How to Get Started with Customer Journey Mapping

Customer Experience (CX) is the backbone of many successful businesses today, and one of the most powerful tools to enhance it is customer journey mapping. Journey mapping allows companies to visualize every customer interaction with their brand, identify pain points, and spot opportunities for improvement. As CX continues to gain prominence, using a customer journey mapping tool like JourneyTrack is an efficient way to capture these insights.

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

Customer journey mapping is the process of visually representing the stages a customer goes through when interacting with a brand. This can include everything from the moment a customer first becomes aware of your company to post-purchase interactions, such as support calls or product usage. Each step in this journey provides critical touchpoints that help identify where the customer experience excels or falls short.

According to a recent Forrester report, journey mapping allows companies to build "empathy-driven experiences that elevate customer satisfaction and increase loyalty"—two key metrics for CX success.

The Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping

Journey maps offer several advantages to both companies and customers. For example:

#1. Increased understanding of customer needs: 

By laying out the steps a customer takes in interacting with your company, you gain a deeper understanding of what they need and expect at each point.

#2. Improved communication across teams: 

Journey maps help different teams within a company align their goals and understand their role in the overall customer experience.

#3. Proactive problem-solving: 

By identifying pain points early, teams can work together to remove friction before it becomes a significant issue that could impact customer loyalty or brand reputation.

While these benefits are clear, how you create and maintain a journey map makes a world of difference. That’s where dedicated customer journey management tools like JourneyTrack come in.

Getting Started with Journey Mapping Using a Designated Tool like JourneyTrack

JourneyTrack is one of the most intuitive and comprehensive journey mapping tools available today, designed specifically for CX practitioners who need to create, manage, and iterate on journey maps. If you're new to journey mapping or working in an organization just starting to embrace CX practices, using a specialized tool provides structure and guidance. Here's how to get started:

#1. Set Clear Objectives

Before diving into the tool, set clear objectives for your journey mapping exercise. Are you trying to improve a specific part of the customer experience, such as onboarding or post-purchase support? Or are you aiming for a broad view of the entire customer journey? Defining these objectives upfront will help you focus your efforts and streamline the mapping process.

#2. Identify Key Personas

Once you've outlined your objectives, identify the key personas involved in the journey. Who are your customers, and how do their needs, behaviors, and motivations differ at each stage of their journey? Platforms like JourneyTrack make it easy to map out different personas and layer their unique journeys on top of one another so you can see where paths converge or diverge.

#3. Identify the Steps of the Journey

Using JourneyTrack’s exclusive workshop feature, you can invite all stakeholders to weigh in on each journey step with insights into what is happening and what the customer is thinking and feeling. The journey map can be created with just one click from the workshop.

Alternately, most customer journey mapping tools provide templates to get started with journey maps, guiding the user through the various steps, emotions, and outcomes. 

#4. Incorporate Data and Feedback

What separates a good journey map from a great one is data. Platforms like JourneyTrack enable you to integrate quantitative and qualitative data into your maps, helping you ground your insights in real-world evidence. Whether you're pulling feedback from customer satisfaction surveys, Net Promoter Score (NPS) data, or support call logs, layering this information into your journey map will allow for more informed decisions.

#5. Collaborate and Iterate

CX is an evolving practice, and so is journey mapping. Dedicated journey mapping tools offer collaboration features, allowing cross-functional teams to provide input and make real-time updates. This ensures your map stays relevant and responsive to changing customer needs and business goals.

Why Use a Specialized Tool Over Multi-Purpose Ones?

While it’s certainly possible to create a customer journey map using general-purpose tools like Excel, PowerPoint, or whiteboarding tools like Miro, Figma, or Mural, these platforms lack the CX-specific features and functionalities that tools like JourneyTrack offer. Here’s why:

#1. Purpose-Built for Journey Mapping

Tools like JourneyTrack are designed specifically for CX professionals. Unlike Excel, PowerPoint, Figma, Miro, etc., which require significant customization to function as journey mapping tools, specialized platforms are ready out-of-the-box to handle the unique complexities of customer journeys. From persona management to data integration, these platforms are built to simplify the mapping process.

#2. Data Integration

As mentioned earlier, integrating real-time data into your journey map is critical for making it actionable. While Excel can manage data, it lacks the intuitive interface and CX-specific analytics offered by JourneyTrack. Miro, on the other hand, is primarily a whiteboarding tool, which makes data incorporation cumbersome.

Gartner suggests that organizations using advanced journey mapping tools experience a 20% improvement in their CX efforts compared to those using more general software platforms.

#3. Collaboration Features

Collaboration is key to successful CX implementation. Excel and PowerPoint are often cumbersome to collaborate on in real time. At the same time, whiteboarding tools, though strong in visual collaboration, lack the ability to track detailed customer data across multiple touchpoints. Specialized CJM tools combine the best of both worlds, enabling teams to work together seamlessly while maintaining data integrity.

According to the CX Network, tools like JourneyTrack allow CX teams to work "in lockstep with product, marketing, and sales teams, ensuring a unified approach to enhancing the customer journey."

#4. Visualization and Reporting

Journey maps aren’t just for internal use—they’re valuable tools for reporting insights to leadership and stakeholders. JourneyTrack provides advanced visualization options and automated reporting tools that make sharing results in a polished, professional format easy. By contrast, creating polished reports in Excel or Miro, etc., requires extra manual work and expertise.

Final Thoughts

Starting your journey mapping process with a dedicated tool like JourneyTrack is one of the most impactful ways for CX practitioners and organizations to ensure success. It allows you to create structured, data-driven maps that provide actionable insights into your customers’ experiences, helping your company not only meet but exceed customer expectations.

Investing in the right tools can make all the difference in today's competitive landscape. As Forrester puts it, "CX leaders who prioritize customer journey mapping will be better positioned to anticipate customer needs and deliver seamless experiences that foster loyalty." For more information about choosing the right platform, check out our blog post on the Top 10 Features to Look for In CJM Platforms.

By leveraging the capabilities of a purpose-built tool like JourneyTrack, you'll ensure your organization’s CX initiatives are grounded in insights that drive customer satisfaction and business growth.

Subscribe to our blog and stay in the know.