Creating a customer journey - blueprint for success

Before you start creating a customer journey, it’s important to understand what it means to visualize and map customer behavior. This involves thinking about how customers interact with your brand at different stages – from discovering your product to making a purchase or returning for support. Mapping this behavior helps you see the steps they take, their decisions, and their experiences along the way. Knowing how to capture and represent this information is key to building an effective customer journey.

A clear framework helps teams work together, stay consistent, and gain insights they can act on. It turns vague behavior into clear, measurable steps that lead to conversion.

In this chapter, we’ll make use of Avinash Kaushik’s See-Think-Do-Care framework, and illustrate how we used it to build a customer journey for our product, Xperience by Kentico.

The foundation of customer journeys

Organizations map customer journeys to improve customer experiences, drive conversions, and strengthen post-purchase engagement. But an effective journey map does more than outline the ideal path – it also highlights friction points and drop-off risks that could cause potential customers to walk away.

A well-designed journey supports customers in reaching their goals by removing obstacles and reinforcing positive experiences at each step, directly translating into more relevant interactions, better conversion rates, and increased brand loyalty.

A strong journey report gives marketing teams the visibility they need to understand how customers interact with the brand at every stage. It helps them create more targeted, relevant content and campaigns while making it easier to spot and fix any customer experience gaps that might otherwise go unnoticed.

We can follow Kaushik’s division of the journey into four broad stages:

See

Customer mindset: “I’m not actively looking for a solution, but I’ve seen your brand.”

Example (Xperience by Kentico): A marketer comes across Xperience in an industry report but isn’t searching for a new platform.

Think

Customer mindset: “I realize I might need something better. What are my options?”

Example (Xperience by Kentico): They start researching DXPs, reading blogs, and comparing features.

Do

Customer mindset: “I’ve narrowed down my choices and need to make a final decision.”

Example (Xperience by Kentico): They attend a demo, request a trial, or speak with sales.

Care

Customer mindset: “I’ve made my choice—how can I maximize value and stay engaged?”

Example (Xperience by Kentico): They onboard, explore new features, and consider upsells.

By defining these four key stages, you ensure that every marketing effort, sales activity, and support interaction aligns with the customer’s needs at each point.

Gathering the right data

To build an accurate customer journey map, it’s best tp combine external data – like industry reports and best practices – with internal insights from analytics tools, support tickets, CRM systems, and customer feedback. This proves to be the right mix to help test assumptions and make sure that each stage of the journey reflects how real customers think and behave.

Cross-department collaboration

Creating the journey map was a collaborative effort across multiple teams.

Marketing focused on attracting and nurturing leads, Sales handled high-intent prospects, Customer Success managed onboarding and retention, and the Growth team analyzed results to improve each stage. This cross-team approach made it easier to connect touchpoints and deliver a smooth, consistent customer experience.

To avoid miscommunication and misalignment, we ensured that each stage of the journey had clear objectives and ownership. We maintained shared documentation to keep everyone on the same page and encouraged transparency across teams. Regular check-ins helped us stay aligned and adjust the journey based on real customer behavior.

Visualizing the journey: bringing data to life

A customer journey map turns insights into action. It gives teams a clear visual guide for decision-making and forces them to organize seemingly unconnected data from different metrics and teams into a flow of connected customer actions. The map shows how customers move through each stage, highlighting key conversion points and areas for improvement.

Seeing data in one place makes it easier for teams to spot patterns, understand customer behavior, and make informed decisions.

When everyone works from the same source of truth – whether it’s a table of key actions or a visual map of the journey – it reduces confusion and keeps goals aligned. This approach made it easier for teams to collaborate across departments, track progress over time, and adjust strategies quickly based on real customer needs.

Next steps

Now that we’ve established the core stages of a customer journey on our own example, let’s take it one step further by analyzing how the individual stages correlate with specific touchpoints and customer segments.