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How to Create a Realistic Customer Journey Map

By: Mark Rosenbaum, Mauricio Losada Otalora, German Contreras Ramirez

Although many articles discuss customer journey mapping (CJM), both academics and practitioners still question the best ways to model the consumer decision journey. We contend that most customer…

• Length: 8 page(s)
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2017
• Discipline: General Management
• Product #: BH792-PDF-ENG

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Although many articles discuss customer journey mapping (CJM), both academics and practitioners still question the best ways to model the consumer decision journey. We contend that most customer journey maps are critically flawed. They assume all customers of a particular organization experience the same organizational touchpoints and view these touchpoints as equally important. Furthermore, management lacks an understanding of how to use CJM as a cross-functional, strategic tool that promotes service innovation. This article proposes a solution to the unwieldy complexity of CJM by linking customer research to the CJM process and by showing managers how to develop a customer journey map that improves a customer's experience at each touchpoint. Using the case of an actual retail mall, we show that common CJM assumptions about the equal importance of all touchpoints are fundamentally wrong, and how easy it is for retail managers and strategic planners to make incorrect judgements about customer experience. This article demonstrates through a case study how customer research helped a mall's strategic management team understand which touchpoints were more or less critical to customer experience. It also shows key strategic initiatives at each touchpoint, resulting in cross-functional input aimed to advance service innovation at the mall.

Jan 1, 2017

Discipline:

General Management

Industries:

Retail and consumer goods

Business Horizons

BH792-PDF-ENG

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• Case studies
• Expert advice

How to create a customer journey map — a step-by-step guide with examples

Learning more about client experience is the best way to understand and improve it. As you are reading this article, you already know that 😉 

Here, you will find a detailed step-by-step guide on making a customer journey map (CJM), examples, expert tips, templates, and a PDF guide to download and save for later.

• 1 What is a customer journey map?
• 2 Benefits of client journey mapping
• 3.1 Step 1: Define your persona
• 3.2 Step 2: Set customer journey stages
• 3.3 Step 3: Define journey map sections
• 3.4 Step 4: Set customer goals
• 3.5 Step 5: Define touchpoints
• 3.6 Step 6: Processes and channels
• 3.7 Step 7: Problems and ideas
• 3.8 Step 8: Emotional graph
• 3.9 Step ?: Be Creative!
• 4 Customer journey map examples
• 5 A customer journey mapping checklist
• 6 The free guide to download

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is the final output of the collaborative visualization process called customer journey mapping. This process lets you reveal typical experiences the customers have over time when interacting with your organization, service, or product. A finished map provides insights into their actions, processes, goals, needs, channels, emotions, and many other aspects shaping the customer experience. 

Journey maps can be of different scopes. For example, a broad-scope map would include multiple customer journey stages like ‘Awareness’, ‘Decision’, ‘Purchase’, ‘Support’, and ‘Renewal’. In contrast, a map with a narrower focus would look at a few specific stages like ‘Decision’ and ‘Purchase’.

CJMs focusing on the current experience are AS-IS maps, while journey maps visualizing the future, desired, state of the experience are called TO-BE maps.

There’s also a similar technique, customer experience mapping, which is often used interchangeably with journey mapping. Experience maps are variations of CJMs, but they typically cover a wider range of interactions and contexts beyond a specific consumer-business relationship. 

Benefits of client journey mapping

Why make journey mapping your tool of choice? There are plenty of reasons, the major of which include:

• Gaining a deeper understanding of your customers 

For instance, a high-end fashion retailer may discover that its younger customers prefer online shopping, while older customers enjoy the in-store experience.

• Getting a single view of your customer within the organization

Journey mapping will help you turn a fragmented vision of the customer experience into a unified, organization-wide one. It will have a massive impact on the decision-making process, encouraging you to consider how your actions will affect your clients and become customer-focused.

• Breaking corporate and cross-department silos 

To make the way toward delivering a great customer experience, you will need to collaborate with others. Understanding why this collaboration is essential, departments and employees will be more inclined to participate in conversations and collaborate.

• Improving customer experience, retention, and loyalty

While working on a map, you will discover customer pain points at different stages of their journey with you. Fixing the most crucial one as quickly as possible will do you a good turn by eliminating the reasons for leaving you. If fixes take much time, look for quick wins first. 

For instance, adding details about your shipping policy on the website will take a developer half an hour, while it will set the right expectations among customers. They won’t be expecting the delivery the next day anymore, bombarding your customer support team with frustrated messages. Another example is a subscription-based video streaming service that can personalize content recommendations to keep subscribers engaged and less likely to cancel their subscriptions.

• Better conversion and targeting of your target customers

Sometimes, it makes sense to focus on a specific segment or, talking journey mapping terms, specific personas. Customer journey insights will help you with this endeavor by giving you a glimpse into these people’s minds and ensuring the higher effectiveness of your marketing.

How to build a customer journey map

Although there is no gold standard for creating a customer journey map, we’ll try to create a somewhat generalized map. So that you can use it as a reference when making maps of your own.

We’ll be using our CJM Online tool along the way for two reasons. Because it’s easy to use and lets you create a CJM fairly quickly without wasting time setting up the environment. Oh, and there's a Personas building tool that comes with it 😉

We’ll take a pizza restaurant as an example of business and learn how to make a customer journey map together.

Step 1: Define your persona

Creating personas is a crucial part of customer experience service and journey mapping in particular. We won’t go into details — you can find them in this post about defining personas .

Let’s just say that our persona’s name will be Eva Moline — 29, works as a journalist and loves pizza. Eva is not really tech-savvy, and she tries to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Step 2: Set customer journey stages

Stages are the steps customers take when interacting with a business. The easiest way to identify them is to think of all the actions the person has to take throughout their journey, organize them into logical groups, and name these groups. These will be your map stages. 

The number of stages varies from business to business, but we’ll take 8 for this example:

💡 Expert tips: 

• If you’re unsure about the order or names of the stages, don’t worry about that. You can change both at any time when working on the map.
• If your stages are complex, you can break them into smaller ones. Read this blog post about defining customer journey stages to learn more.

Step 3: Define journey map sections

Sections are horizontal rows with data that, together with the stages you defined, make up a customer journey map.

When picking sections for a map, your choice will depend on your journey’s type and purpose. 

As for UXPressia’s Journey Map tool, it offers a set of more or less universal sections for all kinds of maps. 

We’ll use some of the sections in the current example.

Step 4: Set customer goals

Setting customer goals at each stage is great for multiple reasons:

• It helps you understand how your business goals align with the goals of your customers.
• You can meet your customers’ needs better, gaining their loyalty by helping them achieve their goals at each stage.

Above, you can see some of the goals we set for Eva. They are self-explanatory, so there’s no need for extra details.

Step 5: Define touchpoints

Touchpoints are encounters that happen between your business and customers. In the pizza restaurant example, touchpoints happen:

• At the Awareness phase, when Eva is actively looking for a pizza place nearby. She is asking around, searching locations on Google Maps, etc.
• At the Research phase, when she is trying to find out what people say about the place by asking her friends and reading online reviews.
• At the Arrival stage, when Eva searches for a parking spot and enters the restaurant to get seated after parking the car.
• At the Order stage, when she makes an order and waits for it.
• Time to eat! At this stage, touchpoints occur when Eva is being served and when she is eating her meal.
• At the Leave stage, Eva interacts with the waiter, pays for the meal, etc.
• At the Feedback stage, she goes to the pizzeria’s website and drops a few lines on Instagram.
• At the last stage, Eva gets a promo email from the restaurant with discounts or other special offers.

Defining all the touchpoints is critical because each touchpoint leaves some impression, and your main goal is to keep it up to the mark.

You can also have a separate section to describe the actions your persona takes:

Step 6: Processes and channels

Now, you may want to add some processes and channels to the map. Just to see what channels your persona uses and what types of processes are in their journey. Luckily, our tool lets you do it in the most awesome way. Processes can be linear, non-linear & time-based, cyclic, or bi-directional. In UXPressia, you can specify up to 10 channels per process.

Step 7: Problems and ideas

It’s time to explore problems Eva might have when using our service. It could be a lack of info about the pizza house. Few reviews and ads do not show how our pizza differs from others.

Upon arriving, Eva may struggle with locating the place due to unclear information on signboards or just because of a hard-to-find location.

When making her order, Eva may look for detailed info on dish ingredients to learn whether it contains peanuts she’s allergic to. Descriptions may not be as detailed as she’d want them to be.

While waiting for the pizza, Eva may want to check out the place. Finding a restroom can turn into a nightmare if you don’t have clear signs showing what’s where in the restaurant.

Once you’re done with problems, it’s time to find solutions to these problems. Brainstorm for some ideas on how this or that problem can be solved. Here’s what we brainstormed for Eva’s case:

Step 8: Emotional graph

Never underestimate the power of visualization. And our Customer Journey tool is all about it. We added an emotional graph to see where our service example shines and where it stinks. Plus, we filled text boxes with Eva’s thoughts:

There’s also a special section ( “Think & feel” ) to put personas’ thoughts.

Step ?: Be Creative!

This is a good start, but the map is far from being complete. So, keep exploring Eva’s journey to find more insights and then add all of them to the map.

If you use our tool (which we highly recommend you to do), check out other CJM sections:

• Image section for screenshots, photos, or any other relevant imagery. You can even turn it into a storyboard , describing the journey from beginning to end with your images or those from our library.

• Charts section for communicating data in a visual and meaningful way, just like we did it in the persona:

• Video and document sections for journey-related videos and documentation (e.g., an annual marketing report).
• Personas section for visualizing different personas’ interactions within the same journey.

💡 Expert tip: The section with the persona’s questions works like a charm for marketing and content purposes. So be sure to add one 😉

Customer journey map examples

There are also a whole lot of free CJM templates for all sorts of journeys in our library. Here are three examples we picked for you.

• Example 1: a mobile user journey

This user journey map template covers the digital experience of the persona who discovers a new mobile app, installs it, and uses the app for some time before deleting it.

• Example 2: a client journey map for a corporate bank

This free template is an example of a multi-persona, B2B customer journey. The key persona is a newly opened company looking for a bank to run their business. The CJM also visualizes interactions between the personas involved. 

• Example 3: a digital customer journey

This customer journey map example shows the digital journey of three customer personas who want to buy a new pair of sneakers online. They go through the same stages, but if you look at the map, you will be able to see the differences in customer behavior, goals, and actions. It’s also a multi-persona journey map .

A customer journey mapping checklist

As a quick recap, here is a checklist with key steps to follow when creating a customer journey map:

• Do research

To represent real people, your real customers, and visualize their journeys, you must base your personas and journey maps upon actual data.

• Define your customer persona(s)

Identify your target personas. Create detailed profiles focusing on information relevant to your journey mapping initiative. Include such details as background, customer needs, motivations, channels, etc. 

• Specify journey map stages

Determine the stages you want to have on your map and come up with their names.

• Decide on the map sections

Determine which sections to include in your map (e.g., actions, touchpoints, emotions, channels).

• Set customer goals for each stage

Make sure that it is your customers’ goals, not your business goals.

• Identify touchpoints between the persona(s) and your organization, product, or service

Consider both online and offline interactions.

• Map out processes and channels

Visualize the journey-specific processes and the channels your customers use at each stage. Include both digital and physical channels.

• Highlight problems and look for opportunities

Identify any pain points and issues customers might encounter. Brainstorm potential solutions and quick wins to improve the experience.

• Add details about the emotional experience

Visualize the persona’s emotional journey. Include thoughts and feelings where it’s relevant.

• Use more sections

Include illustrations, images, and charts to make the map visually engaging and easy to understand. Enrich your journey map with more data, like KPIs related to journey stages.

Feel free to tailor this checklist to the specific context of your business and your project's needs.

The free guide to download

As a bonus, download our free customer journey mapping guide. Fill in the form below to get a PDF file as an email.

Related posts

The post was originally written in 2017.

Rate this post

first of all, excellent example and I’m very happy to I could understand how to create user journey map, due to for a long time I can’t understand it and how, many thanks for your efforts 🙂 I have some question about ser journey map. I hope to open your chest for me,

1-no there are rules for user journey map? 2-I need another example ?(for example Uber)?further understand 3-have I create user journey map without customer?

Hello, Karim!

I am very glad that this article helped you understand customer journey mapping 🙂

In regards to your first question, I would say that journey maps differ from business to business. However, they tend to have the same structure give or take. So no matter what industry you make a CJM for, you will end up having several stages and a bunch of sections we mentioned in this post.

If you’re looking for CJM examples of Uber customers, here is one: https://www.mindomo.com/doc.htm?d=92be818b774d422bad7eab790957ebc0&m=7d286174ccf1450bbb77c921a609ff65 Plus we have a lot more on our template page: https://uxpressia.com/templates

As for your last question, yes. You may have a journey map without a customer (persona) and use target audience segments instead (or have a generic map without personas at all, though I don’t recommend the latter as in this case it will be hard to empathize with real people). So you will certainly have to introduce a customer down the road to gain a deeper understanding of the journey.

many thanks for your reply to me and again I have some questions

1-why you don’t use in your example? user experience, empathy maps such as use goal touch point, and how to create it 2-As for the previous example (Uber) very confuse for me not as your example

Could you please rephrase your first question? And as for the Uber map, well, that’s all I managed to find. 🙂 But again, here you can find a hundred of map examples of all stripes and colors: https://uxpressia.com/templates

welcome again, my question is? what’s different between Aware and Research

The differences come from the names.

At the aware stage your client realizes that there’s a need for a service/product. Or they find out that your company exists and offer a desired service.

While at the research stage they either do research on your business (e.g. visit your website or ask their friends if they used your service) or they research what is out there on the market that can help them.

Makes sense? 🙂

Thank you for this,

I am wondering , Have you done examples on B2B services. I work in Accreditation & Certification, this seems to be the least visited topic in marketing platforms and blog sites.

We have some B2B templates in our Template Library . Type B2B tag in the search placeholder and you will see all categories with the fitting templates. You can also explore the B2B mapping guide here .

Good luck and happy customers!

Great article, well articulated and detailed. I am starting off with service design and was wondering if I could get some advice mapping out a customer journey for a specific project. I was mapping out how do one approach to repair services?

Hi Shreya, glad you liked the article!

If you’re dealing with home repair, I might suggest our pre-filled template for an interior design agency customer journey: https://uxpressia.com/templates/real-estate . Templates can be a great starting point even if they’re not a 100% match to your use case.

Other than that, you will need to create a persona. If you don’t have any research data yet, do it based on your assumptions. Then, try to visualize what their experience across all stages and interactions with the repair service might be. Once you have the first draft, you can proceed with validating it and adding more data as it comes in.

If you have more context on the project, I can look into it and come up with specific tips 🙂

I very delighted to find this internet site on bing, just what I was searching for as well saved to fav

Thank you for sharing, it was something I researched.

Hi Rok! Happy mapping 🙂

What is a Customer Journey Map? [Free Templates]

Learn what the customer journey mapping process is and download a free template that you can use to create your own customer journey map.

Table of Contents

Mapping the customer journey can give you a way to better understand your customers and their needs. As a tool, it allows you to visualize the different stages that a customer goes through when interacting with your business; their thoughts, feelings, and pain points.

And, it’s shown that the friction from those pain points costs big: in 2019, ecommerce friction totaled an estimated 213 billion in lost US revenue .

Customer journey maps can help you to identify any problems or areas where you could improve your customer experience . In this article, we’ll explain what the customer journey mapping process is and provide a free template that you can use to create your own map. Let’s get started!

Bonus: Get our free, fully customizable Customer Experience Strategy Template that will help you understand your customers and reach your business goals.

What is a customer journey map?

So, what is customer journey mapping? Essentially, customer journey maps are a tool that you can use to understand the customer experience. Customer journey maps are often visual representations showing you the customer’s journey from beginning to end. They include all the touchpoints along the way.

There are often four main stages in your sales funnel, and knowing these can help you create your customer journey maps:

• Inquiry or awareness
• Interest, comparison, or decision-making
• Purchase or preparation
• Installation, activation, or feedback

Customer journey maps are used to track customer behavior and pinpoint areas where the customer experiences pain points. With this information uncovered, you can improve the customer experience, giving your customers a positive experience with your company.

You can use customer journey mapping software like Excel or Google sheets, Google Decks, infographics, illustrations, or diagrams to create your maps. But you don’t actually need customer journey mapping tools. You can create these maps with a blank wall and a pack of sticky notes.

Though they can be scribbled on a sticky note, it’s often easier to create these journeys digitally. That way, you have a record of your journey map, and you can share it with colleagues. We’ve provided free customer journey mapping templates at the end of this article to make your life a little easier.

The benefits of using customer journey maps

The main benefit of customer journey mapping is a better understanding of how your customers feel and interact with your business touchpoints. With this knowledge, you can create strategies that better serve your customer at each touchpoint.

Give them what they want and make it easy to use, and they’ll keep coming back. But, there are a couple of other great knock-on benefits too.

Improved customer support

Your customer journey map will highlight moments where you can add some fun to a customer’s day. And it will also highlight the pain points of your customer’s experience. Knowing where these moments are will let you address them before your customer gets there. Then, watch your customer service metrics spike!

Effective marketing tactics

A greater understanding of who your customers are and what motivates them will help you to advertise to them.

Let’s say you sell a sleep aid product or service. A potential target market for your customer base is young, working mothers who are strapped for time.

The tone of your marketing material can empathize with their struggles, saying, “The last thing you need is someone asking if you’re tired. But we know that over half of working moms get less than 6 hours of sleep at night. While we can’t give you more time, we know how you can make the most of those 6 hours. Try our Sleep Aid today and sleep better tonight.”

Building out customer personas will show potential target audiences and their motivation, like working moms who want to make the most of their hours asleep.

Product advancements or service improvements

By mapping your customer’s journey, you’ll gain insights into what motivates them to make a purchase or prevents them from doing so. You’ll have clarity on when or why they return items and which items they buy next. With this information and more, you’ll be able to identify opportunities to upsell or cross-sell products.

A more enjoyable and efficient user experience

Customer journey mapping will show you where customers get stuck and bounce off your site. You can work your way through the map, fixing any friction points as you go. The end result will be a smoothly-running, logical website or app.

A customer-focused mindset

Instead of operating with the motivation of business success, a customer journey map can shift your focus to the customer. Instead of asking yourself, “how can I increase profits?” ask yourself, “what would better serve my customer?” The profits will come when you put your customer first.

At the end of the day, customer journey maps help you to improve your customer experience and boost sales. They’re a useful tool in your customer experience strategy .

How to create a customer journey map

There are many different ways to create a customer journey map. But, there are a few steps you’ll want to take regardless of how you go about mapping your customer’s journey.

Step 1. Set your focus

Are you looking to drive the adoption of a new product? Or perhaps you’ve noticed issues with your customer experience. Maybe you’re looking for new areas of opportunity for your business. Whatever it is, be sure to set your goals before you begin mapping the customer journey.

Step 2. Choose your buyer personas

To create a customer journey map, you’ll first need to identify your customers and understand their needs. To do this, you will want to access your buyer personas.

Buyer personas are caricatures or representations of someone who represents your target audience. These personas are created from real-world data and strategic goals.

If you don’t already have them, create your own buyer personas with our easy step-by-step guide and free template.

Choose one or two of your personas to be the focus of your customer journey map. You can always go back and create maps for your remaining personas.

Step 3. Perform user research

Interview prospective or past customers in your target market. You do not want to gamble your entire customer journey on assumptions you’ve made. Find out directly from the source what their pathways are like, where their pain points are, and what they love about your brand.

You can do this by sending out surveys, setting up interviews, and examining data from your business chatbot . Be sure to look at what the most frequently asked questions are. If you don’t have a FAQ chatbot like Heyday , that automates customer service and pulls data for you, you’re missing out!

Get a free Heyday demo

You will also want to speak with your sales team, your customer service team, and any other team member who may have insight into interacting with your customers.

Step 4. List customer touchpoints

Your next step is to track and list the customer’s interactions with the company, both online and offline.

A customer touchpoint means anywhere your customer interacts with your brand. This could be your social media posts , anywhere they might find themselves on your website, your brick-and-mortar store, ratings and reviews, or out-of-home advertising.

Write as many as you can down, then put on your customer shoes and go through the process yourself. Track the touchpoints, of course, but also write down how you felt at each juncture and why. This data will eventually serve as a guide for your map.

Step 5. Build your customer journey map

You’ve done your research and gathered as much information as possible, now it’s time for the fun stuff. Compile all of the information you’ve collected into one place. Then, start mapping out your customer journey! You can use the templates we’ve created below for an easy plug-and-play execution.

Step 6. Analyze your customer journey map

Once the customer journey has been mapped out, you will want to go through it yourself. You need to experience first-hand what your customers do to fully understand their experience.

As you journey through your sales funnel, look for ways to improve your customer experience. By analyzing your customer’s needs and pain points, you can see areas where they might bounce off your site or get frustrated with your app. Then, you can take action to improve it. List these out in your customer journey map as “Opportunities” and “Action plan items”.

Types of customer journey maps

There are many different types of customer journey maps. We’ll take you through four to get started: current state, future state, a day in the life, and empathy maps. We’ll break down each of them and explain what they can do for your business.

Current state

This customer journey map focuses on your business as it is today. With it, you will visualize the experience a customer has when attempting to accomplish their goal with your business or product. A current state customer journey uncovers and offers solutions for pain points.

Future state

This customer journey map focuses on how you want your business to be. This is an ideal future state. With it, you will visualize a customer’s best-case experience when attempting to accomplish their goal with your business or product.

Once you have your future state customer journey mapped out, you’ll be able to see where you want to go and how to get there.

Day-in-the-life

A day-in-the-life customer journey is a lot like the current state customer journey, but it aims to highlight aspects of a customer’s daily life outside of how they interact with your brand.

Day-in-the-life mapping looks at everything that the consumer does during their day. It shows what they think and feel within an area of focus with or without your company.

When you know how a consumer spends their day, you can more accurately strategize where your brand communication can meet them. Are they checking Instagram on their lunch break, feeling open and optimistic about finding new products? If so, you’ll want to target ads on that platform to them at that time.

Day-in-the-life customer journey examples can look vastly different depending on your target demographic.

Empathy maps

Empathy maps don’t follow a particular sequence of events along the user journey. Instead, these are divided into four sections and track what someone says about their experience with your product when it’s in use.

You should create empathy maps after user research and testing. You can think of them as an account of all that was observed during research or testing when you asked questions directly regarding how people feel while using products. Empathy maps can give you unexpected insights into your users’ needs and wants.

Customer journey map templates

Use these templates to inspire your own customer journey map creation.

Customer journey map template for the current state:

The future state customer journey mapping template:

A day-in-the-life customer journey map template:

An empathy map template:

A customer journey map example

It can be helpful to see customer journey mapping examples. To give you some perspective on what these look like executed, we’ve created a customer journey mapping example of the current state.

Buyer Persona:

Curious Colleen, a 32-year-old female, is in a double-income no-kids marriage. Colleen and her partner work for themselves; while they have research skills, they lack time. She is motivated by quality products and frustrated by having to sift through content to get the information she needs.

What are their key goals and needs? Colleen needs a new vacuum. Her key goal is to find one that will not break again.

What are their struggles?

She is frustrated that her old vacuum broke and that she has to spend time finding a new one. Colleen feels as though this problem occurred because the vacuum she bought previously was of poor quality.

What tasks do they have?

Colleen must research vacuums to find one that will not break. She must then purchase a vacuum and have it delivered to her house.

Opportunities:

Colleen wants to understand quickly and immediately the benefits our product offers; how can we make this easier? Colleen upholds social proof as a decision-making factor. How can we better show our happy customers? There is an opportunity here to restructure our website information hierarchy or implement customer service tools to give Colleen the information she needs faster. We can create comparison charts with competitors, have benefits immediately and clearly stated, and create social campaigns.

Action Plan:

• Implement a chatbot so customers like Colleen can get the answers they want quickly and easily.
• Create a comparison tool for competitors and us, showing benefits and costs.
• Implement benefit-forward statements on all landing pages.
• Create a social campaign dedicated to UGC to foster social proof.
• Send out surveys dedicated to gathering customer feedback. Pull out testimonial quotes from here when possible.

Now that you know what the customer journey mapping process is, you can take these tactics and apply them to your own business strategy. By tracking customer behavior and pinpointing areas where your customers experience pain points, you’ll be able to alleviate stress for customers and your team in no time.

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Colleen Christison is a freelance copywriter, copy editor, and brand communications specialist. She spent the first six years of her career in award-winning agencies like Major Tom, writing for social media and websites and developing branding campaigns. Following her agency career, Colleen built her own writing practice, working with brands like Mission Hill Winery, The Prevail Project, and AntiSocial Media.

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Customer Journey Mapping

Customer Journey Mapping helps you create a single version of the truth of exactly what your customers experience when they interact with your organization.

Periodically it’s important to take a step back to REALLY see things from your customer’s perspective.

What happens to them? Who talks to them and when?

How is information about them shared in your organization and with external partners? How are issues escalated? Who closes the feedback loops and how?

All important questions to answer when analyzing what could be improved or streamlined.

Customer Journey Mapping is an  effective change management activity that helps you and your group reach a shared understanding on the key events, touch points, and activities that your customers receive.

Once you have your map you can quickly and easily identify what’s working well (good practice) and not so well (areas for improvement).

It identifies issues , solves problems , is a great team builder and, as long as you complete the process, you get an excellent action plan out at the end.

Download free slides... enter your email address at the bottom to get this team building activity in your inbox

• check To create a visual representation or map of how a customer interacts with your service or company.
• check The aim is to identify good practices as well as issues and problems.

When Would You Use It?

• If you’re getting feedback from customers that your internal processes aren’t meeting their needs then Customer Journey Mapping will help you with the analysis.
• If you’d like to create a shared understanding within your team / group as to how your customer journey plays out.
• The map focuses on understanding the ‘as is’ situation; thinking about how things could be different will come later.

Are There Any Rules?

• Allocate one swim lane per individual, department or company.
• Always keep the Customer as the central swim lane as a metaphorical reminder they are in the center.

Resources Required

• At least 60 mins depending on the complexity of the journey you are analyzing.
• Up to 15 willing participants.
• Very large piece of plain paper stuck on the wall.
• Lots of space of your participants to move around (HINT: get rid of tables and chairs).
• Lots of different colored Post-Its and pens
• Tack to stick things on the wall.
• Flip-chart and paper.
• 1 The Facilitator sticks a large piece of paper on the wall and draws the Customer swim lane horizontally down the center.
• 2 The Participants brainstorm the typical Events that happen to a Customer and add those to the Customer swim lane in chronological order. One Event per Post-It (see example).
• 3 The Participants brainstorms and agrees the key stakeholders / departments / people / external partners that might be involved the handling of this Customer. TIP: Ensure there are participants who represent these stakeholders in the room (as far as possible).
• 4 The Facilitator adds these stakeholders as their own swim lanes above and below the Customer.
• 5 The Facilitator splits the Participants into smaller groups and allocates each group to their own key stakeholder / swim lane.
• 6 The groups spend 10 mins mapping the activities of each swim lane around each of the ‘Events’ Post-Its in the Customer swim lane.
• 7 Following the mapping exercise (in swim lanes for different stakeholders), work as a whole group to understand the total picture:
• For each swim lane, one person from each group takes no more than 2 minutes to walk everyone through the processes that have been mapped out.
• Does everyone agree that is the current situation
• 8 Analyze the Customer Journey Map as a whole and add:
• Green flags – describing where the process is effective.
• Red flags – describing where the process is broken.
• Quotes – first hand observations from your team.
• 9 The Facilitator summarizes the findings of the group under the headings “What’s working well?” and “What’s not working so well?”
• 10 The Facilitator leads a Plenary Discussion using the questions on the next slide as inspiration.

Blank Template

You can download this blank template at the bottom of the page

Finished Template

Plenary discussion questions.

• What is this picture telling us about the different Stakeholders and the way they are working?
• What is this picture telling us about the Customer and what they are experiencing? 
• Where can the Customer fall through the net and why? Are there any overlaps and/or gaps in customer service?
• Are there any key activities that seem to make a difference?
• What could be done better?
• How is information shared and by who to who? Are there any gaps in information sharing?
• How are referrals/hand-offs managed? Is there any follow up to a referral? When? How?

Secret Sauce

• Ensure there are participants who represent all the key stakeholders in the room (as far as possible).
• Follow the session with a break so the group can reflect and then with an Action Planning session to ensure the participants go away with clear list of actions.
• Use different coloured Post-Its to represent different types of activities (e.g. assessments, referrals, solution providers, handoffs etc.)
• This process can also be used to test the quality of the proposed / new design.

Free Download Files

Download your customer journey mapping slides (free).

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About the Author

Nick Martin helps leaders & consultants improve team results with resources, advice & coaching through WorkshopBank.com

Hi Nick, Been conducting team building and motivational workshops for a while now. Just discovered your resource (strange, but true!). Great stuff. Thank you.

Hi Suby … it’s great to have you with us … welcome 🙂

I just recently used this tool for a strategy Workshop. It was fun for all participants, well perceived and led us perfectly to the next steps for a valuable result. Thanks for sharing this!

Kind regards Barbara

Very glad you had success with it Barbara. Great work!

Thanks for sharing.

Under “resources” you indicate 60 minutes. To be honest, mapping out even a fairly simple customer journey with all it’s touchpoints, and considering what is working well and what is not working, takes much longer – especially if the stakeholders are new to the concept.

The other feedback I would offer is that to optimise the customer journey mapping process you really need customers engaged. Even having internal stakeholders represent the feedback they have received from external customers is a compromise as this feedback is usually filtered (consciously or not),and it is also vitally important that we include the context of the customer journey e.g.: what is the customer’s objective, what did they do before starting the journey and what will they do afterwards. The importance of the customer’s emotions are also being increasingly recognised in customer journey mapping.

Thank you lots for this interesting tool! I’m new to this and will have to run through myself with a team to grasp the methodology, before using it in my sessions.

With regards Beenou

This looks very useful for our quarterly sales team meetings. Thanks for sharing

Hi Nick, great to view your thoughts on this important topic. I will use your template soon on a tru case we have to get my own experiences. At a first glance it looked most useful. Thanks for sharing. Kind regards, Pär

Looks a good activity that will tease out the issues n a fairly non-threatening way

Hi Nick, What if the departments / individuals interact with ‘each other’ for any customer event.. Have you seen a need to show cross-swimlane interaction? Regards Geetha

Yes absolutely Geetha. This will show up in your map as you discuss each customer event and you should represent cross-swimlane interaction with multiple post-its and arrows joining the event together.

Thanks for sharing Nick.

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Competing on Customer Journeys

• David C. Edelman
• Marc Singer

As digital technology has enabled shoppers to easily research and buy products online, sellers have been scrambling after them, trying to understand and satisfy their wants. Savvy companies, however, are using new tools, processes, and organizational structures to proactively lead digital customers from consideration to purchase and beyond. They are creating compelling customer journeys and managing them like any other product—and gaining a source of competitive advantage.

Building successful journeys requires four key capabilities: automation, to smoothly carry customers through each step of their online path; personalization, to create a customized experience for each individual; contextual interaction, to engage customers and appropriately sequence the steps they take; and journey innovation, to add improvements that enhance and extend the journey and foster customer loyalty.

In addition, the most successful companies have a particular organizational structure, with a chief experience officer overseeing a journey-focused strategist and a “journey product manager.” This latter role is critical—the journey product manager leads a team of designers, developers, data analysts, marketers, and others to create and sustain superior journeys, and he or she is accountable for the journey’s ROI and general business performance.

You have to create new value at every step.

Idea in Brief

The problem.

Digital tools have put shoppers in the driver’s seat, allowing them to easily research and compare products, place orders, and get doorstep delivery of their items. Sellers have largely been reactive, scrambling to position themselves where customers will find them.

The Solution

Companies can use new technologies, processes, and organizational structures to proactively lead rather than follow customers on their digital journeys. By making the journey a compelling, customized, and open-ended experience, firms can woo buyers, earn their loyalty, and gain a competitive advantage.

The Strategy

Superior journeys feature automation, personalization, context-based interaction, and ongoing innovation. To achieve all this, companies need to treat journeys like products, built and supported by a cross-functional team that’s led by a manager responsible for the journey’s business performance.

The explosion of digital technologies over the past decade has created “empowered” consumers so expert in their use of tools and information that they can call the shots, hunting down what they want when they want it and getting it delivered to their doorsteps at a rock-bottom price. In response, retailers and service providers have scrambled to develop big data and analytics capabilities in order to understand their customers and wrest back control. For much of this time, companies have been reacting to customers, trying to anticipate their next moves and position themselves in shoppers’ paths as they navigate the decision journey from consideration to purchase.

• David C. Edelman is an executive adviser and a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School.
• Marc Singer is the director of McKinsey’s global customer engagement practice.

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How 5 businesses successfully mapped out the customer journey

Creating a customer journey map puts you in your customers’ shoes to help you understand the user experience—what your users think, feel, and do at each stage of their buying journey.

Last updated

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We’ve put together a list of five brilliant customer journey mapping (CJM) examples to show you how it’s done, so you can learn how to improve the user experience (UX) for your customers. 

Want to know how customers really interact with your product?

Hotjar’s product experience insights tools let you see things through their eyes. 

5 great examples of customer journey mapping 

A good customer journey map identifies buyers’ actions, desires, and experiences at every key touchpoint—from when a customer lands on your webpage all the way to conversion, onboarding, and beyond.

Our list of customer journey examples breaks down the best B2B, B2C, ecommerce, and SaaS journey maps—and shows you how to understand your customers better to build your own.

1. Hotjar’s B2B customer journey map 

At Hotjar (👋), we make product experience (PX) insights tools to help businesses understand how their customers interact with their websites and digital products. And, of course, we’ve done some B2B customer journey mapping of our own to understand what our customers want, by tracking their interactions across key touchpoints. 

The result was the digital customer journey example shown above that maps our customers' experience when they use Hotjar tools for product testing. We visualized the key actions, questions, technical limitations, and opportunities of customers using our tools to get granular data to validate our product ideas and experiments. 

We started by identifying one specific customer journey, then used Google Analytics, Hotjar tools, and data from customer interactions with our brand to understand user actions, thoughts, and feelings. Then, we got UX, dev, engineering, and customer success teams to fill out empathy maps before mapping the journey. 

To increase empathy with our customers, we included two rows dedicated to pain points and happy moments—like the pain of finding patterns in complex customer data, and the ‘a-ha moment' when our users first realize value.  

We made our map flexible enough to be updated as customer needs change and new information becomes available, so we continually validate our assumptions against customers’ real-world experiences.

The benefits of customer journey mapping included helping us visualize customer motivations, drivers, and pain points, align cross-functional teams , eliminate silos, and clarify who owns each part of the buyer journey. 

How B2B companies selling self-serve digital products can create a similar map: 

1. Define the goal and scope of your customer journey map. We recommend starting with a narrow scope and only a few people involved. Focus on a specific problem you can break down into a few steps—like identifying where you’re losing users, and mapping out the pains, desires, and experiences of customers who exit your site.

Ask yourself: 

What do you want to achieve? 

Which customer journey touchpoints do you want to focus on? 

What KPIs do you want to measure? 

Where can you get the data you need? 

Which teams need to be involved?   

2. Use Google Analytics and Hotjar's Observe tools to collect user insights about online interactions:

Create Hotjar Heatmaps on key product pages to see where users are clicking and which parts of your page aren’t engaging users or working as intended. Then, improve UX and optimize the placement of on-page elements to boost conversions. 

Use Session Recordings to see how users scroll, click, and move around your site across an entire session. Focus on spotting bugs and blockers that cause them to bounce. 

3. Add qualitative user data from service chat logs, emails, or by asking customer support teams. 

4. Get key product and customer service teams to fill in an empathy map detailing what your buyers do, say, see, hear, think, and feel. Feel free to steal our free template below!

5. Map the journey with Post-its and pens before digitizing it and sharing it across the company. 

2. Rail Europe’s B2C journey map 

B2C ecommerce travel provider Rail Europe gives customers an easy way to book rail tickets online. Their on-site user interface (UI) is strong, but the company wanted to go deeper to understand the customer journey across all touchpoints. 

Mapping the customer journey produced a full spectrum customer experience map that illustrates the buyer's journey before, during, and after a purchase. It reminded their team that the buyer journey starts long before a customer lands on the website to book a ticket—and continues after the trip, through touchpoints like post-trip refunds, sharing recommendations, or publishing photos on social media. 

Rail Europe’s customer journey map also shows the transition between stages or channels to accurately visualize what is often a non-linear journey . For example, in the initial research, planning, and shopping phases, customers often move back and forth between comparison pages, checking timetables, and website chat and planning features.  

Mapping the journey like this helps Rail Europe understand different customers’ channel preferences, see which touchpoints aren’t working as they should, and which aspects of the user experience need more attention from design teams, marketing, and customer support. They visualized actions, thoughts, feelings, and experiences and rated the customer satisfaction of each stage, as well as the relevance and helpfulness of Rail Europe, to home in on areas for improvement.

The map doubles down on customer empathy by identifying travelers’ overall concerns and frustrations while on the trip, even those unrelated to their rail journey—the overall travel experience is still connected with the company brand in customers’ minds. 

This stand-alone map can be understood across teams without supporting materials, and there’s a focus on actionable insights—like the need to address customer frustrations over snail mail ticket delivery. 

Ecommerce website analysis like this is valuable for any company selling experiential products or services, like concert tickets, vacations, or tours. If that’s you, follow Rail Europe’s example and conduct customer journey map research by surveying current and potential customers to uncover exactly what they’re hoping for, thinking, and feeling as they engage with your brand.

Tips to map out the ecommerce customer journey:

1. Ask yourself: 

How can we access users who aren’t yet customers? 

What happens before the customer gets to our web page? How do they do research for a trip? What kinds of search keywords do they use online?  

Is the buyer journey non-linear? If not, how can we represent this? 

2. If your buyer journey has multiple touchpoints, group them into categories like 'research and planning', 'shopping', 'booking', etc. 

3. Match survey insights to touchpoints and map out the journey visually, adding qualitative insights about what the customer is thinking, feeling, and doing at each stage. 

💡 Pro tip: use Hotjar Surveys to collect real-time suggestions about your website or app from users to make data-driven decisions and validate assumptions that inform and elevate your customer journey map. 

Hotjar’s no-code UI makes it easy to create drag-and-drop surveys  

3. Rewind’s SaaS customer journey map 

Rewind makes backup & restoration software for SaaS platforms. Their team decided to map out the B2B SaaS customer journey when revenue fell short of expectations after the acquisition of a similar product. It also became clear that marketing efforts weren’t attracting the ideal customer.

Like many SaaS companies, Rewind relied on sales calls and customer relationship management (CRM) data to understand their users. But they were missing key insights about what happens before the customer lands on their website. 

To map the journey, the Rewind team defined their ideal customer profile (ICP) before conducting customer interviews to deeply understand buyer motivations and the decision-making process. They also used Google Analytics, Hubspot , and PX insights tools to understand users’ online behavior and how they were interacting with marketing materials. 

This showed them a short, high-intent, back-and-forth customer journey that happens almost exclusively online—since Rewind is installed in SaaS platforms, a lot of traffic is referred from their app marketplaces. 

The map showed event triggers and the customer’s thoughts and feelings as they moved through becoming aware of their problem (loss of important data), understanding the need for a solution, and doing online research—before arriving at Rewind.  

By mapping the full journey, the Rewind team discovered that customers often use professional forums or communities as part of solution research, and discovered a new buyer motivation and market segment: data compliance. 

According to Content Lift Founder Ryan Paul Gibson , who helped Rewind conduct customer interviews, the company also realized “potential buyers don’t want to speak with sales or ‘get a demo'. They want to research the product themselves and evaluate it. They also don’t want to enter a credit card to test it; they want to try it first and pay if it’s a good fit.” 

Rewind updated their go-to-market strategy, personas, product positioning , and marketing to complete these missing steps in the customer journey map.

The result? A two-fold increase in product installations, and better internal alignment on their ICP—which has improved their efficiency and helped them maximize resources. 

To create a great SaaS customer journey map: 

Set your research objectives

Create a list of topics that align with your ideal buyer journey. For example, in Rewind’s case, they were customers’ reasons for buying, details about their company and role, and what caused them to start searching for a solution. 

Create questions to ask customers during interviews, but leave flexibility for discussion.

Run in-depth customer interviews to capture the exact order of events in the buyer journey and make sure you understand every customer action and touchpoint—from users identifying a problem to making a purchase.

Bucket interview insights into user priorities, pains, and anxieties—what happened to trigger a search; which research channels the customer uses; how they evaluate solutions.

4. Spotify’s B2C customer journey map 

When music streaming app Spotify mapped the user journey, their team focused on tracking touchpoints for one specific feature: sharing playlists via third-party apps.  

Their map zeroes in on clearly defined user personas and identifies key areas of customer engagement with a focus on users’ emotions and thoughts at each stage.

The team’s journey mapping research revealed a key customer pain point—fear of being judged for their music taste—that can hold users back from sharing music. They also identified an awareness gap to address: some users didn’t know the feature existed. 

By mapping the user journey, Spotify improved their UI and in-app flows to streamline the customer experience and make every touchpoint relevant to how real customers use the product.  

Mapping user flows is key for digital B2C brands with a product that lives and dies by good usability—and a business model that relies on customer loyalty. 

To map the user journey before improving or launching a feature:  

Conduct market research based on direct and indirect competitors to understand how people use similar features, and what they expect from yours. 

In user interviews , focus on the specific feature or stage of the journey. Why aren’t customers using it as you’d like? What are the barriers to product adoption? Dig deep into what motivates users to complete a specific action—and what blocks them.  

Using interview data, create a buyer persona and include their key needs and motivations. What can you do to bring this feature to their attention and boost adoption? 

Create a customer journey map combining stages in the user’s interaction with the feature, and break down the actions they take and the thoughts and emotions they have at each stage. 

Use these insights to remove friction and improve user flows, validating your design with real users. 

Pro tip : use Hotjar's Observe tools to study Session Recordings and Heatmaps and get insights into the product experience of real or test users at every point in the customer journey.

Heatmaps show you an intuitive aggregated view of which parts of your site are attracting attention and which aren’t to help you make changes that improve UX

5. Emirates Airline’s multi-channel customer journey map 

To reflect their customers’ multi-channel journey, flag carrier Emirates created a CJM that covers reservations, check-in, and onboarding experiences. 

As well as digital channels, the map includes call center interactions, which provide context for interactive voice response (IRV) technology and human service agents. It also sheds light on customer desires, broken down into categories like ‘comfort’, ‘safety’, ‘confidence’, and ‘freedom & control’, shown in the corners of the map.

With a global brand like Emirates, customers expect the same experience at all touchpoints, in all countries. This exercise helped the Emirates team understand customers’ main interactions and expectations to better coordinate service touchpoints and provide a consistent, high-quality experience across each one.  

For example, they set up a single, virtual contact center platform to increase efficiency and ensure consistent interactions across every channel. It’s not just the customer who benefits: the Emirates team now better understands exactly how to meet user needs across several channels and countries.

This map is ideal for businesses whose customer journey combines online and offline touchpoints, especially companies looking to differentiate themselves through the quality of their service. 

How to implement a multi-channel customer journey map: 

Define your key goals for producing the map.

Conduct thorough market research and customer interviews to reduce your assumptions and understand every single interaction and channel customers experience.

Interview customer experience and support staff members at all touchpoints and in all regions.

Use analytics tools and product experience insights software to understand how buyers interact with your digital marketing, website, and chat functions across channels and locations.  

Use AI to analyze customer call recordings for tone and sentiment.

Pro tip: use Hotjar Feedback widgets to get in-context insights about what users really think about your app or website. You can filter feedback by region or channel to better understand your global customer touchpoints.

Hotjar's non-invasive Feedback widgets allow customers to give their opinions of your website or product as they experience it.

You’ve reached your destination: a truly valuable customer journey map  

Customers interact with your brand over a variety of channels and touchpoints, and their journeys aren’t always linear. But understanding their journey is key to improving your product and boosting customer acquisition, adoption, and retention. 

Follow these customer journey mapping examples to experience key touchpoints from your users’ point of view and grasp their pains, needs, and frustrations so you can build a journey your customers will love.

Want to know how customers really interact with your brand?

Frequently asked questions about customer journey mapping, what are the stages of the customer's journey.

Buyer journeys can typically be broken down into three steps or stages: 

Awareness of a problem or pain

Consideration (researching and evaluating solutions)

Making a decision

What does a strong customer journey map look like?

A good customer journey map includes all the touchpoints where a customer interacts with your brand. It should include the various stages of the marketing and sales cycle, customer touchpoints across your product and website, and map out customers’ actions, thoughts, and feelings at each stage, as well as KPIs.

For example, Rail Europe’s customer journey map tracks all the stages of research, planning, and shopping, through to booking, travel, and post-travel. At each stage, it maps out customer questions, concerns, and feelings, as well as the helpfulness and relevance of Rail Europe.

What are the stages of customer journey mapping?

Customer journey map stages are: 

Collecting data and conducting customer interviews or surveys 

Mapping the customer journey in a workshop

Extracting insights and producing a report

CJM tools: features and how to choose

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How to Create a Customer Journey Map: A Step-by-Step Guide

• UPDATED: 23 July 2024
• 13 min read

Reading Time: 13 minutes

For brands to be successful, they have to empower customers to take the actions they want, whether that’s buying a product, subscribing to a service, consuming content, or placing a food delivery order.

But to offer customers the right support (at the right time), brands need to truly understand what motivates and drives their customers. Effective marketers don’t just focus on the desired action, they also focus on how they can help customers achieve their goals easier and more conveniently. By supporting customers through their buying journey, brands are able to engage them more effectively .

When done properly, creating customer journey maps can help brands illuminate customer pain points and find solutions that streamline their experience and keep them on track.

This article breaks down how to create an actionable customer journey map that will activate and engage your customers, and help you to take your customer engagement to the next level. 

What is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a diagram, flowchart, or illustration of all the touchpoints associated with your customer’s entire lifecycle, including before, during, and after they make a purchase. It helps to reveal exactly where your engagement strategy is helping customers, and where it is hindering it.

This visual representation of how your customers engage with your brand reveals valuable insights on the key touchpoints in their experience and opens up opportunities for improvement.

A customer journey map allows you to reverse-engineer your engagement strategy and find more efficient purchase paths for your customers.

When leveraged effectively, customer journey maps provide marketers insights about areas of friction that can be improved, but also areas of success that can be built upon. This allows them to identify effective cross-selling/upselling campaigns, predict and prevent cart abandonment, and make an array of real-time improvements to leverage this strategy elsewhere.

The following illustration shows the 5 stages of the customer journey, along with critical touchpoints that customers engage with a brand on.

Modern consumers engage with brands via a multitude of touchpoints at various times in their customer lifecycle. Mapping out these potential pathways allows b usinesses to implement strategic improvements that reduce friction and improve retention.

When creating customer journey maps, most marketers categorize customers into 5 main stages of the customer journey to better analyze and understand behavior patterns across a myriad of digital and physical touchpoints.

• Awareness: Customers aren’t yet familiar with your brand. At this stage, brands are focused on increasing awareness and recognition so that when a potential customer enters a buying cycle, they have a higher chance of being top of mind for consideration down the road. The priority here is to increase exposure.
• Consideration: Here, customers are in the process of choosing a brand and its products and services. Potential customers are trying to identify what differentiates one brand from another, so they can make an informed decision about which brand or product is best for them. At this stage, the goal is to nurture leads by showing them what you have to offer and what makes your brand unique. 
• Decision: Customers are poised to make a decision on a brand or product. Customers have shortlisted options, based on their research and brand comparisons. At this point, the goal is to ensure that your brand, product, or service is what stands out (and gets picked). 
• Retention: Just because customers choose a brand doesn’t mean they have to keep using it. After customers use a product or service, they’ll have to choose whether to keep using that brand or change to an alternative. At this stage, it’s important to highlight your brand’s unique value and keep customers actively engaged and interested. 
• Advocacy: Now that you have loyal customers, you want to ensure they refer more business your way. Efforts at this stage should focus on building these loyal customers into brand advocates who will stick with you through thick and thin and even promote and recommend your business to their friends and family.

People, and their thoughts, are rarely linear . Customers often interact with multiple channels and in a myriad of ways before they reach their point of decision-making.

Due to this, customer journey maps need to consider the diverse ways customers engage and factor in potential cyclical loops to fully capture the customer journey pathways. Analyzing omnichannel engagement helps your team identify friction points in the customer experience so you can make improvements that increase engagement.

How To Create a Customer Journey Map in 10 Easy Steps

Creating a customer journey map can be complex. It requires the ability to analyze customer behavior from quality data and clear team objectives. Numerous drafts are often required before you are able to test and ensure that the map is realistic to the customer experience and suits your purpose. A proper customer journey map must also be visually effective and understandable for the teams that rely on it.

We have broken this process down into 10 comprehensive steps to get you started on the path toward improved customer engagement and retention.

1. Understand your customer journey mapping objectives

To build a useful customer journey map, brands need to start with a simple question. What is the objective of the customer journey map? Or, in other words, what action do you want customers to take and what aspects of the customer experience are you hoping to shine light on?

A single customer journey map won’t guide all your customers where they need to go. Instead, you’ll have to create multiple unique customer journeys that reflect the varied objectives of your customers. It’s crucial that these customer journey maps are focused on the end goal, or they’ll cast too wide of a net (and fail to deliver results). By focusing your customer journey map around clearly defined objectives, you’ll ensure that they help you elicit the intended action from your customers. You’ll also ensure that you’re equipped to measure how well you’re able to achieve the intended outcome for your customers so you can review, analyze, and improve the process.

2. Define the scope of the journey mapping

After you’ve agreed upon the objectives, it’s time to identify the scope of the mapped journey. What customers will your map focus on? Will it focus on creating a captivating customer onboarding process, where you skillfully nurture anonymous web users into loyal customers? Or perhaps your map will set its sights on the ongoing customer experience post-acquisition, ensuring their satisfaction knows no bounds.

Specificity is important here because casting the net too wide will make the map less effective. As they say, to chase two rabbits is to catch none. 

To start with, stick to no more than three customer personas to frame the journey map. With that framing in mind, you can begin to research and analyze the data already available to your business to inform the customer journey map.

A clear scope is critical to determining your team’s next steps, such as more research, channel refinement, checkout design, or altered messaging. Determine what story will unfold through your marketing decisions.

3. Research, collect data, and analyze

To build customer journey maps that accurately represent the customer’s experience, they need to be based on facts rather than expectations or wishful thinking. Marketers need to be able to make data-driven decisions that enable them to optimize engagement. And in today’s landscape, customer journeys are increasingly omnichannel — which means your data should be omnichannel as well.

Brands will want to look for any existing data they may already have to draw insights from, whether that’s customer survey feedback, call logs, focus group studies, industry studies, or competitor analysis. Beyond that, you’ll want to conduct your own quantitative and qualitative research to round out your understanding of customer behavior.

Contextual inquiry is another powerful tool in this process. It starts with observation of your customers as they interact with your brand, access your services, or utilize your products in their everyday lives.

As they are encouraged to use your products or access your services holistically, you can acquire more refined insights than if you asked them to complete a survey that disrupts their routine. Specific interviews with small sample sizes can help your team refine their assumptions leading into the workshopping phase.

The collected data can then be used to construct customer segmentation profiles and approximate customer personas to act upon. Personas are constructed based on customer demographic and psychographic information, as well as their emotive and purchasing behavior.

Making use of customer segmentation and personas provides a valuable lens through which to shape your customer journey map. Think of personas as archetypes of your customers that provide valuable insights into their behavior and needs. They serve as a powerful tool for your organization to truly understand your customers in an effective way.

4. Workshop the first draft of the map with different teams

Creating the initial draft of the map requires cooperation from multiple teams within the organization. Every team will have different insights into how the customer interacts with the brand. The cooperative effort across these teams will be where you capture the best insights on how to improve the customer experience.

However, true, data-backed customer experiences should never be discarded by anecdotal suggestions. Your team’s insight is valuable, but it won’t always align with the authentic customer journey. That’s where testing comes in.

Every stage in the journey needs to be accounted for in detail, and team cooperation is crucial. By combining feedback and observations from various business branches, such as product design, operations, or go-to-market, the outline of the customer’s journey will finally start to take shape. 

Sales and support branches will be invaluable during this step of the process as they contribute directly to the customer experience and engage with customers in the most direct way.

5. Determine the stages of the journey

Identify which stages of the customer journey apply to your map.

Keep in mind that not all journeys will include all five stages. Some journeys may end at a sale, and will not require a post-purchase stage. Others may even end at engagement; media companies may rely solely on ad revenue, meaning customers never make a ‘purchase’ or buy a subscription.

Other journeys may only look at existing customers, and may not require the awareness phase to be factored in. The stages depend on the objective of the journey map you are creating and the intended action you want the customer to take.

These stages will determine the entire framework of your customer journey map, acting as the foundation you build upon. This will help you keep your map structured as you develop it. 

Always keep these stages in mind as you build out your map so you are always conscious of the type of engagement you are trying to elicit at the various stages of the customer journey.

Now that you have this framework in place, you can begin to map out the customer journey itself.

6. Identify the customer-oriented elements

Only now is it time to actually map out the events — or interactions — in the customer journey. You’ll need to map out every single individual interaction the customer takes, whether that interaction is measurable or not.

Customer-oriented elements capture the crucial aspects of the journey experienced directly by the customers themselves. They provide insights into their needs, emotions, and interactions. This aspect of the map will be informed by your earlier research and contextual inquiries.

Remember, it’s always important to keep the end objective in mind. It’s often easiest to start at the end and work your way backward to the beginning. By the end, you need a complete journey mapped out, with every single interaction a customer will take throughout the process represented.

No matter how you choose to map out the journey, it’s critical that you consider how a customer would realistically travel through the experience, and not just how you want them to travel through it. Think critically from their perspective to understand how they’ll proceed through the defined journey, and even anticipate potential friction points along the way.

It’s also imperative that you think about what metrics and KPIs you can use to measure engagement throughout the journey. This will enable you to quantify retention and churn at each stage so you can identify strengths and weaknesses ( and make the necessary adjustments!).

7. Work in the front and back end support elements

Now that you’ve outlined the process’s customer-facing elements, it’s time to identify the front- and back-end components that enable your team to bring it all together.

Front- and back-end support elements encompass the systems, people, and processes that help customers reach their goals. Some of these elements directly impact the customer, but most work behind the scenes to ensure a seamless and enjoyable customer experience.

While these are critical components of the customer journey, they can’t be the elements that guide it. Instead, brands need to ensure that their customer journey is customer-centric and then build these front and back-end elements around what works best for their customers.

8. Test the map with real customers, and iterate until it works

Frictionless consistency doesn’t happen overnight. You will have already anticipated what you think issues are, but that won’t always be the case in reality. Once you’ve defined the stages of your customer map, you need to validate each of those steps through genuine testing.

Choose a representative sample to test with; broad enough that it represents the diversity of your customers. If possible, use direct customer observation or contextual inquiry to actually see how customers interact with (and respond to) your orchestrated journey.

When this isn’t possible (and it often isn’t), you’ll need to rely on omnichannel analytics that gives you detailed data on customer demographics and behavior.

Test how well your customer journey represents accurate customer pathways and how effectively it drives engagement. It’s important to update and continually iterate the map to make it more accurate and provide marketers with more useful data.

Expect testing to illuminate problems with your map. Identify inconsistencies and promptly act on them. Don’t forget what the teams are aiming for. Clear goals in testing help ensure that things stay on track. You don’t want distractions from the real insight: where you will focus your efforts to improve.

9. Finalize, and make it visually appealing

Effectively visualizing the qualitative and quantitative insights you have revealed helps make the customer journey map actionable for your team.

Graphics should be clear. Diagrams and graphs might be necessary to illustrate key information and actionable touchpoints. Clear, comprehensive data visualization empowers marketers to make faster, more accurate decisions about the customer journey.

Digital collaboration platforms like Miro offer templates that brands can use to create visually compelling customer journey maps that teams can leverage to improve the customer experience and maximize engagement.

A visually appealing and informative customer journey map ensures that all stakeholders can easily understand, interpret, and utilize it to maximize engagement at various stages in the customer lifecycle and at all touchpoints.

10. Distribute the map within your organization to those who benefit from it

Now that the map is ready for distribution, teams can use it to tackle points of friction for the customer,better break down their information silos, and collaborate more effectively. Incorporate the use of the customer journey map in developing future applications or any upcoming changes to your channels, such as mobile or web.

As the map facilitates improvement, it may be beneficial to draft similar maps with differing goals and customer personas in mind. Using customer journey maps to shape how teams approach problem-solving helps ensure productive uniformity within your business.

Customer journey maps can become important touchstones during team and development meetings. Use them to facilitate discussions and motivate improvement across departments. By engaging in these conversations, enhancing the overall customer experience will become an internal constant that keeps your business competitive and driving toward success.

Tips for Building a More Strategic Customer Journey Map

Customer engagement strategies live and breathe as your audience does. There will always be ways to improve. 

The following are some additional tips to ensure that your customer journey map remains actionable and rewarding to your marketing and customer engagement efforts.

Make it omnichannel and consider all touchpoints

Customer experiences are increasingly omnichannel . Customers interact across a myriad of touchpoints, both online and offline, and they expect a familiar experience across all of them.

For your customer journey maps to actually help you understand and improve the customer experience, they need to accurately reflect the ways customers interact with your brand. Ensure the map you create accounts for the various channels customers can use to connect with your brand, and encapsulates the myriad of pathways customers can take.

To reflect this range of pathways, teams will often need to develop multiple customer journey maps that cover the different channels and touchpoints available to your customers.

Implement elements of personalization throughout

Customer journey maps aren’t developed on a one-to-one basis but instead often target customer segments and unique personas. That being said, personalization is crucial for increasing traction and engagement with your customers.

Think critically about where in the customer journey you can implement elements of personalization that will resonate with customers on a deeper level.

Consider where you can add these elements to the customer journey, as well as how to execute the personalized component. Identify where personalization will have the greatest impact, and then determine how you can execute experiences and campaigns that personalize the right elements of the customer journey.

Take a customer-centric approach

It’s true that you want to design customer journeys to encourage customers to take the actions you want them to take. But to maximize engagement, you need to build customer journeys based on how customers actually behave.

Don’t just build elaborate, wishful journey maps that fail to reflect how customers truly engage with your brand. Instead, take a customer-centric approach that allows you to develop customer journey maps that truly reflect how customers interact with your brand, empowering you to maximize engagement.

Apply decision trees

As you apply your customer journey map, it will directly influence future production decisions. Pairing decision trees with your customer journey map provides fresh opportunities in the development phases for new products and services. Decision trees can help you hone segmentations of the personas you have developed for your map.

As decision trees help marketers analyze relevant variables that impact customer behavior, they can be used to branch off and brainstorm touchpoints that have already been established in your map.

If your team is focusing on email campaigns and how customers interact with that touchpoint, decision trees can help hone in on specifics for A/B testing and recommendations to customers in the retention phase.

Keep testing and iterating

Continue to monitor customer interaction. Don’t take for granted that the journey map will remain accurate and relevant over time without effort. A static map that doesn’t change as customers do won’t serve your business in any real, material way.

Enhancement and revision are to be expected and encouraged. Use dynamic A/B testing to compare the performance of different journey flows, to find the most relevant ones for different customer segments.. 

Leave lines of communication open to customers so that as they evolve and their purchase patterns shift, your team can be primed to adapt. Build moments of re-evaluation into your development and marketing workflow so that needed updates don’t get swept under the rug over time. 

Guide Your Customer Journey Maps With MoEngage

Customer journey maps allow businesses to implement strategic improvements to reduce friction and improve retention. A customer journey map is not a magical solution that solves all problems at once, but it is a crucial tool that empowers teams to deeply understand customer interactions, identify weaknesses in your campaigns, and make significant improvements that increases engagement and retention.

Prioritizing customer value, and shaping your brand decisions in a customer-centric way is a necessity in the modern market.

Our platform aims to be your true north on the road to customer engagement. To understand how we commit to putting customers first and enable you to implement your customer journey maps with perfection, request a demo today.

Shana is the Head of Content and Organic Growth for MoEngage's North America region and has over a decade of marketing experience helping businesses reach and engage their customers through strategic storytelling. When she isn't writing or editing, you can find her playing pickleball, singing karaoke, or walking her dog, Dexter.

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2022 was the year that generative artificial intelligence (AI) exploded into the public consciousness, and 2023 was the year it began to take root in the business world. 2024 thus stands to be a pivotal year for the future of AI, as researchers and enterprises seek to establish how this evolutionary leap in technology can be most practically integrated into our everyday lives.

The evolution of generative AI has mirrored that of computers, albeit on a dramatically accelerated timeline. Massive, centrally operated mainframe computers from a few players gave way to smaller, more efficient machines accessible to enterprises and research institutions. In the decades that followed, incremental advances yielded home computers that hobbyists could tinker with. In time, powerful personal computers with intuitive no-code interfaces became ubiquitous.

Generative AI has already reached its “hobbyist” phase—and as with computers, further progress aims to attain greater performance in smaller packages. 2023 saw an explosion of increasingly efficient foundation models with open licenses, beginning with the launch of Meta’s LlaMa family of large language models (LLMs) and followed by the likes of StableLM, Falcon, Mistral, and Llama 2 . DeepFloyd and Stable Diffusion have achieved relative parity with leading proprietary models. Enhanced with fine-tuning techniques and datasets developed by the open source community, many open models can now outperform all but the most powerful closed-source models on most benchmarks, despite far smaller parameter counts.

As the pace of progress accelerates, the ever-expanding capabilities of state-of-the-art models will garner the most media attention. But the most impactful developments may be those focused on governance, middleware, training techniques and data pipelines that make generative AI more trustworthy , sustainable and accessible, for enterprises and end users alike.

Here are some important current AI trends to look out for in the coming year.

Reality check: more realistic expectations

• Multimodal AI

Small(er) language models and open source advancements

Gpu shortages and cloud costs, model optimization is getting more accessible, customized local models and data pipelines, more powerful virtual agents, regulation, copyright and ethical ai concerns, shadow ai (and corporate ai policies).

When generative AI first hit mass awareness, a typical business leader’s knowledge came mostly from marketing materials and breathless news coverage. Tangible experience (if any) was limited to messing around with ChatGPT and DALL-E. Now that the dust has settled, the business community now has a more refined understanding of AI-powered solutions.

The Gartner Hype Cycle positions Generative AI squarely at “Peak of Inflated Expectations,” on the cusp of a slide into the “Trough of Disillusionment” [1] —in other words, about to enter a (relatively) underwhelming transition period—while Deloitte’s “State of Generated AI in the Enterprise “ report from Q1 2024 indicated that many leaders “expect substantial transformative impacts in the short term.” [2] The reality will likely fall in between: generative AI offers unique opportunities and solutions, but it will not be everything to everyone.

How real-world results compare to the hype is partially a matter of perspective. Standalone tools like ChatGPT typically take center stage in the popular imagination, but smooth integration into established services often yields more staying power. Prior to the current hype cycle, generative machine learning tools like the “Smart Compose” feature rolled out by Google in 2018 weren’t heralded as a paradigm shift, despite being harbingers of today’s text generating services. Similarly, many high-impact generative AI tools are being implemented as integrated elements of enterprise environments that enhance and complement, rather than revolutionize or replace, existing tools: for example, “Copilot” features in Microsoft Office, “Generative Fill” features in Adobe Photoshop or virtual agents in productivity and collaboration apps .

Where generative AI first builds momentum in everyday workflows will have more influence on the future of AI tools than the hypothetical upside of any specific AI capabilities. According to a recent IBM survey of over 1,000 employees at enterprise-scale companies , the top three factors driving AI adoption were advances in AI tools that make them more accessible, the need to reduce costs and automate key processes and the increasing amount of AI embedded into standard off-the-shelf business applications.

Multimodal AI (and video)

That being said, the ambition of state-of-the-art generative AI is growing. The next wave of advancements will focus not only on enhancing performance within a specific domain, but on multimodal models that can take multiple types of data as input. While models that operate across different data modalities are not a strictly new phenomenon—text-to-image models like CLIP and speech-to-text models like Wave2Vec have been around for years now—they’ve typically only operated in one direction, and were trained to accomplish a specific task.

The incoming generation of interdisciplinary models, comprising proprietary models like OpenAI’s GPT-4V or Google’s Gemini, as well as open source models like LLaVa, Adept or Qwen-VL, can move freely between natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision tasks. New models are also bringing video into the fold: in late January, Google announced Lumiere, a text-to-video diffusion model that can also perform image-to-video tasks or use images for style reference.

The most immediate benefit of multimodal AI is more intuitive, versatile AI applications and virtual assistants. Users can, for example, ask about an image and receive a natural language answer, or ask out loud for instructions to repair something and receive visual aids alongside step-by-step text instructions.

On a higher level, multimodal AI allows for a model to process more diverse data inputs, enriching and expanding the information available for training and inference. Video, in particular, offers great potential for holistic learning. “There are cameras that are on 24/7 and they’re capturing what happens just as it happens without any filtering, without any intentionality,” says Peter Norvig, Distinguished Education Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). [3] “AI models haven’t had that kind of data before. Those models will just have a better understanding of everything.”

In domain-specific models—particularly LLMs—we’ve likely reached the point of diminishing returns from larger parameter counts. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (whose GPT-4 model is rumored to have around 1.76 trillion parameters), suggested as much at MIT’s Imagination in Action event last April: “I think we’re at the end of the era where it’s going to be these giant models, and we’ll make them better in other ways,” he predicted. “I think there’s been way too much focus on parameter count.”

Massive models jumpstarted this ongoing AI golden age, but they’re not without drawbacks. Only the very largest companies have the funds and server space to train and maintain energy-hungry models with hundreds of billions of parameters. According to one estimate from the University of Washington, training a single GPT-3-sized model requires the yearly electricity consumption of over 1,000 households; a standard day of ChatGPT queries rivals the daily energy consumption of 33,000 U.S. households. [4]

Smaller models, meanwhile, are far less resource-intensive. An influential March 2022 paper from Deepmind demonstrated that training smaller models on more data yields better performance than training larger models on fewer data. Much of the ongoing innovation in LLMs has thus focused on yielding greater output from fewer parameters. As demonstrated by recent progress of models in the 3–70 billion parameter range, particularly those built upon LLaMa, Llama 2 and Mistral foundation models in 2023, models can be downsized without much performance sacrifice.

The power of open models will continue to grow. In December of 2023, Mistral released “Mixtral,” a mixture of experts (MoE) model integrating 8 neural networks, each with 7 billion parameters. Mistral claims that Mixtral not only outperforms the 70B parameter variant of Llama 2 on most benchmarks at 6 times faster inference speeds, but that it even matches or outperforms OpenAI’s far larger GPT-3.5 on most standard benchmarks. Shortly thereafter, Meta announced in January that it has already begun training of Llama 3 models, and confirmed that they will be open sourced. Though details (like model size) have not been confirmed, it’s reasonable to expect Llama 3 to follow the framework established in the two generations prior.

These advances in smaller models have three important benefits:

• They help democratize AI: smaller models that can be run at lower cost on more attainable hardware empower more amateurs and institutions to study, train and improve existing models.
• They can be run locally on smaller devices: this allows more sophisticated AI in scenarios like edge computing and the internet of things (IoT). Furthermore, running models locally—like on a user’s smartphone—helps to sidestep many privacy and cybersecurity concerns that arise from interaction with sensitive personal or proprietary data.
• They make AI more explainable: the larger the model, the more difficult it is to pinpoint how and where it makes important decisions. Explainable AI is essential to understanding, improving and trusting the output of AI systems.

The trend toward smaller models will be driven as much by necessity as by entrepreneurial vigor, as cloud computing costs increase as the availability of hardware decrease.

“The big companies (and more of them) are all trying to bring AI capabilities in-house, and there is a bit of a run on GPUs,” says James Landay, Vice-Director and Faculty Director of Research, Stanford HAI. “This will create a huge pressure not only for increased GPU production, but for innovators to come up with hardware solutions that are cheaper and easier to make and use.” 1

As a late 2023 O’Reilly report explains, cloud providers currently bear much of the computing burden: relatively few AI adopters maintain their own infrastructure, and hardware shortages will only elevate the hurdles and costs of setting up on-premise servers. In the long term, this may put upward pressure on cloud costs as providers update and optimize their own infrastructure to effectively meet demand from generative AI. [5]

For enterprises, navigating this uncertain landscape requires flexibility, in terms of both models–leaning on smaller, more efficient models where necessary or larger, more performant models when practical–and deployment environment. “We don’t want to constrain where people deploy [a model],” said IBM CEO Arvind Krishna in a December 2023 interview with CNBC , in reference to IBM’s watsonx platform. “So [if] they want to deploy it on a large public cloud, we’ll do it there. If they want to deploy it at IBM, we’ll do it at IBM. If they want to do it on their own, and they happen to have enough infrastructure, we’ll do it there.”

The trend towards maximizing the performance of more compact models is well served by the recent output of the open source community. 

Many key advancements have been (and will continue to be) driven not just by new foundation models, but by new techniques and resources (like open source datasets) for training, tweaking, fine-tuning or aligning pre-trained models. Notable model-agnostic techniques that took hold in 2023 include:

• Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA): Rather than directly fine-tuning billions of model parameters, LoRA entails freezing pre-trained model weights and injecting trainable layers—which represent the matrix of changes to model weights as 2 smaller ( lower rank ) matrices—in each transformer block. This dramatically reduces the number of parameters that need to be updated, which, in turn, dramatically speeds up fine-tuning and reduces memory needed to store model updates.
• Quantization: Like lowering the bitrate of audio or video to reduce file size and latency, quantization lowers the precision used to represent model data points—for example, from 16-bit floating point to 8-bit integer—to reduce memory usage and speed up inference. QLoRA techniques combine quantization with LoRA.
• Direct Preference Optimization (DPO): Chat models typically use reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to align model outputs to human preferences. Though powerful, RLHF is complex and unstable. DPO promises similar benefits while being computationally lightweight and substantially simpler.

Alongside parallel advances in open source models in the 3–70 billion parameter space, these evolving techniques could shift the dynamics of the AI landscape by providing smaller players, like startups and amateurs, with sophisticated AI capabilities that were previously out of reach.

Enterprises in 2024 can thus pursue differentiation through bespoke model development, rather than building wrappers around repackaged services from “Big AI.” With the right data and development framework , existing open source AI models and tools can be tailored to almost any real-world scenario, from customer support uses to supply chain management to complex document analysis.

Open source models afford organizations the opportunity to develop powerful custom AI models—trained on their proprietary data and fine-tuned for their specific needs—quickly, without prohibitively expensive infrastructure investments. This is especially relevant in domains like legal, healthcare or finance, where highly specialized vocabulary and concepts may not have been learned by foundation models in pre-training.

Legal, finance and healthcare are also prime examples of industries that can benefit from models small enough to be run locally on modest hardware. Keeping AI training, inference and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) local avoids the risk of proprietary data or sensitive personal information being used to train closed-source models or otherwise pass through the hands of third parties. And using RAG to access relevant information rather than storing all knowledge directly within the LLM itself helps reduce model size, further increasing speed and reducing costs.

As 2024 continues to level the model playing field, competitive advantage will increasingly be driven by proprietary data pipelines that enable industry-best fine-tuning.

With more sophisticated, efficient tools and a year’s worth of market feedback at their disposal, businesses are primed to expand the use cases for virtual agents beyond just straightforward customer experience chatbots .

As AI systems speed up and incorporate new streams and formats of information, they expand the possibilities for not just communication and instruction following, but also task automation. “2023 was the year of being able to chat with an AI. Multiple companies launched something, but the interaction was always you type something in and it types something back,” says Stanford’s Norvig. “In 2024, we’ll see the ability for agents to get stuff done for you . Make reservations, plan a trip, connect to other services.”

Multimodal AI, in particular, significantly increases opportunities for seamless interaction with virtual agents. For example, rather than simply asking a bot for recipes, a user can point a camera at an open fridge and request recipes that can be made with available ingredients. Be My Eyes, a mobile app that connects blind and low vision individuals with volunteers to help with quick tasks, is piloting AI tools that help users directly interact with their surroundings through multimodal AI in lieu of awaiting a human volunteer.

Explore IBM watsonx™ Assistant: market-leading conversational AI with seamless integration for the tools that power your business →

Elevated multimodal capabilities and lowered barriers to entry also open up new doors for abuse: deepfakes, privacy issues, perpetuation of bias and even evasion of CAPTCHA safeguards may become increasingly easy for bad actors. In January of 2024, a wave of explicit celebrity deepfakes hit social media; research from May 2023 indicated that there had been 8 times as many voice deepfakes posted online compared to the same period in 2022. [6]

Ambiguity in the regulatory environment may slow adoption, or at least more aggressive implementation, in the short to medium term. There is inherent risk to any major, irreversible investment in an emerging technology or practice that might require significant retooling—or even become illegal—following new legislation or changing political headwinds in the coming years.

In December 2023, the European Union (EU) reached provisional agreement on the Artificial Intelligence Act . Among other measures, it prohibits indiscriminate scraping of images to create facial recognition databases, biometric categorization systems with potential for discriminatory bias, “social scoring” systems and the use of AI for social or economic manipulation. It also seeks to define a category of “high-risk” AI systems, with potential to threaten safety, fundamental rights or rule of law, that will be subject to additional oversight. Likewise, it sets transparency requirements for what it calls “general-purpose AI (GPAI)” systems—foundation models—including technical documentation and systemic adversarial testing.

But while some key players, like Mistral, reside in the EU, the majority of groundbreaking AI development is happening in America, where substantive legislation of AI in the private sector will require action from Congress—which may be unlikely in an election year. On October 30, the Biden administration issued a comprehensive executive order detailing 150 requirements for use of AI technologies by federal agencies; months prior, the administration secured voluntary commitments from prominent AI developers to adhere to certain guardrails for trust and security. Notably, both California and Colorado are actively pursuing their own legislation regarding individuals’ data privacy rights with regard to artificial intelligence.

China has moved more proactively toward formal AI restrictions, banning price discrimination by recommendation algorithms on social media and mandating the clear labeling of AI-generated content. Prospective regulations on generative AI seek to require the training data used to train LLMs and the content subsequently generated by models must be “true and accurate,” which experts have taken to indicate measures to censor LLM output.

Meanwhile, the role of copyrighted material in the training of AI models used for content generation, from language models to image generators and video models, remains a hotly contested issue. The outcome of the high-profile lawsuit filed by the New York Times against OpenAI may significantly affect the trajectory of AI legislation. Adversarial tools, like Glaze and Nightshade —both developed at the University of Chicago—have arisen in what may become an arms race of sorts between creators and model developers.

  Learn how IBM® watsonx.governance™ accelerates responsible, transparent and explainable AI workflows →

For businesses, this escalating potential for legal, regulatory, economic or reputational consequences is compounded by how popular and accessible generative AI tools have become. Organizations must not only have a careful, coherent and clearly articulated corporate policy around generative AI, but also be wary of shadow AI: the “unofficial” personal use of AI in the workplace by employees.

Also dubbed “shadow IT” or “BYOAI,” shadow AI arises when impatient employees seeking quick solutions (or simply wanting to explore new tech faster than a cautious company policy allows) implement generative AI in the workplace without going through IT for approval or oversight. Many consumer-facing services, some free of charge, allow even nontechnical individuals to improvise the use of generative AI tools. In one study from Ernst & Young, 90% of respondents said they use AI at work. [7]

That enterprising spirit can be great, in a vacuum—but eager employees may lack relevant information or perspective regarding security, privacy or compliance. This can expose businesses to a great deal of risk. For example, an employee might unknowingly feed trade secrets to a public-facing AI model that continually trains on user input, or use copyright-protected material to train a proprietary model for content generation and expose their company to legal action.

Like many ongoing developments, this underscores how the dangers of generative AI rise almost linearly with its capabilities. With great power comes great responsibility.

Moving forward

As we proceed through a pivotal year in artificial intelligence, understanding and adapting to emerging trends is essential to maximizing potential, minimizing risk and responsibly scaling generative AI adoption.

1 “Gartner Places Generative AI on the Peak of Inflated Expectations on the 2023 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies,” Gartner, 16 August 2023

2 ”Deloitte’s State of Generative AI in the Enteprrise Quarter one report,” Deloitte, January 2024

3 ”What to Expect in AI in 2024,” Stanford University, 8 December 2023

4 ”Q&A: UW researcher discusses just how much energy ChatGPT uses,” University of Washington, 27 July 2023

5 “Generative AI in the Enterprise,” O’Reilly, 28 November 2023

6 ”Deepfaking it: America’s 2024 election coincides with AI boom,” Reuters, 30 May 2023

7 ”How organizations can stop skyrocketing AI use from fueling anxiety,” Ernst & Young, December 2023

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