The route to better CX: Your customer journey map template

A customer journey map helps you visualize the entire customer experience, from onboarding to ongoing engagement.

By identifying friction points where users encounter problems and highlighting key user experience touchpoints, you can understand each step of the customer journey—and fix issues before they escalate into churn.

Read on for our detailed guide to all-things customer journey mapping, including a free template to get started.

A customer journey map is a tool that helps product teams visualize and understand user interactions at every stage of the customer journey—from first interaction to conversion and adoption.

You can see where customers get frustrated (e.g., dropping off at the checkout page) and where they feel satisfied (e.g., after receiving post-purchase support). From this map, you can see exactly where the experience breaks down—such as an overwhelming landing page, or lack of support during onboarding.

Once you address these pain points, you refine the customer experience, increase user engagement, and reduce churn.

Customer journey mapping transforms the way you interact with your customers and understand their experiences. While journey maps are valuable for all teams, they’re particularly helpful for Product Managers (PMs) and UX teams looking to improve the customer experience, attract new users, and reduce churn.

Here are some key benefits:

Before you pull out your compass and push-pins, consider when is the best time to use your customer journey map.

The next step is understanding what goes into the map itself. Let’s break down exactly what’s included in a customer journey map.

The Lens defines who the customer is and marks the beginning of their customer journey. This zone narrows down your map to a single, relevant perspective. For example, if you’re mapping the experience of a first-time buyer trying to purchase a product online, the Lens ensures you concentrate only on that customer and their specific actions.

To be effective, your customer journey map needs to have a tight focus on one user persona and experience—you can’t create a map that matches every user’s experience, so start with your most important persona or feature and work out from there.

Key elements:

The Experience captures what the customer thinks, feels, and does during each phase of their journey.

For example, in an online checkout process, the customer’s actions could include selecting items, entering payment details, and confirming the purchase. Their thoughts might include “Is this secure?” while their emotional experience may shift from excitement to frustration if the payment process is too slow.

Key elements:

The Insights turn the journey map into an actionable plan. Here, you can use UX research tools to identify problems and opportunities for improvement. For example, if customers often abandon their carts at the payment stage, the pain point is likely a complicated checkout process—too many form fields, unclear error messages, limited payment options, or unexpected shipping costs at the last step.

This highlights an opportunity to simplify the checkout process. You should assign ownership for specific actions in this zone—for example, the UX team might redesign the payment form, while Customer Support ensures FAQs address common checkout questions and customer feedback.

Key elements:

The next step is building and filling in your customer journey map. Let’s go!

There’s broadly six steps in creating a customer journey map—each stage plays a key role in capturing the complete customer experience and addressing areas for improvement.

Think about what specific outcomes and customer experience metrics you're aiming for—whether that’s increasing user engagement, improving onboarding, or reducing churn.

You should also clarify what part of the customer journey you’re looking to map. While customer journey maps can cover the entire journey, you’ll also use them to look at specific sections of the customer experience.

For example, if your objective is to improve user onboarding, it’s a waste of time to map the journey of a power user who’s used your tool for five years. Instead, you’d focus on mapping the early stages, such as how new users interact during sign-up, where they encounter friction, and what might cause them to drop off.

If the aim is to reduce churn, concentrate on the later stages of the customer lifecycle, pinpointing where users disengage, like not renewing a subscription after a trial period or abandoning the platform after encountering usability issues. This ensures the journey map targets the most critical touchpoints.

Customer or user personas are fictional profiles that represent the key segments of your user base. Creating personas helps you focus on the specific needs, behaviors, and pain points of different types of users, making your customer journey map more effective.

Instead of a generic profile, each persona focuses on what drives a particular group of customers, what frustrates them, and how they engage with your product.

Here’s our customer persona template to download and start building detailed profiles for your users:

Once you understand who your customers are and what drives them, you need to track how they interact with your product at various stages.

This step is about mapping out specific moments of engagement—called touchpoints—where your personas interact with your brand, and what actions they take at each of those touchpoints.

Here’s how to make this process actionable:

You can recruit real users from the Maze Panel—which allows you to target participants based on specific demographics and behavior—ensuring you gather feedback from the right users. With 400+ filters and a pool of over 3 million participants across 130+ countries, you can recruit the right audience tailored to your research needs.

Plus, with Maze’s In-Product Prompts, you can recruit participants directly while they interact with your product, collecting real-time feedback from people already engaging with your platform.

Now you’ve set your objectives, created user personas to better understand your customers, made observations and gathered customer insights, it’s time to identify the stages of the customer journey.

These stages break down the entire customer experience, helping you understand how people move from one phase to the next. Each stage is defined by a set of goals, actions, and touchpoints that reflect the customer’s behavior and needs at that point in their journey.

Common customer journey stages include:

Depending on your goals, you’ll focus on some phases more than others. By mapping out these stages, you can clearly see the entire journey and how a customer transitions from one step to the next, identify potential drop-off points, and tailor your interactions to meet customer needs at each phase.

When you visualize the journey, you turn raw data into a functional customer journey map that guides your team to make data-driven decisions and improve the overall customer experience.

A journey map typically includes the following elements:

If your team is remote, use an online tool like our Customer Journey Mapping Template or an online whiteboard, like Miro or Figma. These solutions offer more flexibility for adding layers of information with real-time collaboration across teams. Plus, they make it easier to keep the map updated as customer needs evolve.

Alternatively, you can use traditional methods like sticky notes and whiteboards—a quick and hands-on way to brainstorm and map out the journey in real-time. This approach works well in team workshops or when you need a physical, visual overview of the journey in person.

The goal is to continuously improve the customer experience by making data-driven adjustments based on feedback, performance metrics, and customer behavior insights.

Start by regularly reviewing the current state of your journey map. Look for customer pain points that are still unresolved or where conversion rates are lower than expected.

Then, focus on optimizing the future state of the journey. This means looking at upcoming product updates, market trends, or customer needs that may arise, and adjusting your journey map accordingly.

Your journey map is a living document that requires regular adjustments to stay relevant and effective. Run regular user research like UX surveys, interviews, and usability testing, to see if new touchpoints or features improve the overall experience.

Work to engage stakeholders across teams, and remember that every adjustment should align with broader business goals—whether it’s improving customer retention, reducing churn, or boosting customer satisfaction.

Spotify’s customer journey map is designed to constantly improve the music-sharing experience by understanding user behavior and emotions at every stage. By tracking key actions—such as opening the app, browsing playlists, and sharing music—Spotify can identify where users encounter friction or disengage.

Each touchpoint is carefully examined to improve the flow, making interactions smoother and more intuitive. This detailed analysis allows Spotify to continuously refine its platform and ensure users enjoy a seamless experience.

What sets Spotify apart is its in-depth focus on the emotional aspect of the user journey. Spotify doesn’t just look at what users do—it also captures what they think and feel during each interaction. For example, users may feel hesitant to share music because of concerns about being judged, or they may find the process too cumbersome.

Spotify tailors its user experience to align with customer needs, making the platform intuitive and emotionally engaging.

Spotify’s customer journey map is a living tool that evolves with user behavior, allowing for constant optimization. This data-backed refinement has resulted in increased engagement, particularly in music sharing, and high overall customer satisfaction.

Spotify's community feedback system plays a key role in refining its platform, especially through the Spotify Community and Idea Exchange. Here, real users share their feedback, report bugs, and suggest new features. Users can vote on ideas, which helps Spotify gauge which features or improvements have the most demand.

Now that you've explored the depths of customer journey mapping, it's time to take action. This free template is designed to help you quickly and effectively map out your customers' experiences.

Simply make a copy of the template, and start mapping your customers’ journeys today.

A well-designed journey map ensures every interaction (during the entire customer journey) meets the customer’s expectations. But journey mapping alone isn’t enough–you need the right tools to gather customer insights and analyze user behavior.

Maze's array of UX research features and automated reporting ensures your customer journey evolves with real-time feedback.

Plus, by integrating Maze with your favorite design and collaboration tools like Figma, AdobeXD, Sketch, Slack, and Amplitude, you can easily share insights across teams and continuously improve your product–guaranteeing your customer journey delivers a flawless user experience, from awareness to adoption.