---
name: customer-journey-map
description: Use when asked to build a customer journey map — a visual map of the stages a customer goes through with a product or service, from awareness to advocacy, including their thoughts, feelings, and friction at each stage — distinct from a [[customer-persona]], which describes who the customer is rather than what they actually go through.
---

# Customer Journey Map

A customer journey map lays out, stage by stage, what a customer
actually goes through when interacting with a product or service —
from first becoming aware of it through to using it and, ideally,
recommending it to someone else. Its job is to make friction visible:
where the experience matches what the customer expected, and where it
doesn't.

## Key components

- **Stages in sequence** — the customer's path from awareness through
  consideration, purchase or signup, onboarding, ongoing use, and
  advocacy (or churn), each treated as a distinct phase rather than one
  undifferentiated "experience."
- **Touchpoints per stage** — the specific moments the customer
  interacts with the company at that stage: an ad, a support call, a
  pricing page, an onboarding email, a renewal notice.
- **Goal and emotion at each stage** — what the customer is trying to
  accomplish at that point, and how they actually feel (confident,
  confused, frustrated, delighted) — the part a purely operational
  process map leaves out.
- **Pain points and opportunities, called out explicitly** — friction
  the customer hits at a given stage, and where an opportunity exists
  to remove it or exceed expectations, marked directly on the map
  rather than buried in narrative notes.

## Persona vs. journey map

A [[customer-persona]] and a journey map answer different questions:
the persona describes *who* the customer is — goals, pain points,
context — while the journey map describes *what* they actually go
through over time. The two work together: a journey map is normally
built for one specific persona, since different segments can take
meaningfully different paths through the same product.

## Common pitfalls

- **Mapped from the internal process, not the customer's experience**
  — describing what the company's teams do at each stage (marketing
  hands off to sales, sales hands off to onboarding) instead of what
  the customer actually sees, thinks, and feels produces an org chart
  in disguise, not a journey map.
- **So many touchpoints listed that the real friction gets lost** —
  cataloging every possible interaction in equal detail buries the
  handful of stages that actually cause drop-off or frustration; the
  map should make the worst friction obvious at a glance, not treat
  every touchpoint as equally important.
- **Built once and never validated against real behavior** — a map
  drawn from internal assumptions about the ideal path, and never
  checked against support tickets, analytics, or actual customer
  interviews, can be confidently wrong about where the real friction
  is.
- **No distinction between current and ideal state** — mixing how the
  journey actually works today with how the team wishes it worked
  makes it impossible to tell what needs fixing versus what's already
  aspirational.
- **Advocacy or churn left off the map** — stopping at "purchase" or
  "onboarding" misses the later stages where retention and referral
  (or quiet churn) actually happen.

## Learn more

- [[customer-persona]] for who the journey map's customer actually is.
- [[customer-onboarding]] for a deeper look at one specific stage many
  journey maps show as a major friction point.
- [[churn-analysis]] and [[net-promoter-score]] for data that can
  confirm or challenge where a journey map says friction and advocacy
  actually happen.
- [[customer-success-plan]] for how the ongoing-use stage gets managed
  after a journey map identifies what the customer needs there.