Feature
The Gist
- From static to strategic. Customer journey mapping has evolved from one-off diagrams to real-time orchestration tools that drive measurable ROI and customer loyalty.
- Emotion meets analytics. Modern journey maps combine behavioral data, emotional cues, and AI-powered insights to uncover what truly drives customer satisfaction.
- Technology as an enabler. Vendors like Medallia, Genesys and Qualtrics—highlighted in Forrester’s report—are redefining journey mapping with AI-driven orchestration and predictive intelligence.
A customer experience journey map, or customer experience map, illustrates all of the touchpoints a customer has with a brand as they weave through the marketing funnel across all of the brand’s channels. Today’s journey maps are no longer static diagrams; they’re the basis for always-on journey analytics and orchestration that find pain points, fixes them in real time, and proves the lift.
You can inform your brand's entire decision-making process by learning what customers want and need. Using the customer journey in marketing is especially helpful, as it can help inform campaign strategies that deeply resonate with prospects and customers. But digital customer journey mapping isn’t something you only do once — you should optimize and refine these maps continuously to adapt to changes in your customers, the market as a whole and your company.
Table of Contents
- FAQ on Customer Journey Mapping
- Best Practices for Customer Journey Mapping
- What Do Customer Journey Maps Look Like?
- Practical Advice for Customer Experience Journey Mapping
- Expert Tips for Mapping Customer Journey Success
- Customer Journey Mapping: Step-by-Step Guide
- Customer Journey Mapping Software
- Video Demonstrating the Importance of the Customer Journey
- 3 Examples of Brands Investing in Customer Journey Mapping
- Reap the Rewards of Customer Experience Journey Mapping
FAQ on Customer Journey Mapping
Click through the drop-downs to discover answers to the foundational questions around customer journey mapping.
AI and machine learning can analyze customer sentiment, predict behavior, and surface patterns that human teams might miss. Companies like American Express use AI-driven sentiment modeling to understand the emotional context of interactions and improve the journey in real time.
Customer journey maps should be reviewed and updated regularly — ideally every six months or after major CX changes, product launches or shifts in customer expectations — to stay aligned with evolving customer behaviors and needs.
Effective journey maps use a mix of quantitative and qualitative data, including analytics, surveys, reviews, interviews and behavioral research. Combining these data types helps teams understand both what customers do and why they do it.
Customer journey mapping is the process of visually representing all the touchpoints and interactions a customer has with your brand — from initial awareness to post-purchase engagement. It helps identify pain points, emotions, and opportunities to enhance the overall customer experience.
Journey mapping allows organizations to see their business from the customer’s perspective, uncover friction in the buying process, and create more seamless, emotionally resonant experiences that build loyalty and long-term value.
Best Practices for Customer Journey Mapping
A map lets brands focus on how customers experience a product or service. This information can help companies better connect with consumers on an individual level and improve brand reputation. These key customer touchpoints serve as a visual representation of the path that an average customer takes, providing insights on ways to increase customer satisfaction and make the existing journey more aligned with your audience's needs.
Three Ps for Customer Journey Mapping: Practice, Purpose and Practical Tips
These practices help CX teams ensure journey maps reflect real customer perspectives and remain actionable across the organization.
| Practice | Purpose | Practical Tip |
|---|---|---|
| Start with the customer’s perspective | Center mapping efforts on what customers actually experience, not just internal processes. | Use direct interviews and feedback; validate assumptions with real-world data. |
| Break down silos | Ensure all teams share a unified view of the journey for end-to-end improvements. | Create cross-functional mapping teams; make the map a living, shared resource. |
| Use real, multichannel data | Capture journey touchpoints across web, app, social, and offline channels for accuracy. | Combine analytics, surveys, reviews, and observational research. |
| Map emotions and pain points | Uncover drivers of loyalty and churn, not just process steps. | Ask “how did this make you feel?” at key moments; visualize with empathy maps. |
| Iterate and continuously update | Keep journey maps relevant as customer expectations, products, and channels evolve. | Schedule regular reviews; update maps after major CX changes or new product launches. |
When creating a customer journey map, include these core elements to capture both the functional and emotional aspects of the customer experience:
- Personas: General groups of customers based on demographics and psychographics.
- Actions: What the user does at each touchpoint.
- Timeline: The process of going through the touchpoints and phases of the journey.
- Channels: Which of the brand’s channels the customer is currently on for any given touchpoint.
- Feelings/Expectations/Questions: The emotional state the customer is experiencing at any given touchpoint.
Let’s break it down a little further.
Personas
Personas are where we try to figure out who the customer is and their interests.
You’ll want to use data and feedback from existing customers and prospects to build these buyer personas. You can also use tools, such as lookalike audiences, to widen your pool of information. Lookalike audiences analyze your current target audience and find other people with similar demographics, interests, etc.
Use surveys that hone in on customer goals and expectations and ask questions about purchase intent and customer support. When you survey customers, you can identify buyer personas based on pain points, using customer data to better define your target audiences. This is crucial for the next steps of the customer journey mapping process. Once you've established a number of personas, narrow your focus to the most common or relevant ones to create the most useful map.
Actions
Now it’s time to assess what actions your customers take. How do they behave across various touchpoints? What content do they interact with? Do they reach out for help to understand a product or prefer to conduct their own research? How many steps does a customer take, from learning about your product to making a purchase?
Understanding the motives and emotions behind each action your customers take is also important. What is the problem each action is trying to solve? What pain point is each action addressing?
Take a look as well at when your customers stop taking action. For example, when do they abandon a shopping cart? At what point do they click away from a video? Here you may discover obstacles keeping customers from moving forward.
Timelines
The next step is to analyze the timeline the customer operates on. When are they actively engaging with the product or service? Do they prefer brand communications in the morning or the evening?
Make sure you look for customer interactions across all touchpoints to understand customer timelines.
In today’s “always on” world, customer expectations, channel preferences, and touchpoints change constantly. Brands that treat journey maps as static documents risk missing evolving pain points and losing relevance as the business grows. Bryan Cheung, chief marketing officer at Liferay, told CMSWire that in the past, journey mapping was often seen as a 'one and done' exercise aimed at documenting processes.
Treating journey maps as living assets enables brands to quickly adapt, orchestrate improvements across departments, and integrate AI ethically—turning maps into vehicles for proactive, customer-driven change.
Channel Engagement
The focus then shifts to channel engagement. Marketers should pay close attention to the channels customers use to interact with their brand.
It's easy to focus solely on your website. But remember that customers will interact with your brand across multiple channels, including:
- Social media
- Third-party review sites
- Messaging apps
- SMS
Google Analytics can reveal how potential customers reach out to you, allowing you to determine which channels matter most to the customer journey.
Feelings, Expectations and Questions
Beyond tracking actions and touchpoints, the most powerful journey maps get to the heart of why customers make the decisions they do—examining the emotions, expectations, and questions that influence their experience.
Brands that listen for emotional cues and anticipate questions can design journeys that not only resolve pain points, but also build trust and positive sentiment at every stage.
Sandeep Menon, CEO at Auxia, suggested that "An effective journey map in 2025 does more than outline stages and touchpoints—it serves as a dynamic system for understanding and improving how customers realize value. Modern maps clearly define stages, channels, and key moments, each linked to measurable KPIs,” explained Menon. “The best teams start by identifying how users achieve value in the product, then work backward to map the experiences that drive those behaviors—much like Facebook’s classic ‘7 friends in 10 days’ insight."
Menon emphasized that the goal is not just to list customer feelings and expectations, but to connect them directly to business outcomes. By working backward from moments of value, brands can uncover the underlying emotions and motivations that shape the journey—then continuously refine touchpoints to meet, and exceed, evolving customer needs.
The greater understanding and empathy a brand has with its customers, the more it can improve the customer experience. By mapping the customer journey, brands can determine what their customers actually want rather than what brands think they want. This accuracy can reveal new insights.
Related Article: Customer Journey Intelligence: Why Data Leaders Must Bridge the Insight-to-Action Gap
What Do Customer Journey Maps Look Like?
Here is an example of what a basic customer journey map can look like. Clearly, brands will have a much more robust view of the customer journey depending on their customer base:
Practical Advice for Customer Experience Journey Mapping
Each company’s customer journey maps will be unique to the brand, its products and services and its customers. Once you master mapping the customer journey , the next step is to make sense of the insights and analytics gained, as the data from customer feedback is useless if you don’t understand it.
Here are a few key points to focus on when digesting data:
Eliminate Unneeded Interactions
Think of the customer effort score (CES) that’s part of every voice of the customer (VoC) program. How hard does the brand make it for the customer to do business with them? Is the process so frustrating or lengthy that customers give up and leave? Are there extra steps within the journey that you can eliminate?
Focus on the Negative and Positive
The pain points in the customer journey are not likely to be forgotten, as they create a negative emotional connection. Eliminating or reducing pain points in the journey should be one of the top goals of journey mapping.
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Build Upon Successes
Again, creating a positive emotional connection can leave a customer feeling they made a wise purchasing decision. It provides them with a positive emotional experience, which enhances customer loyalty and increases the net promoter score (NPS), turning customers into brand advocates.
Reduce Omnichannel Friction
The customer experience journey should be consistently exceptional across all of a brand’s channels. For instance, say a customer places an order on a brand’s mobile app and then calls customer service. Their experience should move from one to the other without the need to reenter information.
Making Journey Maps Actionable and Measurable
To maximize the value of journey mapping, brands must bridge the gap between customer attributes and the actual behaviors that drive value and loyalty. Effective maps not only chart the steps that customers take but also uncover the reasons behind those choices, enabling teams to optimize both acquisition and retention.
Dexter Chu, head of marketing at Secoda AI, told CMSWire that impactful journey mapping starts with pairing the right data with a solid understanding of the customer.
“You need to know how they are going to use it, where they hang out and get educated about the problem you or your tool is solving, etc. Add a bowtie view so teams are able to see both sides of the funnel: how people arrive, how value grows after they sign up,” said Chu. “Most firms still spend majorly on acquiring users than keeping them, so the map should help shift effort to activation, repeat use, and LTV. Building your funnel and identifying key moments in the conversion journey lets you work backwards and reverse engineer the different moments that lead up to that 'ah ha moment'. Once you have that, you can design a journey that moves that customer further along."
Mapping the customer journey with both acquisition and retention in mind allows teams to allocate resources more effectively, engineer higher customer lifetime value (CLV), and identify the specific moments that trigger loyalty and growth.
It’s no longer enough to visualize a customer journey—real impact comes from activating on insights, measuring what matters, and adjusting strategies as customer needs evolve. Amy Hage, co-founder and email/SMS strategist at Strategy Maven, explained that "The purpose has fundamentally changed from 'understanding our customer' to 'activating on understanding.' A few years ago, journey maps were created by strategists for strategists. Now, they're created with the ops team, the retention team, the CS team—because the map is only valuable if it directly informs what message someone gets, when they get it, and through which channel.”
Hage said that the most effective approach she’s seen is connecting journey stages directly to revenue metrics rather than vanity metrics. “That insight completely changed how we structured post-purchase journeys for our beauty and wellness brands."
Tying journey maps to direct business outcomes—like CLV, repeat purchase, or retention—enables teams to focus on high-impact touchpoints and prove measurable ROI from experience improvements.
Expert Tips for Mapping Customer Journey Success
Journey mapping can look different depending on your industry, brand, products and services and even physical location. Customer journey marketing, for instance, might look at ways to improve campaign performance through personalization. The sales team, on the other hand, might be more interested in user experience or pain points.
Still, there are a few tips from experts that can apply to most journey mapping strategies.
Embrace Emotions, Start Early
New research continues to confirm that emotional connection is a key driver of customer loyalty and purchase decisions. According to Salesforce’s 2024 “State of the Connected Customer” report, 80% of consumers say the experience a brand delivers is just as important as its products or services. PwC’s latest survey finds that 65% of US consumers are more loyal to brands that create positive experiences, with emotional connection ranking among the top loyalty drivers for younger generations.
As journey mapping evolves, brands that intentionally create emotional bonds—rather than just functional convenience—gain a real edge in engagement and retention.
Speak Directly to Customers
No amount of analytics can replace the insights gained from hearing customers describe their own experiences in their own words. The richest journey maps start with immersion—going beyond surveys and dashboards to uncover motivations, frustrations, and needs through direct dialogue. When brands make the effort to truly listen, they discover not only the “what” of customer behavior, but the “why” behind it.
Hage suggested that the most effective journey mapping efforts are those that go beyond documentation and become deeply actionable, driven by direct conversations with customers and cross-functional collaboration. She emphasized that talking to customers—rather than only reviewing aggregated data—gives brands the clarity needed to personalize engagement and remove friction in real time.
Look at Similarities, Dig Into Data
A well-rounded journey map blends both qualitative insights and quantitative evidence. Once you’ve gathered direct customer input, the next step is to identify patterns and trends that reveal what works, what stalls progress, and where opportunities lie. Data analysis helps separate the common pain points from unique edge cases, and enables brands to validate hypotheses.
Chu emphasized that finding actionable patterns—such as which moments in the journey drive repeat engagement or higher lifetime value—requires blending behavioral analytics with customer feedback. He emphasized that only by synthesizing these insights can brands create journey maps that guide continuous improvements and stronger business outcomes.
Related Article: Mastering Customer Journey Management: From Silos to Seamless CXCustomer Journey Mapping: Step-by-Step Guide
The most common obstacle to journey mapping success is fragmentation—data, teams, and incentives that are misaligned, leading to disjointed experiences and missed opportunities for improvement. Cross-functional collaboration and shared accountability are essential for journey maps to become operational tools—breaking down silos ensures that every team is working toward a unified, customer-centric vision.
Chris Hunter, director of customer relations at ServiceTitan, told CMSWire that, in his opinion, the biggest obstacle to journey mapping success lies within a brand's silos. "Teams often focus only on their own piece of the customer journey, which makes it hard to see the full picture. Leaders can help by encouraging collaboration across departments and creating shared goals and metrics. When everyone works together, it’s much easier to spot pain points and make changes that actually improve the customer experience."
There are seven basic steps to creating a good customer journey map. Let’s dive into each of them.
1. Research Your Audience
This is where Tincher’s advice will pay off. By speaking directly with customers, brands can obtain genuine feedback about experiences throughout the touchpoints in the customer journey.
Seek to understand customers’ emotions and goals.
2. Build Your Personas
We are not talking about micro-segmentation here. Instead, you want to find the brand's main types of customers.
3. Identify Persona Pain Points
Consider a customer who cannot locate a particular paint color in a brick-and-mortar hardware store. Might they want to use the brand’s mobile app to find it instead? Will they get frustrated and go to a competitor’s store?
“I’ve seen the most impact when teams focus on the biggest pain points in the customer journey, test solutions through small experiments, and track the results closely,” explained Hunter.
By identifying pain points, brands are in a better position to provide solutions.
4. Map Out Journey Touchpoints
Recognizing and understanding all of the touchpoints along the customer journey is vital. Without this understanding, a journey map won’t be able to truly impact customer experience.
Map out all of the stages of the customer journey (brand awareness, consideration, purchasing, retention and brand advocacy) for each persona. Determine what each stage involves for each persona.
A teenage customer might see an ad on social media, visit the website and make a purchase online, for example. An middle-aged customer, on the other hand, might get an email, visit the brick-and-mortar store to make a purchase and then call customer service.
Hage emphasized that what makes a journey map effective now is behavioral specificity. “Instead of broad stages like ‘awareness’ and ‘consideration,’ we’re mapping actual customer behaviors: Did they browse but not add to cart? Did they subscribe to SMS but never open an email? Did they buy once and ghost us? Each of these micro-behaviors triggers a different journey, and an effective map in 2025 accounts for these variations.”
5. Optimize Your Interactions
Ease of use and convenience are two of the biggest drivers of sales and loyalty. The less effort a customer exerts, the more likely they will do business with a brand. Better still, the more likely they will continue doing business with a brand.
Menon said that brands should “visualize the friction points that block customers from reaching those moments of value, ensuring that every team can see where to intervene.”
The less friction that occurs between touchpoints, the better the experience will be for the customer.
6. Find the Insight
The goal of customer journey mapping is to improve customer experience (and, with it, increase return on investment). The actionable insights it brings are often jewels hidden in plain sight. Look for opportunities to create strong, positive emotional experiences.
7. Revise Based on Insight
As with any customer experience initiative, the process is iterative and never ends — additional improvements are always possible. Reevaluate the data, talk again with customers and continue to improve the customer journey for each persona.
“Today, customer journey mapping is viewed as an ongoing process aimed at improving the customer experience,” said Cheung. “Businesses recognize the need to continuously review and refine their journey maps as customer preferences change.”
8. Instrument + Orchestrate/Test
To move from insight to action, businesses must equip their customer journeys with the right analytics and feedback mechanisms—then orchestrate targeted improvements and test their impact in the real world.
This means connecting journey maps directly to operational systems, setting up event-based triggers, and conducting experiments (such as A/B tests) to validate whether changes actually improve outcomes. The orchestration layer ensures that every touchpoint—across marketing, sales, and service—can adapt based on real-time data, while continuous testing allows teams to iterate quickly and double down on what works. Ultimately, the journey map becomes a living system for customer experience management, not just a planning artifact.
Customer Journey Mapping Software
According to Forrester, customer journey orchestration (CJO) platforms serve as the “nerve center” of a journey-centric organization. In its June 2024 report, The Forrester Wave™: Customer Journey Orchestration Platforms, Q2 2024, analyst Joana de Quintanilha notes that the top vendors are helping brands move beyond data silos to deliver real-time, personalized experiences across channels. The study evaluated nine providers across 30 criteria, identifying leaders, strong performers, contenders, and challengers in the field.
Forrester found that the best platforms enable data fusion, real-time decisioning and responsible AI to align customer outcomes with business goals. Vendors are increasingly embedding generative AI to surface journey insights, predict friction and recommend next-best actions. Forrester’s research emphasizes that effective CJO software connects behavioral data, sentiment analysis and predictive intelligence to orchestrate seamless journeys that reflect both emotion and intent — bridging CX and EX for holistic engagement.
Customer Journey Mapping Tools
These leading vendors, highlighted in Forrester’s evaluation, combine data integration, real-time decisioning and AI capabilities to enhance customer journey mapping and orchestration.
| Vendor | Core Capabilities | Key Strengths | Ideal Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alterian | Real-Time CX Platform with no-code integration and AI-powered decisioning | Instant journey insights, preloaded data, orchestration playbooks | Best for CX and marketing teams needing quick, AI-driven journey visualization and analysis |
| CSG Xponent | Journey analytics, data fusion, and real-time orchestration | Strong at identity resolution and cross-channel decisioning; includes genAI tools like Bill Explainer | Ideal for telecommunications, financial services, and retail brands looking for deep data orchestration |
| Qualtrics XM for CX | Behavioral, sentiment, and emotion analysis integrated with genAI-driven insights | Combines customer and employee journey analytics; strong visualization and benchmarking tools | For enterprises seeking to link CX and EX and measure emotion-driven experience outcomes |
| Genesys Cloud | AI-powered journey management and contact center integration | Journey hierarchy and strategy optimization; event data platform; partnership with Salesforce | Suited for organizations focused on agent-assisted CX and contact center performance |
| Medallia | AI-infused orchestration platform with real-time decisioning and journey analytics | Dynamic content personalization, actionable dashboards, real-time journey flows | Best for CX teams expanding from feedback analytics to AI-based journey orchestration |
| Engage Hub | AI-powered cross-channel journey orchestration | Strong at data fusion, conversational journeys, and contact center automation | Ideal for organizations optimizing service and communication channels across regions |
| inQuba | Goal-based journey profitability and ROI analysis | Tracks drop-offs, loops, and customer goals; integrates nudges and intervention strategies | For firms focused on measurable outcomes and journey profitability |
| Quantum Metric | Journey analytics and storytelling with session replays | Quantifies opportunities through behavioral insights and genAI-driven analysis | Perfect for teams connecting digital analytics to broader customer journey orchestration |
| Roojoom | AI-generated journey modeling and real-time personalization | Predictive journey AI, simulation, and testing with real-time decisioning | Best for companies aiming to automate customer care and reduce call volumes |
Source: The Forrester Wave™: Customer Journey Orchestration Platforms, Q2 2024.
Video Demonstrating the Importance of the Customer Journey
How Hyatt Designs the Guest Journey: Beyond the Call with Katrina Fine
On this August 2025 episode of CMSWire TV’s Beyond the Call, CMSWire Editor-in-Chief Dom Nicastro speaks with Katrina Fine, senior manager of Standards Transformation at Hyatt. Fine offers a rare inside look at how one of the world’s top hospitality brands balances global brand standards with local individuality to create a consistent yet emotionally resonant guest experience across regions.
Fine describes Hyatt’s approach to the guest journey as both data-informed and human-centered. Her team defines which aspects of a stay — such as amenities, service tone, or digital tools — should be standardized worldwide and which should flex to local culture. This balance ensures that guests recognize the Hyatt brand everywhere, yet still feel connected to the unique character of each destination.
Hyatt’s guest journey strategy integrates feedback loops from multiple sources, including structured surveys and unprompted social listening across platforms like Reddit and Facebook. These insights help the brand spot friction points and uncover unmet needs in real time. Fine also emphasizes the role of ethnographic research in identifying overlooked human behaviors — like a guest searching for a TV remote that’s actually a tablet — as a key step in refining standards and improving design touchpoints.
To Fine, customer experience (CX) is inseparable from employee experience (EX) and supplier experience. She visualizes them as three interlocking circles in a Venn diagram — all influencing the outcome of the guest journey. Her team uses integrated dashboards that merge guest and employee data, revealing how operational realities and human factors combine to shape satisfaction.
AI is also becoming an integral part of Hyatt’s journey design. Fine highlights tools like AI-powered trip search on Hyatt.com and early exploration of agentic AI to help employees access brand standards and deliver faster service. The company tests these innovations by benchmarking against consumer technologies — not just other hotel chains — to ensure experiences feel intuitive, conversational and aligned with modern digital behaviors.
Through a combination of structured standards, human insight and intelligent automation, Hyatt’s CX strategy transforms every guest interaction into an opportunity to create both comfort and connection — proving that in hospitality, the customer journey is the experience.
Related Article: Reimagining Customer Journeys With Innovative Mapping Techniques3 Examples of Brands Investing in Customer Journey Mapping
Customer journey maps all try to visualize customer interactions, preferences, trends and pain points. However, maps can differ depending on your industry, department and organizational goals. Let's take a look at some real-world customer journey map examples.
Customer Journey Mapping Example: LEGO’s Experience Wheel
When LEGO set out to improve engagement in its global VIP loyalty program, the company relied on journey mapping to identify where members were getting lost or disengaged. LEGO used a customer journey mapping tool called the Experience Wheel, which visualizes a persona’s “before, during and after” phases across every touchpoint—physical, digital, and service-oriented. The map employed emoticons and simple visuals to highlight where customer feelings range from positive through neutral to negative, making it easy for cross-functional teams to spot friction.
Behind the scenes, LEGO concurrently transformed its operational platform (product-lifecycle management, enterprise architecture) so that every mapped touchpoint aligned with a unified system. The result: journey maps that are rooted in real data and internal capability, not just aspirational diagrams.
How American Express Reinvents the Customer Journey Through Sentiment and Listening
In an interview with CMSWire’s CX Decoded podcast, Luis Angel-Lalanne, vice president of Customer Voice for the Global Services Group at American Express, described how the company is evolving its approach to the customer journey by moving beyond transactional feedback toward a sentiment-driven, journey-centric model. Angel-Lalanne told CMSWire that his teams are rethinking how to measure and act on customer sentiment — shifting from traditional surveys to AI-powered analysis that captures emotion and intent across every touchpoint.
For years, American Express relied on post-interaction surveys as part of a global Voice of the Customer (VoC) program, which informed performance metrics for frontline teams. While effective, the model focused primarily on isolated transactions — such as calls or digital interactions — and sometimes missed how customers felt across the entire journey. Recognizing these gaps, Amex began adopting a journey-centric lens powered by Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning to model customer sentiment directly from interactions like phone calls and chats. This modeled sentiment now serves as the primary “scorecard” metric for front-line care professionals, providing a real-time, holistic understanding of experience quality.
Angel-Lalanne explained that this transition allows the company to link individual transactions to end-to-end journeys and, ultimately, to the overall customer relationship. The goal is to ensure Amex doesn’t miss “key moments in the journey,” such as follow-up calls or resolution steps that fall outside traditional survey cycles. By integrating sentiment modeling with journey surveys, the company can understand the emotional peaks and endpoints that most shape how customers recall their experiences — a principle rooted in “peak-end theory.”
At the heart of this evolution is American Express’s long-standing customer-obsessed culture. Angel-Lalanne said the company has been systematically collecting customer feedback since 2007, embedding it into incentives and leadership scorecards. This foundation, he noted, helps ensure that customer listening isn’t “a flavor of the month,” but an enduring driver of decision-making across the enterprise.
American Express’s customer journey strategy also incorporates three tiers of measurement: transactional data, journey-level surveys, and product-level Net Promoter Scores (NPS). This multi-layered structure helps the company identify correlations between specific touchpoints, end-to-end journeys, and overall product satisfaction — enabling leaders to pinpoint the “moments that matter” most to customer loyalty and business outcomes. The long-term goal, Angel-Lalanne said, is to use these correlations to prioritize investments that drive both experience improvements and measurable ROI.
By combining machine learning with human-centered design, American Express is transforming customer listening from a measurement function into a proactive engine for customer journey management. The company’s approach exemplifies how modern CX leaders can connect emotion, analytics and operational data to continuously refine and personalize the customer experience.
Customer Journey Mapping Example: IKEA’s Physical-Digital Experience Design
IKEA is often cited as a brand that masters journey mapping by bridging the gap between its physical stores and digital experiences. Unlike traditional maps that list steps, IKEA’s approach centers on “deconstructing the physical journey into an order of operations that makes intuitive sense to the consumer,” ensuring each moment is orchestrated to feel purposeful and frictionless.
A 2022 review by the CX consultancy Cieden reiterated that “the highest level of IKEA’s customer journey map is about analyzing the emotional state, goals, and context of the customer at each step, not just the touchpoints themselves.” This holistic approach enables IKEA to design in-store and online journeys that reflect real customer needs, guiding visitors smoothly from inspiration and product discovery through purchase and aftercare.
Rather than focusing solely on what happens at each interaction, IKEA’s journey mapping demonstrates the power of organizing every stage—from browsing to purchase—around customer emotions, convenience, and context. This strategy ensures that customers feel understood and supported throughout both their digital and physical experiences.
IKEA’s Blended Customer Journey Mapping Approach
This table illustrates how IKEA integrates physical and digital touchpoints across key journey stages to deliver a cohesive and emotionally engaging customer experience.
| Stage | Customer Goal | Physical Experience | Digital Experience |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inspiration | Find ideas and envision possibilities | Showroom displays, catalogs | Online galleries, room planners |
| Product discovery | Identify the right product | Aisle signage, staff guidance | Search/filter tools, product reviews |
| Purchase | Buy with confidence and ease | Checkout lanes, self-serve options | E-commerce checkout, order tracking |
| Aftercare | Get help and support post-purchase | Returns desk, in-person support | FAQs, live chat, mobile app support |
Reap the Rewards of Customer Experience Journey Mapping
Customer journey maps are useful tools for understanding how customers act and feel. They track people as they move through all the brand’s touchpoints on each channel. They also enable companies to eliminate pain points while improving customer experience.
