Prepare to build customer journey

Understanding customer journeys can help your team create meaningful interactions, improve conversion rates, and foster long-term relationships with your customers. Whether you’re a marketer, editor, or developer, mapping the customer journey helps ensure your customer will experience meaningful interactions across all touchpoints.

This guide will explain who should be involved and the resources you need to define effective touchpoints for your customer journeys.

Gather your team

Customer journey mapping is a collaborative process. You’ll need insights from different team members across departments to benefit the most.

• Marketing Team – Marketers understand your customer behavior across digital and offline channels. They track campaign performance, engagement rates, and conversions. They will provide insights into what attracts and retains customers. Their knowledge of applying contact segmentation into contact groups and personas or creating personalized experiences will ensure that the customer journey pinpoints any tailored experience.
• Sales Team – The sales team interacts directly with customers. They can provide real-world insights into customer pain points, objections, and decision-making processes. They understand what makes a lead convert, potential buyer questions, and where prospects drop off. Their input helps refine touchpoints to nurture leads into customers better.
• Customer Support and Success Teams – Customer Success teams handle post-sale interactions and provide firsthand insights into customer frustrations, frequently asked questions, their feedback, and any issues ran into. They help identify pain points that might not be visible through analytics, ensuring that journey improvements focus on real customer concerns.
• Data Analysts/BI Team – Analysts play a key role in validating assumptions and identifying trends in customer behavior. They use data from website analytics, CRM systems, and other sources to detect bottlenecks, predict customer needs, and refine journey mapping strategies. Their ability to interpret data-driven insights ensures that optimizations are based on facts rather than assumptions.

Understanding the customer journey starts with gathering the right people and the right information. By involving key stakeholders from marketing, sales, support, and analytics, you ensure that every touchpoint you define is grounded in real customer behavior and team expertise. With your team in place, you’re ready to start collecting the data that will shape your journey map.

Collect resources

Before mapping the customer journey, you should gather key resources to ensure that your map provides accurate and actionable information. These resources will build the foundation you will use to identify customer behavior patterns, pain points, and opportunities for improvement. In the following pages, we’ll look at different resources you should have at hand when you start mapping your customer journeys.

Next step

Learn about how identifying customer segments helps build targeted, effective customer journeys.