Customer Journey Map: How to Create a Customer Journey Map Step by Step [2026]

A Customer Journey Map is the visual representation of the complete path a customer follows from discovering your brand until becoming an active promoter. It's not a decorative diagram for internal presentations: it's an operational tool that documents every Touchpoint, every emotion, every channel and every action the customer executes in their interaction with your business. If you don't have one, you're designing experiences blindly.

The customer journey map forces you to leave the internal perspective and look at your product or service through the eyes of who uses it. It's a key piece for UX, marketing, sales and Customer Success teams because it exposes the moments where you generate value and, above all, the moments where you generate friction. According to McKinsey, companies that actively manage the complete journey increase customer satisfaction by 20% and reduce service cost by 15%. For a global view of the concept, check our guide on Customer Journey.

Step 1: Define Buyer Personas

You can't map a journey without knowing who travels. The first step of any customer journey mapping is defining your Buyer Personas: semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on real data, not assumptions.

Each Buyer Persona should include: demographic data (age, location, sector, position), motivations (what problem they want to solve, what result they expect), Pain Points (current frustrations with the solution they use or the absence of one), and preferred channels (where they search for information, how they prefer to communicate, what social networks they use).

You need a minimum of 2 or 3 personas to cover your main segments. Don't invent profiles: extract data from interviews with real customers, post-sale surveys, CRM data and support team conversations. A journey map built on a fictional persona will lead you to fictional conclusions and, worse, to resource investments in touchpoints that don't matter. A Customer Success Manager who knows their portfolio thoroughly is an invaluable source of information in this phase. If you want to understand how to create a customer journey map that really works, start here: without well-defined personas, the rest of the process is built on sand.

Step 2: Identify Journey Phases

Every Customer Journey Map is structured in phases that represent the customer's evolution in their relationship with your business. The standard model includes six stages:

Awareness (Discovery): the customer identifies they have a problem or need and starts searching for information. This is where they find you for the first time.

Consideration: the customer evaluates options, compares solutions and delves deeper into what you offer. They read your blog, watch demos, check reviews.

Purchase: the customer makes the decision and executes the purchase or contracting.

Onboarding: the customer starts using your product. It's the most critical phase because it determines Time to First Value.

Retention: the customer is already active. Your mission is to ensure they keep obtaining value and don't go to the competition.

Advocacy (Recommendation): the satisfied customer becomes a promoter, generates referrals and leaves positive reviews.

These phases are a starting point. You must adapt them to your business model: a B2B SaaS will have a much longer and more complex onboarding than a B2C e-commerce, and a business with long sales cycles may need to subdivide the Consideration phase into technical evaluation and commercial evaluation. What matters is that each phase is clearly defined and has measurable entry and exit criteria. If you can't determine when a customer moves from one phase to the next, your phases are poorly defined.

Step 3: Map Touchpoints and Channels

This is where the journey map customer takes real shape. For each phase, you must identify the Touchpoints (contact points), the channels where they occur and the customer's predominant emotion at that moment. This is the table you must build:

Each cell of this table is a design decision. If your customers are on WhatsApp but your support only responds by email, you have a channel misalignment that generates friction. If the predominant emotion in the retention phase is frustration instead of trust, you have a customer experience problem you must resolve before worrying about advocacy. The goal of customer journey mapping isn't to fill the table once and forget it: it's to review it periodically with updated data to detect changes in customer behavior and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Step 4: Identify Pain Points and Opportunities

This is the step that transforms a pretty diagram into an actionable tool. For each Touchpoint, you must answer three questions: where do customers get frustrated, where do they abandon the process and where do they need help they're not receiving.

Pain Points aren't invented in a meeting room. They're extracted from real data: product analytics (where funnels drop, which screens have the highest abandonment rate), satisfaction surveys (CSAT, NPS), support tickets (what problems repeat over and over), user session recordings and qualitative interviews.

Each Pain Point is an improvement opportunity. If 40% of users abandon onboarding at step 3, it's not a user motivation problem: it's a step 3 design problem. If the support team receives 200 tickets per month about the same functionality, you don't need more agents: you need to redesign that functionality or create better documentation.

Prioritize pain points by impact on retention and resolution cost. Those affecting more customers in the most critical phases (onboarding and retention) go first. Use an impact vs effort matrix: high-impact, low-effort pain points are quick wins you must resolve immediately; high-impact, high-effort ones are strategic projects you must plan medium-term. A mature customer success team uses this information to design proactive intervention playbooks at each detected friction point.

Tools to Create Journey Maps

You don't need expensive software to create your first Customer Journey Map. Here are the options ordered by complexity:

Free or general tools: Excel or Google Sheets for the base table, Miro (free plan available) for collaborative visual maps, Figma for more elaborate designs with journey map templates.

Specialized tools: UXPressia (dedicated exclusively to journey mapping with predefined templates and emotion analysis), Smaply (focused on service design with integration of personas and stakeholder maps).

What matters is not the tool but the quality of the data you put in it. A journey map on a whiteboard with post-its based on real data is infinitely more useful than an interactive map in UXPressia built on assumptions. To see concrete examples of finished maps, check customer journey examples.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many journey maps do I need?

One for each main Buyer Persona. If you have three personas (for example: operations director at medium company, customer service manager at startup, SMB CEO), you need three maps. Each profile's journey is different: different motivations, different channels, different pain points. A generic map reflects nobody.

How often is a Customer Journey Map updated?

At a minimum, every quarter. Your customers' journey changes when you launch new features, when the market changes, when you modify your communication channels or when a new competitor enters that alters expectations. An outdated map is worse than having no map because it generates decisions based on a reality that no longer exists. Also, review it whenever you have an unusual churn spike or a significant drop in NPS.

Who should participate in creating the journey map?

The process should be multidisciplinary. You need representatives from marketing (they know the awareness and consideration phase), sales (they know the purchase phase), product (they know onboarding and adoption), support and Customer Success (they know retention and real Pain Points). If only marketing does it, the map will have acquisition bias. If only product does it, it will ignore what happens outside the application.

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