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The definitive 8-step customer journey mapping process

In business, as in life, it's the customer's journey that makes the company's destination worth all the trouble. No customer wants to jump through several different hoops to get to your product: they want it fast and they want it now.

Following certain customer journey mapping stages helps you improve your user's experience (UX) to create a product they love interacting with, ensures you stay ahead of key workflow tasks, and keeps stakeholders aligned. But a misaligned map can derail your plans—leading to dissatisfied users who don’t stick around long enough to convert or become loyal customers.

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This article walks you through the eight key stages of great customer journey mapping, and shows you how to adapt each to your unique business and product to optimize the customer experience from start to finish.

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Hotjar's Observe and Ask tools let you go ‘behind the scenes’ to understand your users’ product experiences and improve their customer journey.

An 8-step process for effective customer journey mapping

A customer journey map is a visualization of every point of interaction a user has with your company and product.

Mapping out the customer journey gives you insights into your buyers’ behavior to help you make changes that improve your website and the user flow between touchpoints. This helps you increase online sales and turn users into loyal customers and brand advocates.

Follow these eight proven steps to understand—and enhance—the customer experience.

Note: every business is distinct, so be sure to adapt these steps to your particular user and business needs.

1. Define your purpose

The first step to creating a successful customer journey map is to define your product's vision or purpose. Without a clear purpose, your actions will be misguided and you won’t know what you want users to achieve during their journey on your website, product page, or web app.

To define your purpose, consider your company’s mission statement and incorporate your specific user pain points as much as possible.

Make your purpose specific to your company’s needs and goals—for example, the purpose of an ecommerce brand looking to help users navigate several different products and make multiple purchases will differ from that of a SaaS company selling subscriptions for one core product.

2. Make sure your team is aligned and roles are clear

Cross-functional collaboration is essential when mapping out your brand's or product’s user journey. Get insights from different teams within your organization to find out exactly how users engage with key touchpoints to derive a holistic sense of the user experience (UX), which will help you improve every aspect of the customer experience.

Lisa Schuck , marketing lead at Airship , emphasizes the importance of keeping “anybody that has a touchpoint with a customer” involved. She advises teams to “figure out how to align your external marketing and sales with your internal operations and service.”

Although sales, product, and marketing departments are often the key players in customer journey mapping, also involve your operations and design teams that are responsible for creating the user flow.

If you have a SaaS company, for example, marketing creatives, sales teams, product owners and designers, and your customer experience department all need to participate in the process. Clearly define who’s responsible for different aspects of the map, and regularly check in to make sure your final map isn’t missing any important perspectives.

Pro tip: use Hotjar's Highlights feature to collect and organize key product experience (PX) insights and data on user behavior from teams across your organization to help you build your customer journey map. Then use Hotjar’s Slack integration to quickly share learnings with your relevant stakeholders to get buy-in and ensure everyone is aligned.

Hotjar’s Slack integration Slack lets teams discuss insights in the moment, so they’re up to date with critical issues

3. Create user personas

Once you’ve defined your purpose and involved all relevant stakeholders, it’s time to design your user personas . Use resources like UXPressia and HubSpot’s Make My Persona tool to help you design various product personas .

Create a range of user personas to understand what each type of buyer needs to curate a journey that’s easy and enjoyable for every customer. This is an important early step in the customer journey mapping process—because if you don’t understand your users, you won’t be able to fully comprehend how they interact with your brand to better it.

Create user personas for all your product’s possible buyers—for example, to map out a B2B customer journey for a company in the hospitality business means developing personas for a range of different customers, from large chain hotel managers to small vacation rental owners.

4. Understand your user goals

Once you’ve designed your user personas, it’s time to define their jobs to be done . What do your users hope to accomplish when they search for your product or service? What do they want to do when they click on your website? Address and answer these questions to build a deep understanding of your users’ goals and pain points to inform your customer journey.

In a SaaS customer journey , perhaps users are looking for helpful comparisons of product features on your website, or want to easily sign up for a trial account in the hopes that your product will solve their problems. But you won’t know until you ask .

Once you have users or test users, get direct insights from them with Hotjar's Feedback tools and Surveys to ask buyers exactly what their goals are as they browse different pages of your website or interact with product features.

Since user goals are at the center of your customer journey map, define them early on—but keep speaking to your users throughout the entire process to make sure you’re up to date with their needs.

#Use Hotjar's Feedback tools to understand what your users want to do at key customer journey touchpoints—like when they land on your homepage

5. Identify customer touchpoints

After you understand your users and what their goals are, it’s time to identify the ways they interact with your company and your product.

"Touchpoints are the moments the customer interacts with your brand, be it through social media channels, your product, or customer support. The quality of these experiences affects the overall customer experience, which is why it’s important to be aware of them. Consider what happens before, during, and after a customer makes a purchase or uses your product."

Key customer journey touchpoints for a website or product include your homepage, landing pages, product pages, CTA buttons, sign-up forms, social media accounts, and paid ads.

Collaboration is key to identifying touchpoints throughout the entire customer journey. Include insights from different teams and stakeholders —your marketing and sales teams will have a strong understanding of the touchpoints involved pre-purchase, while the customer experience department can shed light on post-purchase touchpoints.

Post-purchase touchpoints can help turn users into loyal customers and even advocates for your brand.

In the words of Lisa Schuck, "When you create a raving fan, or a brand advocate, who goes out and tells the world how wonderful you are, you get social credibility and validity. It’s becoming more and more important to have advocates."

Pro tip : speak with your users regularly to get direct voice-of-the-customer (VoC) insights on what they love and what frustrates them on their journey. Place Hotjar Feedback widgets and Surveys at key website touchpoints like your homepage and landing pages to get valuable user insights on what you can improve. Use Hotjar’s survey templates to get inspiration for your survey questions.

An example of an on-site Hotjar Survey

6. Map out the customer journey

Once your user and product research are complete and all roles are distributed, it’s time to map out the full customer journey.

First, map out an overarching customer journey by putting your key touchpoints in order and identifying how your various user personas interact with them. Then, home in on the details, looking at how customers engage with specific aspects of your website, product, or social media accounts.

Breaking down the mapping process into smaller phases will ensure you don’t miss any key interactions.

Here’s how an ecommerce brand could lay out general touchpoints, then narrow each down into more specific actions:

Pro tip : it’s helpful to think of the user journey in terms of different functions when mapping it out, like:

Connect: how are buyers connecting with your brand?

Attract: how are you convincing them to convert?

Serve: how are you serving customers when they want to purchase?

Retain: how are you promoting brand advocacy and customer retention ?

7. Test the customer journey

Once you’ve mapped out the customer journey, it’s time to take it for a spin. You can’t understand how your users move through customer touchpoints unless you test out the user flow yourself.

Start with an informational Google search, then visit your website, check out your social media pages, and simulate the purchase process. This will help you get a better sense of how users interact with each touchpoint and how easy it is to move between them.

Be sure to try out the journey from the standpoint of every relevant user persona. For an enterprise software company, this could mean looking at how decision-makers move through the user flow vs. the employees who’ll use your software day to day.

By walking through the customer journey yourself, you can identify issues and difficulties that users may have to address them proactively.

Try out the user flow with test users to get a realistic perspective of the user experience. Be sure to use focus groups that represent every one of your user personas.

8. Use continuous research to refine your map

Continuously map out, analyze, and evaluate the customer journey by observing users and getting their feedback. Hotjar Heatmaps and Recordings help you understand how your users are experiencing the customer journey on your website: create heatmaps to see whether users are clicking on CTAs or key buttons, and watch recordings to find out how they navigate once they reach your homepage.

Then, use Google Analytics to get an overview of your website traffic and understand how customers from different channels move through the user journey.

Finally, once you have these combined user insights, use them to make changes on your website and create a user journey that is more intuitive and enjoyable.

#Watch your users as they navigate on your website during their customer journey to see where they're getting stuck with Hotjar Session Recordings

Pitfalls to avoid during the customer journey mapping stages

Jamie Irwin , director & search marketing expert at Straight Up Search , says companies should avoid these three common mistakes when mapping out the customer journey:

Don't map out the entire customer journey at once

Don't forget about the ‘hidden journeys’

Don't make assumptions about customer behavior

To sidestep these common pitfalls:

Start by mapping out the overall journey, and only drill down into more detail once you have a broader, higher-level overview of the customer journey

Factor in every way that customers interact with your brand, even the ones you don’t have as much visibility on, like ‘dark social’ communications about your brand shared in private channels. Talk to your users to find out what they’ve heard about your brand outside of public channels , and use sticky share buttons to keep track of when your content’s shared through email or social media messengers.

Take a data-informed approach: don’t assume you already know your users —test out your hypotheses with real users and qualitative and quantitative data.

Follow proven steps to successfully map out the customer journey

Take the time to understand your business goals and users, involve the right teams, and test frequently to consistently improve your customer journey and make the decisions that will help you map out an experience that will get you happy and loyal customers.

FAQs about customer journey mapping stages

What is the purpose of customer journey mapping.

Customer journey mapping helps you visualize how users interact with your business and product, from the moment they find it until long after they make their first purchase.

The purpose of customer journey mapping is to gain insights into the buyer's journey to create a more enjoyable, streamlined, and intuitive experience for your customers.

What are the benefits of following a customer journey mapping process?

The main benefits of a customer journey mapping process are: :

Building on tried-and-tested processes

Not missing any key steps

Considering all buyer personas

Keeping all relevant stakeholders involved

Creating a valuable customer journey map

Improving user experience

What happens if you don’t follow key steps in customer journey mapping?

If you don’t follow key steps when mapping out the customer journey, your map likely won’t give you the insights you need to enhance the experience users have with your most important touchpoints —like your homepage, landing pages, CTAs, and product pages.

This can result in high bounce rates, low conversion, and unsatisfied users who fail to become loyal customers.

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Gravity Flow

Automate your business processes with Gravity Forms.

Mapping the Customer Journey Workflow from Awareness to Purchase

Newsletters and short email campaigns are all well and good—they still have a place in your marketing journey, after all. Yet, marketers are increasingly using automated customer journeys, which set off specific triggers within their email marketing tool.

Below, we’ll take a look at what people should know about how customer journey workflows can really transform the customer experience.

Why Customer Journey Mapping Matters

Customer journey mapping serves to ensure that your users experience your product/services the way you intended. We’ve talked about it before , but we’re going to revisit mapping. The mapping process is critical to making sure you’re engaging with your audience correctly at every stage of the buying cycle.

One of the most significant trends in the customer success space is to move to an outside-in approach.

This means companies are starting to measure customer experience outside of things like retention, churn and conversions. According to Harvard Business School professor, Ranjay Gulati, companies are increasingly addressing customer pain points first rather than emphasizing sales, products and other internal goals.

Consider your company’s story through the lens of your customer. Your goal is to identify the customer’s desired outcomes first and create a model that shows how those customers arrive at that endpoint.

Here’s what you need to know about mapping the marketing automation customer journey, and how workflows fit into this process:

The Marketing Automation Customer Journey

Your first step in creating a journey that works with your organization’s goals is, establishing the phases in your customer journey.

Now, nearly all journeys start with awareness and end with a purchase, but some companies opt to add more phases in between.

In most cases, you’ll start with the basic phases:

Consideration

Loyalty–or follow-up

You’ll notice the above map shows customers at each stage in the process. This is a traditional journey map, but for our purposes, it’s a good starting point. Gradually, your customer journey workflows will get more specific.

Here’s a look through the phases:

At the beginning of the buyer journey, your buyer likely isn’t aware of your company or that you offer something that they need.

At this stage, your biggest concern should be answering this question: “why should I be interested in x if I don’t know you exist yet?”

With that in mind, the awareness stage is all about education and promotion. Meaning, you’ll need to push content out through the usual channels—Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or whatever else you use.

During the awareness stage, your goal is addressing customer pain points, not emphasizing your company or product.

So, before you begin, you’ll need to research your audience’s pain points and create educational content that highlights these issues.

If you’re using Gravity Flow, you could start the workflow when an anonymous user enters their information into your system. So, it begins when they’ve signed up to receive newsletter updates, a free download or some other piece of content.

Once the buyer has narrowed down their choices—you, and a few others, they might do some more in-depth research.

According to Pardot’s State of Demand Generation Report , roughly 70% of shoppers return to Google 2-3 times to dive deeper into the subject matter.

As customers revisit your content—you’ll want to track their growing interest and respond accordingly.

Say a customer left something in a digital shopping cart—that action could trigger a specific workflow. Perhaps, a message that highlights what was left behind.

The second part of the consideration stage is making a selection.

Once your buyer has the support of upper management or a fresh paycheck in hand, they’re ready to buy. At this stage, a buyer is looking at the costs involved with opting in and gathering any final items that will determine if your solution is a good fit after all.

At this point, the buyer is on the verge of making that decision. So, this may be the time to pull out all the stops. And by stops, we mean testimonials and case studies—here, you’ll want to show off what others gained by choosing you over the competition.

The Purchase

The research is done. The buyer has finally made a decision and pulled that trigger. If you’re an e-commerce business or you’ve got a simple solution, you don’t need to do much—skip to the follow-up stage.

If you’re selling something a more involved like a new CRM or you’ve signed on a new legal or financial client—then you’ve got more work to do.

When purchasing at the high level, people tend to continue their research. With a piece of software, customers want information about best practices, tutorials for each feature, ways to implement each element into their daily lives.

In case you were wondering, you do need to engage with your audience after that initial purchasing stage.

Consider a drip nurturing program for these new customers. You can write and save your messaging for each part of the journey in Gravity Forms either with a mailing service like MailChimp or you can roll your own with Gravity Flow.

We’ve gone over how to set up an email course in a previous article, so you’ll take your map of choice and follow the steps provided there.

Here’s a look at what it might look like if you use a series of lessons as part of your onboarding drip campaign:

The Follow-Up

After the conversion takes place, your work isn’t done. You want to make sure those customers make repeat purchases. In this case, we recommend adding a step to your journey in Gravity Flow, triggering an email after a certain amount of time passes with no activity.

Naturally, the follow-up process is different for every type of company. E-Commerce businesses have the benefit of offering discounts to someone a month after their last purchase. Or, they might request the customer write a review or invite them to participate in a loyalty program. According to a 2016 Bond Survey , offering rewards stands to increase sales.

A SaaS business follow-up approach, by contrast, consists of more check-in emails. For example, you could set your workflow to follow up after the initial sale—with an onboarding drip series. Once they complete the onboarding process—that could trigger another email promoting a webinar takes a deeper dive into the advanced features.

What is the Point of Automating This Stuff, Then?

So, we’ve provided some examples of how automated workflows can be inserted into the customer experience. What makes this so vital in today’s online space is, sending the wrong email to customers at any of these stages can get you blocked and banned in short order.

Automating your map allows you to manage several different customer journeys at once. You’re not spending time creating one-off messages for every action (or inaction) a customer takes.

The mapping process requires that you analyze what a customer needs at every stage. An onboarding newsletter can help customers feel seen, heard and cared about.

According to McKinsey & Company , taking the time to craft messages for every stage can improve sales, retention and end-to-end service costs. The same study found that automating the journey and the messaging that goes with it can improve employee satisfaction, too.

Asking for information at an inappropriate time can cost you a sale—just because you fudged some part of the nurturing stage.

If you’re relying on manual follow-ups or haphazard email scheduling—you run the risk of upsetting the map.

The second point is, we’re looking at several potential actions any one prospect might take. One person, during the awareness stage, might like you on social media, but not sign up for your webinar until their third visit. Another might signup and fail to go through the onboarding steps on your website while another could buy something from you once and never return.

In other words, you’re writing a “choose your own adventure” for your customers. There needs to be a response for every stage, no matter how a person moves through the path.

The B2C email has evolved a ton from the newsletter we’ve long relied on.

Which brings us to this point—even a routine update newsletter may benefit from a workflow. The customer journey just has so many sub-stages and layers, as Shopify calls them.

Before You Build Your Map, Do Your Persona Research

One of the biggest mistakes you can make when mapping your customer journeys is thinking that your customers fit into the box that you’ve made for them.

Finding the ideal customer is no more realistic than finding the perfect mate. Instead, there are likely a few different groups that will find value in your solution.

So, you need to think in broader terms—who would be interested in your product—how will it help with issues facing those folks within your niche?

You’re going to have to do some good persona research to take full advantage of your customer journey map.

Before you get started, ask your existing customers a few questions to learn more about their experience working through the customer journey:

Why did were they looking for x that led them to your website?
How did they research the product and how long did it take?
What about YOUR company made them buy?
Which competitors did they look at?
How was their experience with your website? Could anything be done better?

Parting Thoughts

In the end, it’s important to spend a good deal of time developing a customer journey workflow that covers all of your bases–or, each potential decision for every stage along the way. While the examples given above may look like basic infographics, mapping is vital for diagramming your customers’ needs and addressing any motivations or pain points that emerge during the buying and post-purchase cycles.

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Customer Journey Workflow Examples

Customer Success Journey Map: How to Build One and Drive Success in SaaS

10 min read

Creating a customer success journey map is necessary for:

Creating a customer success strategy.
Building customer success playbooks.
Measuring success across the buyer journey.
Offering the right in-app experiences to engage your customers.

This article covers the entire process of creating a customer journey map.

So if you’re yet to define one for your SaaS, read this post and get started as soon as possible.

A customer success journey map is a visual representation of the steps, stages, and milestones that your customer needs to pass in order to reach success.
Customer journey mapping has many benefits including:
The ability to spot and remove friction throughout the journey.
Improving the customer experience with in-app communication and reducing churn.
Better upsells that drive account expansion , and thus increased customer LTV.

There’re eight steps for customer success journey mapping:

Determining the type of customer success map you want to make. Some include current state maps, future state journey maps, service blueprints, day-in-the-life, empathy, and experience map.
Describe the user persona you’ll target. Including customer pain points, JBTDs, and motivators.
Defining what success looks like for your persona and understanding how your product helps.
Deciding which part of the customer lifecycle you’re going to map.
Identify the milestones required to achieve the goal.
Specify the necessary steps to complete each milestone.
Use a tool to create a visual representation of your customer success map. If it allows team collaboration and templates, then even better.
Implement and track progress across the journey with a user adoption tool like Userpilot

Building a map is the first step toward a complete customer success strategy. You can use Userpilot to:

Create and trigger personalized in-app messages based on the customer’s stage in the journey.
Offer self-service support to remove friction across the journey with an in-app resource center. You can also personalize the knowledge base content based on user segments .

What is a customer success journey map?

A customer success journey map illustrates each step, stage, touchpoint, and milestone that your customer needs to go through to achieve success. Its purpose is to provide a repeatable blueprint that the customer success team can use to help users achieve their goals.

Customer journey maps are segmented for specific user types, include detailed steps for achieving goals, and there are multiple types for different purposes.

Benefits of mapping your customer success journey

Building a success map is not optional or a nice-to-have. It’s an essential component for any customer success process , and it’s highly beneficial to:

Understand where customers get stuck and remove friction

With a customer success map, you can have clarity over:

The current stage of your customer
The next milestone they need to achieve
The end goal of your customers and the steps they need to take

This lets you identify if a customer got stuck at a specific point in their journey.

So if—for instance—a user didn’t finish the signup process, you can quickly tell what step generated the most friction and fix it.

What’s more, reducing friction constantly across the customer success lifecycle makes it easier for the customer to advance through—thus improving the user adoption flywheel :

Improve customer experience and reduce churn

In-app communication is vital for keeping users engaged and reducing customer churn.

So instead of using generic tactics like product tours , you can use a customer journey map to determine:

What the right in-app message is for each stage.
What specific actions are needed to reach the next milestone.

This way, you can create a communication strategy that focuses on “ micro-conversions ” and drive customer success with granular in-app guidance and decreasing churn by providing value when the customer needs it.

Also, you don’t have to limit yourself to in-app communication.

You can also use your customer success map to spot which users are showing signs of churning and reach out to them proactively to offer personalized help .

Increase the customer lifetime value

With a customer success map, you can identify the stage where an upgrade would bring more value to the customer.

So instead of upselling randomly, you can offer a relevant upgrade to the right customer at the right time—allowing you to increase account expansion MRR continuously and boost LTV .

8 Steps to map the customer success journey

A customer success journey map sounds simple, but how exactly do you create one?

We’ve determined eight steps to create a success map that’s accurate and helpful for your team and includes:

Choosing the type of customer success map you have to create
Describing the user persona, you’re going to target
Defining what success looks like for your user persona
Decide which part of the customer lifecycle you’re going to cover
Identify the milestones across the journey
Specify the touchpoints required between each milestone
Use a tool to create a visual representation of your customer success map
Implement and track progress across the journey

Let’s explain each of them:

Step 1. Which type of customer success journey map should you create?

No customer success map can fit every purpose. That’s why there are many map types designed for specific goals in mind, and they include:

Current state maps. Shows how your users are interacting with your product today, so you can iterate on what’s not working.
The future state journey map. Which predicts how users will interact with your product in the future. It’s used for setting goals once you’ve fixed the problems from the current state map.
Service blueprint. This one tracks and evaluates every touchpoint with your customer so you can improve their experience.
Day in the life journey map. It covers the customer’s day-to-day habits, behaviors, and motivators so you can design a user experience that fits them.
Empathy journey map. A map that focuses on understanding the customer experiences from the user’s point of view. Includes what the user says, thinks, feels, and acts about your product.
Experience journey map. Which visualizes and focused on the experience of accomplishing a goal in general so you can create and improve the journey to success.

Once you know the purpose of your customer success map, you can get started with this current state template by Brightvessel :

current-state-customer-success-journey-map

Step 2. Which customer persona’s journey are you mapping?

You can’t create one journey for every single user segment .

Even if some touchpoints would overlap, it’s essential to define the user persona for each map and describe what a successful customer journey looks like for them. Just like this customer success manager (CSM) persona example :

customer success manager persona journey map

Note: A fictional persona is useless. You must build your user persona based on interviews, customer feedback , and microsurveys .

Step 3. Define what success looks like for your persona

You can’t achieve success without knowing what success is in the first place.

Each user persona will have different goals and desires. So if you want your customer success map to be effective, you must understand what your user is looking to achieve with your product.

Think of: What are the jobs to be done they need to complete? What’s making it harder? What obstacles are they facing?

Once you find out how your persona can succeed with your product, you can start laying out the specific steps.

Step 4. Which customer lifecycle stages are you mapping?

Your customer journey map doesn’t have to cover the entire customer lifecycle .

In fact, starting with a few stages is better since you can focus on the details and expand later on.

Here are the main stages of a post-purchase customer journey:

Purchase decision. The stage where the user signs up for a trial, a freemium account, or a product demo.
The Aha moment . When the user understands the value of your product and decides to move forward.
User activation . The moment the user starts engaging with the product’s core features and experiencing its value.
Product adoption . When the user engages with primary and secondary features repeatedly. Meaning the product is part of their habit.
Retention . When the user decides to stay with your brand and become a paying customer.
Expansion . The moment a customer upgrades their account to grow and achieve bigger goals.
Loyalty and advocacy. The stage where they become advocates of your brand and drive positive word-of-mouth.

For example, mapping out the first three stages could be a good idea if you’re struggling to activate users because you’re not clear when the “aha” moment happens.

But, what do you have to “map out” exactly?

Step 5. Identify customer milestones for the journey stages you are mapping

The next step is to map out the success milestones required to win at each journey stage.

But what do we mean by milestone? Well, Lincoln Murphy defines “customer milestones” as:

“Customer-centric milestones within the product. They’re not activity for activity’s sake. They will be the result of meaningful activity and will be tied to other inputs to ensure we know that the customer is actually achieving their desired outcome.”

Determine the main goals that your customer wants to achieve within each stage.

For example, let’s stick to the activation stage.

You want your user to reach the activation milestone as soon as possible, and for this, they must engage with a series of features first.

customer success journey map feature adoption

Step 6. Map specific touchpoints in between milestones

Once your milestones are laid out, think of the specific steps required to reach them depending on:

The channel where the user is (inside the app, website, chat, etc.)
The element they’re engaging with (The product’s UI, website content, a support agent, the customer success team, etc.)

For the activation stage example, users are likely inside your app and interacting with your product.

So—if the milestone is to reach the activation point —your customers should engage with at least two or three core features, depending on your product’s purpose (if you can’t identify them, then you have a customer-product fit problem).

With this information, you can use in-app communication to encourage customers to follow those steps and reduce friction (e.g., adding a checklist to guide the user to the activation point).

7. Use tools to build and visualize your customer journey map

Next up, you want to visualize your customer journey map. And for this, you need an app that provides:

Design tools to create a visually appealing map
Templates to avoid starting from scratch
Team collaboration to discuss details.

There are multiple options in the market. But Miro offers a good number of templates already:

customer success journey map template miro

8. Track progress across the customer journey

There’s no point in mapping the journey to success if you’re not using it to identify and track users’ progress.

Using a customer success tool , you can set specific goals and trigger in-app messages to help customers reach their milestones and succeed.

When using Userpilot, the first step is to add your milestones as your primary goals so you can track when users reach specific points in their journey.

customer success journey map goal creation user pilot

And once your goals are set, you can track how your users are moving across the journey and easily spot the stages with more friction:

goal tracking customer success journey map userpilot

This way you can easily track your customer success goals and create strategies based on data.

However, that’s not everything Userpilot can do.

How Userpilot can help you drive customer success across each stage of the journey

Mapping the customer journey is not enough for a complete customer success strategy .

What about communicating with your users? Or providing proactive support?

Userpilot isn’t helpful for mapping your customer journey, but it does help you implement the strategies and make use of your map.

Here’s how:

Trigger custom in-app experiences based on the customer’s journey stage

Imagine in-app communication as the oil that removes friction in your customer success machine.

As a customer success software, Userpilot can trigger in-app messages based on:

Different user segments
User’s in-app behavior and engagement
User’s journey stage
Specific events and the count of them using custom attributes

This way, you can show relevant UI patterns such as modals, slideouts, and other in-app guides based on where they are in the journey.

With Userpilot, you can to create “ flows ” to add these widgets:

userpilot customer success journey map ui patterns

For example, if you’re struggling with product adoption, you can add tooltips to help users discover relevant features, offer tips, and move them through the journey, using a progressive onboarding strategy .

Also (coming back to the activation example), you can create activation checklists to encourage users to engage with core features:

customer success journey map userpilot checklist

Offer contextual help and remove friction across the journey

Often, users deviate from the plan, or the product doesn’t work as intended—so they’ll rely on support to solve problems.

This creates friction, and the best way to minimize it is with self-service support .

For this reason, Userpilot allows you to build resource centers inside your product, and include a knowledge base, video tutorials , how-to articles, and instant access to a support ticket.

So your customers don’t have to leave your product to find answers or waste your support team’s time on common issues—which means less customer service gap .

And that’s not all. You can use targeting options to show content based on a specific URL path, user segment , localization, and behaviors: