Customer Journey Map (2025): How-to & Examples [+ Template]

The Customer Journey is the process your customers go through with your company. This then covers the first to last interaction someone has with your company.

Many companies do not have a map of how their customers orient, what they care about or when the company comes into the potential buyer’s mind.

Not having enough mapping of the Customer Journey puts you at risk of having, perhaps unknowingly, negative touchpoints with your (potential) customer.

I’m going to show you:

• What the Customer Journey is
• How to create your Customer Journey
• And what good examples of a Customer Journey are

Let’s get started…

What is the Customer Journey?

The Customer Journey is the process that maps every interaction with your brand:

The first interaction someone has with your brand is the beginning of the Customer Journey. If you find yourself in a niche market, it can also be interesting to map interactions with your niche.

The Customer Journey for B2B and B2C often looks quite different:

	B2B	B2C
Customer Service	Relatively high quality customer service is expected.	Want products or services that meet a need or desire.
Orientation	Often do their own research on products or services.	Do not do as much research before purchasing, often rely on word of mouth or online reviews.
Forgiveness	Less forgiving after a bad experience.	Expect good customer service, but are often more forgiving

The Customer Journey is relevant to any business, but particularly important for companies that:

• Are customer-centric
• Want to improve customer satisfaction
• Want to increase sales

In general, you often see in companies that the marketing department is responsible for ensuring that (potential) customers have a positive experience with the brand.

A nice trend you see is that marketing/growth teams are becoming more responsible for the entire funnel rather than just reaching and bringing in new customers.

7 Stages of the Customer Journey

There are different models you can use to map out the Customer Journey, but in the end they all boil down to the same thing:

• See-Think-Do-Care
  
• Pirate Funnel
  

Keep in mind the different roles of the Decision-making Unit, but essentially there are 7 steps you can include in the Customer Journey….

1. Need

Your (potential) customer can have 2 types of needs:

1. Latent need: the person does not yet know he needs something. If you are going to buy a car you are not yet directly concerned with insurance.
2. Concrete need: the person knows they have a certain need, here it is important to be visible with your brand. For example, think of buying a phone when your old one is broken.

Every Customer Journey basically starts with a certain need.

In practice, you can encounter 5 types of customers in this:

1. Unaware: don’t realize they have a problem or need.
2. Problem Aware: realize they have a problem or need.
3. Solution Aware: they know there are solutions to their problem or need, but they don’t know you.
4. Product Aware: they know you, but haven’t bought you yet.
5. Most Aware: brand ambassadors.

2. Orientation

The orientation process has changed a lot in recent years thanks to digitalization, which makes it extra important to map it out using research.

You want to be visible with your brand at least in the orientation phase so that you will eventually be included in the consideration phase.

Some examples of behavior in the orientation phase:

• Concrete keywords in search engines
• Asking acquaintances for their opinions
• Checking out inspiration platforms such as Pinterest, TikTok or Instagram

3. Consideration

In the consideration phase, we examine which option from the orientation phase best meets the customer’s wishes and needs.

Here it is important to know which decision criteria weigh most heavily for the customer; this should be properly researched.

Some examples of decision criteria:

• Price
• Brand awareness
• Service
• Warranty
• Reviews

4. Decision

In the decision phase, a product or service from a specific vendor is actually chosen.

There are a number of things that make it easier for the customer to choose your product or service:

• Make it easy to compare
• Provide a good selection in different options
• Offer a good deal, make sure your customer can’t say no
• Provide a smooth payment process
• Increase engagement in your brand by providing valuable content, offers and support

Provide as few distractions as possible during the decision phase, people who are still Googling “[company name] discount code” from the checkout want to be convinced to convert.

5. Delivery

After someone has become a customer, a product or service will need to be delivered.

Here the first moments of evaluation will be whether someone actually made the right choice to choose your company, product or service.

Some tips:

• Make sure you deliver on time and that your product arrives in the right condition or that your service is of high quality.
• Give clear instructions on how to use or what the added value of the service is.
• Provide good support if the customer experiences problems in using your product or service.

6. Use

In the use phase it is important that customers get the most out of your product or service and that they really see the added value.

You can stimulate this in a number of ways:

• Include tutorials
• Measuring and communicating impact
• Aftersales phone call

This is the ultimate evaluation moment; if your product or service did not help the customer well, there is little chance that they will make a repeat purchase or become a brand ambassador.

In any case, it is important to prevent people from talking badly about your brand, so make sure that in the earlier stages you already make sure that people who are not ideal customers for you are excluded and that you make sure that customers see the added value of your product or service.

7. Loyalty

It is 5 to 7 times cheaper to retain a customer than to bring in a new customer. This is precisely why it is so important to encourage loyalty.

Loyalty can be expressed in the number of repeat purchases or upsells a customer eventually makes with you. You can encourage this by offering valuable content, offers and support.

The goal is for people to remain loyal to your brand and not switch to a competitor or go out of business in the first place.

There are different forms of loyalty:

• Transactional Loyalty: getting customers to make repeat purchases by giving offers.
• Social Loyalty: interacting with your customers on social media, for example.
• Engagement Loyalty: you reward people who engage with you where you can receive points for subscribing to a newsletter, for example.
• Emotional Loyalty: if your brand is positively aligned with your customer’s emotions, you can’t get this kind of loyalty with offers. In this, you want to make people feel part of something.
• Behavioral Loyalty: a level of loyalty in which you want to make customers do something like buy higher volumes where you give a third product for free after buying 2 products.
• Advocacy Loyalty: you are going to reward people who recommend others to become customers of your brand.

Customer Journey Mapping

Download the Customer Journey Canvas:

Common mistakes

There are a number of mistakes that you often see passed in Customer Journey Mapping:

1. Based on assumptions: often you see that a Customer Journey is completely based on assumptions and not on validated research.
2. Wrong scope: critically determine in advance where you want your Customer Journey to begin and end otherwise you quickly lose focus and overview.
3. No customer perspective: reason the Customer Journey from your persona or customer and not from your company.
4. Inside-out: if you start from how you do it as a company you are not customer-centric and there is going to be a mismatch in how the customer experiences something and how your company does it. Make sure your Customer Journey is actually completed from the customer’s perspective.
5. Stakeholders: it is important to involve all relevant stakeholders so that you start creating support for the Customer Journey.
6. End goal: the Customer Journey is not an end goal, but a starting point. It is something that will continuously play out and needs to be changed.

And now you…

Now you’re armed with enough knowledge to start visualizing your Customer Journey.

I’m curious, what has been the biggest insight for you in understanding your target audience?

Let me know in a comment.

P.S. if you would like additional help you can email me at [email protected]

Frequently Asked Questions