7 February 2025

We share real-life customer journey map examples and how to create them

Quick Summary

Customer journey maps do more than visualize experiences—they drive focus, reveal friction, and align teams around high-impact work. Our article walks through six expert-level steps to build journey maps that scale, complete with real examples and best practices. Whether you're tackling churn, complexity, or siloed teams, you'll learn how to turn mapping into momentum—and how TheyDo supports the process end to end.

Looking to unlock what’s really happening in your customer experience?

We know how hard it is to manage customer experience at scale—especially when different teams rely on different data. Journey maps fix that. But most examples you’ll find aren’t built for complex, regulated industries.

In this TheyDo article, we break down real customer journey map examples and what makes them work. But first…

Why listen to us?

At TheyDo, we empower large, regulated enterprises to manage customer journeys with precision. Companies like Jumbo and PostNL have used our platform to align teams and enhance customer experiences.

Known for our user-friendly interface and robust data integration, we stand as a trusted solution in customer journey management.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map shows every step a customer takes when interacting with your business—from first contact to post-purchase—like a visual story. It reveals gaps, pain points, and opportunities across channels and teams.

Businesses use journey maps to align teams around real customer behavior. They give structure to complex experiences and turn scattered research into a single source of truth.

At scale, this isn’t just about UX—but about breaking silos. When everyone sees the same journey, they can prioritize improvements that actually matter. That’s why journey mapping is essential for large, customer-driven organizations.

Why are customer journey maps important?

Reveal Gaps: They show where customer needs aren’t being met, helping teams fix broken experiences before they become business risks.
Align Teams: Everyone, from product to compliance, works from the same source of truth. That means faster decisions and fewer handoffs.
Prioritize Work: By tying insights to real journeys, teams focus on what drives the most value instead of guessing.
Uncover Opportunities: Journey data often highlights unmet needs that become competitive advantages when you act on them quickly.

How to create a customer journey map (+ examples)

1. Choose a specific journey to map

Don’t start by mapping everything. Start by mapping the journey that matters most to your business goal. High-performing teams narrow focus early.

You need to pick a journey that’s both visible to the customer and meaningful to your company. That usually means anchoring to a strategic objective—like reducing churn or improving onboarding time.

Use a structured approach to filter options. At TheyDo, our customer journey mapping tool enables this with journey taxonomies that connect customer experiences to company priorities. This helps you avoid mapping based on opinions or siloed initiatives.

Here’s how to qualify a journey before you commit:

Is it cross-functional? If it touches multiple teams, it’s more likely to uncover issues worth solving.
Is it measurable? You should be able to tie improvements to metrics that matter.
Is it recurring? One-off processes rarely justify a full map.
Is there a clear owner? Someone needs to be responsible for using the map once it’s live.

If a journey scores high across all four, it’s likely a strong starting point.

Example: PostNL’s Journey Factory

PostNL took a journey-first approach by building a ‘journey factory’ with our platform to align teams and drive customer-focused innovation. By mapping specific journeys, they uncovered key areas to improve—boosting Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and cutting costs. Their structured process made it easier to prioritize the right journeys based on business value and customer impact.

The work brought teams together across business units. Each one could see their role, where efforts overlapped, and where gaps held back the experience. With one clear structure in place, PostNL focused on what mattered most.

The result: a repeatable, impact-driven way to turn journeys into outcomes—and a scalable model for continuous improvement. By starting with high-impact journeys, they built momentum fast and showed teams across the business how journey management delivers results.

2. Define the customer persona

Your journey is only as good as your understanding of the customer behind it. Personas keep the work focused on real needs, not assumptions.

But don’t build personas from scratch for every map. Reuse existing ones that already have data behind them—especially if they include measurable behaviors and business value.

You’re not just mapping for marketing. You’re mapping for product, ops, and compliance too. So your persona needs to reflect how the customer interacts across those teams.

Strong personas should cover:

Goals and jobs-to-be-done
Pain points that emerge across the journey
Behavioral context—not just demographics

At TheyDo, we let teams link journeys directly to personas, making it easier to align maps with known patterns and keep everything centralized.

Example: Spotify’s B2C Customer Journey Blueprint

Spotify’s customer journey mapping focused on improving the playlist-sharing feature by grounding decisions in user behaviors and emotions.

They found that some users hesitated to share playlists due to fear of judgment over their music preferences. Others simply didn’t know the feature existed. By building detailed personas that reflected these insights, Spotify updated the interface and in-app flows to make sharing easier and more intuitive.

The result: product enhancements that tackled real needs and removed emotional friction from the experience.

3. List each step in the journey

You can’t fix what you haven’t mapped. Every journey needs a clear step-by-step breakdown—from the customer’s point of view, not the organizational chart’s.

Skip generic stages like “awareness” unless they help drive decisions. Be specific.

What’s the customer doing? What’s the outcome of that step? Steps should reflect real behavior, not abstract phases.

In TheyDo, we help you structure these steps into journeys that align across teams. That means product, legal, and CX are all working from the same version—not their own.

To map strong steps:

Anchor them in customer actions, not internal processes.
Use consistent naming so patterns emerge across journeys.
Break complex flows into multiple maps if needed—don’t overstuff one view.

Example: Van Lanschot’s Step-Level Clarity

Van Lanschot used TheyDo to break down complex client journeys into clearly defined steps. This gave teams visibility into overlapping work, reduced duplication, and ensured each step had clear ownership.

By aligning journeys like onboarding and portfolio management, they uncovered dozens of improvement opportunities. Step-level clarity gave the organization a shared view—turning scattered insights into coordinated action.

Our platform became an opportunities hub, helping teams spot and prioritize meaningful solutions across journeys and functions. The approach created a shared language from peers to C-level, boosting collaboration and connecting customer experience to business goals.

Teams could see how every step linked to systems, responsibilities, and strategy—making journeys actionable and measurable, not just visual. That shift made customer journey work scalable and sustainable across the organization.

4. Identify touchpoints, channels, and stakeholders

Steps alone won’t reveal breakdowns. To understand friction, you need to map how and where each step happens—and who owns it internally.

Every step should show the channel used (e.g., email, phone, app) and the touchpoint involved. Then, connect that to the team or system responsible. This reveals bottlenecks, duplicate tools, and handoff issues.

We make this alignment easier with our taxonomy. You can tag steps with owners, systems, and channels—creating a shared view across teams that normally don’t collaborate day-to-day.

To make your map useful beyond CX:

Include real systems, not placeholder tools (“CRM” → “Salesforce”).
Note whether a touchpoint is customer-initiated or business-initiated.
Keep stakeholders accountable by assigning ownership.

Example: Jumbo’s Touchpoint-Led Transformation

Jumbo, one of the Netherlands’ largest supermarket chains, used our platform to map journeys across touchpoints, channels, and stakeholders. By involving product teams early, they ensured every touchpoint was clearly defined and aligned with real customer needs.

This journey-first approach improved collaboration across functions and helped teams spot and solve overlapping processes and experience gaps. The result: a streamlined innovation workflow that lifted customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

With us, Jumbo could see how each touchpoint connected to tools, channels, departments, and owners. Bringing touchpoint owners into one shared view helped teams understand the ripple effect of changes across the journey.

This gave them a clearer picture of the end-to-end experience—and a faster way to make decisions that stick. It also laid the foundation for scaling journey work across the business, with structure in place to keep teams aligned as they grow.

5. Spot pain points, emotions, and opportunities

This is where the map shifts from descriptive to strategic. You’re not just documenting steps, you’re diagnosing what’s broken and spotting where to invest.

At each step, capture how customers feel and what gets in their way. Don’t rely on assumptions. Use voice-of-customer data, operational metrics, and frontline feedback to validate pain points and emotional responses.

Our Journey AI helps teams process research fast, surfacing pain points and themes without days of manual analysis. This enables stakeholders to align around facts—not opinions.

To get the most out of this stage:

Annotate pain points with supporting data (e.g., NPS dips, call volume spikes).
Mark emotional shifts to show where trust erodes or confidence grows.
Highlight opportunity areas where experience gaps overlap with business priorities.

Example: Vinted’s Checkout Optimization with Journey AI

Vinted, Europe’s leading second-hand fashion marketplace, used our Journey AI to turn years of scattered user research into actionable insights. By uploading historical interview data, they quickly surfaced pain points in their checkout process, including user confusion and friction.

Journey AI pulled in direct quotes and emotional cues, helping the team prioritize fixes based on real user frustrations. This journey-centric approach streamlined their service blueprint and turned disconnected feedback into focused, coordinated improvements.

Best practices for creating effective journey maps

Use journey data to inform prioritization, not just documentation

Too many teams stop at mapping. The real value comes when you use the map to guide decisions.

Look at where pain points intersect with business impact—then prioritize accordingly. This means tying journey insights to goals like reducing churn, increasing speed-to-resolution, or improving conversion.

A well-built map doesn’t just explain what’s happening; it points to what should happen next.

Create reusable components to scale efficiently

Mapping gets messy when every team starts from scratch. Reusable components—like shared personas, consistent step definitions, and pre-tagged systems—make it easier to expand without duplicating effort.

Platforms like TheyDo make this modular by design. When every team works from the same building blocks, scaling across departments becomes a matter of configuration, not reinvention.

Link journeys to strategic goals

A journey map is not a UX artifact. It’s a business tool.

If you want buy-in from leadership, connect journeys to measurable objectives—like lowering operational costs or boosting product adoption. This also helps you avoid mapping for the sake of it.

If a journey doesn’t support a priority, it probably doesn’t need your time right now.

Limit the number of active journeys

More isn’t better. It’s chaos. When too many teams map at once, alignment breaks.

Limit active journeys and enforce ownership. Choose one initiative per team or per business unit to focus on.

This keeps efforts clear, actionable, and trackable. It also forces teams to prioritize—and that’s where impact starts.

Review and update maps regularly

Your business evolves. So do your customers.

A journey map built six months ago may already be out of date. Set regular review cycles to validate steps, touchpoints, and insights. This doesn’t have to mean starting over—just maintaining what’s already in place.

Treat journey maps like living systems, not static documents. When kept current, they stay useful. When ignored, they become shelfware.

Map smarter customer journeys with TheyDo

Customer journey maps help teams cut through complexity, uncover hidden issues, and align around what truly matters. When done right, they drive real outcomes—not just pretty diagrams. That’s where we come in.

TheyDo is a journey management platform built for scale. We help enterprise teams turn fragmented data into structured, actionable journeys—connecting customer insight to business impact every step of the way.