/customer-journey-map

name: customer-journey-map
description: Create a customer journey map across stages, touchpoints, actions, emotions, and metrics. Use when diagnosing a broken experience or aligning a team on the full customer flow.
intent: >-
  Create a comprehensive customer journey map that visualizes how customers interact with your brand across all stages—from awareness to loyalty—documenting their actions, touchpoints, emotions, KPIs, business goals, and teams involved at each stage. Use this to identify pain points, align cross-functional teams, and systematically improve the customer experience to achieve business objectives.
type: component
theme: workshops-facilitation
best_for:
  - "Mapping the full customer experience across all touchpoints"
  - "Aligning cross-functional teams on the end-to-end customer journey"
  - "Identifying pain points and opportunities by stage with measurable KPIs"
scenarios:
  - "I need to map the customer journey for our B2B SaaS onboarding experience from signup to first value"
  - "Create a journey map for a PM leader evaluating our skills repo — from discovery through loyalty"
estimated_time: "20-30 min"

Purpose

Create a comprehensive customer journey map that visualizes how customers interact with your brand across all stages—from awareness to loyalty—documenting their actions, touchpoints, emotions, KPIs, business goals, and teams involved at each stage. Use this to identify pain points, align cross-functional teams, and systematically improve the customer experience to achieve business objectives.

This is not a user flow diagram—it's a strategic artifact that combines customer empathy with business metrics to drive actionable improvements.

Key Concepts

The Customer Journey Mapping Framework

Adapted from NNGroup's framework and Carnegie Mellon's PM curriculum, a customer journey map documents:

**Horizontal structure (stages):**

• **Awareness:** Customer first learns about your brand
• **Consideration:** Customer evaluates your offering
• **Decision:** Customer makes a purchase
• **Service:** Customer uses the product/service post-purchase
• **Loyalty:** Customer becomes a repeat buyer and advocate

**Vertical structure (for each stage):**

• **Customer Actions:** What customers do
• **Touchpoints:** Where/how they interact with your brand
• **Customer Experience:** Emotions and thoughts
• **KPIs:** Metrics to measure success
• **Business Goals:** What you're trying to achieve
• **Teams Involved:** Who owns this stage

Why This Works

• **Empathy-driven:** Centers on customer emotions, not just actions
• **Cross-functional alignment:** Shows which teams affect which stages
• **Metric-focused:** Ties customer experience to measurable outcomes
• **Gap identification:** Makes pain points and opportunities visible
• **Actionable:** Clear KPIs and goals enable prioritization

Anti-Patterns (What This Is NOT)

• **Not a user story map:** Journey maps are broader (all touchpoints, not just product use)
• **Not a service blueprint:** Less detailed on internal processes, more focused on customer experience
• **Not static:** Journey maps evolve as customer behavior changes

When to Use This

• Understanding customer experience across all touchpoints (not just product)
• Aligning cross-functional teams (marketing, sales, product, support)
• Identifying pain points and prioritizing improvements
• Onboarding new team members to customer perspective
• Auditing the end-to-end customer experience

When NOT to Use This

• For deep product-specific workflows (use story mapping instead)
• Before defining personas (need to know who you're mapping)
• As a one-time exercise (journey maps require ongoing updates)

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Application

Use `template.md` for the full fill-in structure.

Step 1: Prepare Prerequisites

Before mapping, ensure you have: 1. **Key stakeholders:** Marketing, sales, product, customer service representatives 2. **Buyer personas:** Detailed personas with demographics, psychographics, goals, challenges (reference `skills/proto-persona/SKILL.md`) 3. **Defined stages:** Main stages of your buying process (typically: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Service, Loyalty) 4. **Touchpoint inventory:** All places customers interact with your brand (website, social, email, store, support, etc.)

**If missing:** Run discovery interviews, persona definition work, or touchpoint audits first.

---

Step 2: Set Clear Objectives

Define what you want to achieve:

## Objectives
- [Goal 1: e.g., "Identify top 3 pain points causing drop-off between Awareness and Consideration"]
- [Goal 2: e.g., "Align marketing and sales on customer motivations at each stage"]
- [Goal 3: e.g., "Understand emotional journey to inform messaging strategy"]

**Quality checks:**

• **Specific:** Not "understand customers" but "identify drop-off causes in Consideration stage"
• **Actionable:** Results should inform decisions, not just document observations

---

Step 3: Choose a Buyer Persona

Select one persona to focus on (create separate maps for each persona):

## Persona
- [Persona name and brief description]
- [Example: "Manager Mike: 35-42, Director of Product at mid-sized B2B SaaS, struggles with data-driven prioritization, values time savings over feature depth"]

**Why one persona per map:** Different personas have different journeys. Mixing them creates confusion.

---

Step 4: Map Each Stage

For each stage (Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Service, Loyalty), document:

Customer Actions

What customers do at this stage:

### Stage: [Stage Name, e.g., Awareness]

**Customer Actions:**
- [Action 1: e.g., "See LinkedIn ad about product management tools"]
- [Action 2: e.g., "Hear about tool from PM peer at conference"]
- [Action 3: e.g., "Google 'best product roadmap software'"]

**Quality checks:**

• **Observable:** You can see or measure this action
• **Specific:** Not "research products" b