Therefore, the need to create a consistent experience is critically important.
Our main goal when mapping a customer journey is to find all the possible touchpoints.
TOUCHPOINT EXAMPLES
For instance…
A customer might pay for an order (touchpoint) through the website, via bank payment, or by handing cash to the delivery man.
At the same time, customers can use their smartphone to access the website to pay for the chosen item, order delivery, and give a phone call to the support team.
The journey must take into consideration the wants, needs and values of the customer at any given touchpoint.
When we create a message for our ‘market’ it is important to know who we are specifically marketing to. Rather than taking a broad-brush approach it can be extremely helpful to single out specific people. When creating target markets or considering your ideal customer remember that segments do not experience your brand, individuals do. Individuals with needs, wants and desires
Physical – all the costs involved in the product/service existing
Monetary – or consumer perceived value – what the product/service is worth (compared to comparable)
Functional – what it is worth in terms of usefulness
Social – how owning the product or using the service makes them look
Psychological/Emotional – how they feel about themselves when they buy or use the product/service
Connect your value proposition to the customer experience.
At each step of the journey your customer has a job they want to complete:
You need more than just touchpoints for your customer journey map.
It’s important to know what’s happening at and around each touchpoint.
Get inside the minds and hearts of the customers at every juncture to find out what they’re thinking, feeling, and needing to do.
Every customer goes on a journey, but between discovering a need and becoming a loyal advocate where does this path take them?
Opportunity Areas
Describe what you can improve in the journey of your persona.
Review the Persona
Summarise a depiction of your target group from the Persona Template;
Customer Jobs
Define what job your persona wants to carry out by using your product/service;
Create Journey Stages
Describe the actions your persona needs to take to reach a goal from start to finish;
Emotional Status
What is your persona thinking and feeling at every specific journey stage?
Touch points
List the contact points where your persona interacts with a service;
Your actions – Channel for connection
The things ‘you’ will do to interact at the point of ‘contact’;
With a diverse background spanning over 30 years and a passion for developing ideas, Kel has built her expertise in marketing, communications and planning across a wide range of industries.
She has a combo of out-of-the-box thinking, technical skills and practical smarts that always gets the job done – and done amazingly well.
Utilising captivating storytelling that engages and resonates with target audiences, matched with innovative thinking she offers a refreshing and dynamic approach to content creation and workshop facilitation.
Content created November 2024, reviewed February 2026
