7 customer journey map examples across industries

If you’re an avid Agatha Christie fan, you’ll notice the rough sketches and maps that the author adds to recreate the murder scenes. The courtyard, bedrooms, and living room are all mapped to help the reader visually reconstruct the happenings of the ominous day. The author is also content, knowing that the readers are in step with her as she takes them along the journey to solve the mystery.

Though not as fascinating as Christie’s maps, customer journey maps are handy, step-by-step visual representations of the journey that potential customers go through while interacting with your brand. They cover stages from awareness to purchase, customer loyalty, and advocacy.

To build the ideal customer journey map, you need to be aware of your customer base, conduct in-depth market research, and interact with real customers to fully understand how they progress from awareness to purchase, loyalty, and beyond.

Customer journey maps benefit every organization in two ways. First, they help companies better understand the target audience, including customer needs, pain points, and user behavior. Second, they help companies align their internal teams to be more customer-centric and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Download Now: Free Customer Journey Map Template

Customer journey maps are the outcome of rigorous journey mapping exercises that companies undertake to bridge the gap between customer expectations and actual customer experience. Customer journey mapping is a type of user experience mapping—commonly referred to as UX mapping—that is centered around a specific buyer persona.

Unlike other UX mapping methods, such as empathy mapping or service blueprinting, which are mapped from either the customer’s or organization’s perspective, customer journey maps outline both customer behavior and opportunities for organizations to work on. This helps improve internal employee alignment and the overall customer experience throughout the buyer’s journey. 

While you might have seen e-commerce or B2B SaaS product journey mappings as common examples of customer journey maps, we bring you seven customer journey map examples across different industries to help you realize the benefits of journey mapping for complex businesses.

But first, do you know the core elements of a customer journey map that make it a valuable asset for your business? Read on.

What should an actionable customer journey map include?

About 27% of UX practitioners [1] agree that a customer journey map is successful only when it leads to action. Understanding customer needs, customer emotions, and customer behavior should translate to a solid plan built on the opportunities identified and assigned to respective teams, with metrics to execute the next steps. 

Here are a few characteristics of actionable customer journey maps.

1. Well-defined personas and customized journey stages

Personas are the foundation on which a customer journey map is developed. The more focused and detailed your customer personas are, the easier it is to identify customer actions. While building a persona, take into account demographics, customer perspective, and the real-life problem they are trying to solve with your product or service.

In addition to personas, phases in the customer journey have to be drawn up based on business scenarios. For instance, a SaaS company might have stages like the post-purchase process, onboarding, adoption, and expansion within its B2B customer journey map.

2. Include all possible user channels and touchpoints

Today's omnichannel buyers use about three to four channels to interact with brands, including websites, apps, and social media. Your journey map has to factor in all these interactions across these channels and identify all possible customer touchpoints to streamline communications and offer the best customer experience.

3. Capture logical and emotional states of customers

Both logical reasoning and customer emotions play vital roles in purchase decisions and product usage. On the logical front, customers may contemplate what better features your competitors offer at similar pricing. On the emotional front, they may look at online reviews and case studies to understand what other customers feel about your product or service. It’s vital to spot what a customer feels, thinks, and does at every stage of the customer journey.

4. Identify opportunities and insights at every stage

Once you have the customer data mapped out, it’s time to ask the right questions and derive user insights that’ll help you chart the way forward. For example, if you notice lower conversions for pages on mobile, there’s an opportunity for you to optimize your site to be more mobile-friendly.

5. Assign ownership to internal teams for each phase of the customer journey

A key outcome of any customer journey map is for employees to realize their role in influencing the overall customer experience and align themselves to your company’s vision of delivering superior CX. When you assign internal ownership, every stakeholder is sure of the phase they have an impact on and works towards enhancing the experience in their particular area, cumulatively elevating the overall customer journey.

6. Include KPIs and metrics for individual journey stages

Measuring the impact of both the current and future state of your customer journey mapping requires metrics and KPIs to be captured for every phase. For instance, if you’ve identified an opportunity to improve your support team’s response speed, metrics like first contact resolution and average response time will help you assess your existing state and how much you can improve. Metrics also help in clear decision-making. If you want to improve traffic and conversions, ensure you have tools like Google Analytics to help you fine-tune aspects like bounce rate and clickthrough rates.

Related resource: A detailed guide to customer journey mapping

Customer journey mapping example

Now that we have a grasp of the key elements of a customer journey map, let’s look at the types of customer journeys and some journey mapping examples.

#1 E-commerce customer journey map example

E-commerce customer journey mapping begins by first identifying which part of the journey you want to break down and map. Identify your goals and pick the use case or scenario you want to map. If you want to give a hassle-free returns and exchange experience, choose a scenario after the buying process and break it down into smaller phases. Where a new customer tries the product, decides to exchange, chooses a product variant, returns the old product, and receives the exchanged product. 

This example is taken from the popular Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) tool UXPressia. You can view the detailed experience map and many other e-commerce and retail customer journey map templates here.

#2 Healthcare: Patient journey mapping example

Healthcare practitioners and hospital administrators can deliver better patient care and support when they understand patients' emotions and questions during different phases of their journey.

When facing an illness, patients may check with family and friends for a good healthcare center, read online reviews, and book an appointment. Their on-site care may begin with creating or verifying health records, assessing vital parameters, and the doctor’s consultation. Medication, therapy, and follow-ups continue as post-appointment procedures. 

Mapping the patient journey helps align internal hospital admin processes and be your patient’s preferred health partner.

You can access this patient journey mapping example, along with other journey map examples and a simple CJM template we built, here.

#3 B2B SaaS product journey map example

The overall B2B SaaS product journey can be summarized in the map below. However, to better understand user behavior and goals in each phase, you can break the journey into smaller use cases, such as onboarding, customer support, value realization, or controlling churn rate.

Note how the example calls out barriers or pain points as a separate element in the user journey map. Identifying barriers from the customer’s perspective also helps you find gaps within your product that you can rectify by modifying or adding new features to your product roadmap.

#4 Support journey mapping example for logistics

The highly collaborative logistics function involves suppliers, distributors, third-party logistics (3PL) providers, and last-mile delivery partners. This journey map example demonstrates to a logistics provider the user goals, actions, and touchpoints as a customer awaits the safe delivery of their ordered items. The emotions recorded at every stage help gauge customer satisfaction and find ways to improve customer success and retention.

Knowing the journey, the logistics provider can offer good customer service by giving prompt updates and accurate information regarding the delivery to their customers.

The above example was created on UXPressia, and the free version of their app includes reusable templates for various scenarios.

#5 Education: Online learning customer journey map example

This customer journey map is a detailed breakdown of the online learning experience, beginning from a student’s search for online courses to enrollment, assessment, and accreditation.

The map is split into ‘Current state’ and ‘Future state’ to help e-learning businesses envision the ideal learning experience that they want to offer their customers.

The above online learning journey map template and other mapping examples are available for free on the CJM tool Smaply.

#6 Customer journey map example for a restaurant

The restaurant customer journey map example shared below covers the journey of a consumer placing an order via a restaurant’s mobile app. It captures the customer’s thoughts, actions, and feelings before, during, and after ordering food.

Opportunities and insights are also identified at every step of the journey. Since restaurants thrive on user reviews, sharing customer feedback and reviews online is a major phase of the customer mapping process.

This example is from the online infographic maker Venngage, which also offers templates and resources for building customer journey maps. 

#7 Online travel agency customer journey mapping example

The travel and tourism sector is heavily dependent on crafting memorable experiences for business and leisure travelers. The COVID-19 crisis has wreaked havoc on the travel industry, and as the sector bounces back, Evelyn Zhang from Travelport 2—a software solutions provider for the travel industry—shares this traveler journey map for the new normal that Online Travel Agencies(OTAs) can refer to.

Ready to brainstorm and create your own customer journey map?

The examples and templates presented in this post depict different mapping use cases across industries. We hope the journey map examples shared here inspire you to start your company’s customer journey mapping process. 

So what are you waiting for? Gather your team and start creating your customer journey map. We’ve got you covered with a free journey map template.