3 Brilliant Retail Customer Journey Map Examples For New & Established Sellers

In one study, customer-centric companies were found to be 60% more profitable compared to companies that aren't.

When you concentrate on customers in everything you do, you can build a stable and highly-appreciated retail business. One way to do so is by creating a customer journey map for your retail company.

Even a piece of paper and a pencil is enough to create a small CJM. However, if you’d like to make a nice, electronic version of it, you can use customer journey mapping software.

Whichever you choose, here are some retail customer journey map examples to inspire you as you embark on the CJM process. I think you'll find these examples useful whether you’ve been in business for years or you’ve just started.

What Is A Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of your business's purchasing process. Every purchasing process can be depicted as a journey with several stages, including acknowledging the problem/need, searching for possible solutions, comparing available options, and placing and finishing the order.

Depending on the company, the product, and the industry, there can be five, six, seven, or even more stages in a customer journey map. In general, customer journey maps are all about customer experience. You want to understand the process each customer goes through to end up with your product. This way, you can optimize it and make it more successful.

To craft the best CJM, you must know your customers well and include every relevant puzzle piece in your map. Let's have a closer look at these pieces.

What Should Be Included In Your Customer Journey Map (CJM)?

First off, please remember that these elements are not set in stone. There is no one correct way of creating and optimizing a customer journey map. However, my experience shows that these elements are pretty repetitive, and they have a place in the vast majority of CJMs.

Keep in mind that your ultimate goal is to put yourself in the customer’s shoes so that you know what to do and how to provide them with an excellent customer experience.

1. The purchasing process

As you might have guessed, your map needs to depict the purchasing process. What channels are involved? What steps does the customer need to take in order to place and receive the order? You’ll likely come up with several stages (e.g., open the website, enter the brick-and-mortar store, put products in the cart, etc.). It is vital to list these stages horizontally, as each stage will later be supplemented with additional information.

2. Customer personas

A customer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your typical customer. However, you might have to create a few customer personas to account for. For example, you'll want to consider the kinds of personas that may be interested in the different retail product categories you offer; i.e. women's clothing vs. maternity clothing. It's okay if your personas overlap—the point is to bake their needs and pain points into your customer journey analytics.

3. User actions

At each step of the buying process, your customers can take many different actions. For instance, in the discovery stage, they might look for possible solutions online or talk to their friends or coworkers. In the purchase stage, they can look for different payment options or product customization features. Finally, in the retention stage, they can look for a newsletter or a loyalty program they can sign up for to receive additional benefits, like rewards points and discounts.

You should list all these possible actions and include them in your CJM.

4. Emotions

To some extent, customer experience is related to the emotions a given person experiences before, during, and after the purchasing process.

Robert Plutchik, who was a psychologist and a professor emeritus at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, is famous for his chart of emotional states humans can feel. Today, this chart is known as The Plutchik Emotion Wheel:

You can use this wheel to understand what kind of emotions your customers are feeling and decide what kind of emotions you want to evoke with your offer. Needless to say, your retail touchpoints should trigger positive emotions so that your customers can be truly satisfied with their experience.

This satisfaction should also extend to the purchased product, the payment process, and the return policy (even if a given person doesn’t intend to return the product, they'll want to know it’s a hassle-free process).

5. Pain points

Emotions and pain points are inseparable. Pain points trigger negative emotions such as annoyance, sadness, or even anger. More often than not, they are the major reason people are looking to buy new products in the first place. If you have a blender that breaks down all the time or isn’t very effective, sooner or later, you’ll be irritated with it and buy a better model. 

And since pain points motivate customers to start the purchasing process, they should be a vital element of your customer journey map.

6. Solutions

The Solutions portion of your CJM is about outlining what's "in it" for your customers. A functional product offered at a reasonable price and delivered on time is a perfect example of a solution. Knowledgeable and quick customer support capable of efficiently and effectively resolving customer issues is another great example.

7. Touchpoints

Touchpoints are moments of interaction between the store and the customer. When a customer opens a chatbot window to ask a question about the product, that’s a touchpoint. When a customer is looking for the best product in the search engine and they see your store’s ad, that’s also a touchpoint.

Customer touchpoints are critical as they make the purchasing process more tangible. When your touchpoints are carefully considered, it’s easier for customers to understand what’s going on and what the next step should be. Your goal as a retail entrepreneur is to make all customer interactions enticing while validating that your solutions meet the pain points of your target personas.

To understand what touchpoints are all about, take a look at this chart created by Shopify:

If you want to go further with your map, you can include many more additional elements, such as:

• KPIs
• Types of customer data + sources
• Technologies used
• Team members responsible for a given stage, etc.

My advice, though, is to limit yourself just to points that really matter to you. Less is more.

What’s Unique About Customer Journey Maps For Retail?

For one thing, they can be quite complicated. That’s because the majority of stores operate in the omnichannel model. Customers want to have access to your offer in many different ways, including:

• Brick-and-mortar stores
• Online store
• Mobile apps
• Marketplaces
• Social commerce

Each of these channels might require a separate customer journey map. For example, a customer regularly visiting your brick-and-mortar store may not even know that you have a mobile app!

Secondly, retail businesses usually offer many different products. If you sell products for kids, men, women, and other customers, you will probably decide it’s best to divide these products into separate customer journey maps and separate buyer personas.

Retail Customer Journey Map Examples

I understand that creating a customer journey map from scratch can be overwhelming, especially if you’ve never done anything like that in the past. However, don’t feel discouraged, as CJMs can be very beneficial to your store. Looking at things from the customer’s perspective will help you grasp the bigger picture of your business.

A customer journey map is usually the result of the brainstorming process that involves your entire team, especially people working in marketing, customer service, sales, and IT. Now, let’s take a look at three examples of customer journey maps your retail business can learn from.

Example 1: The Online and In-Store Retailer

Integrating online and offline experiences is what omnichannel is all about—a rising trend that has been dubbed phygital experience. In my first example, I want to show you a retailer that works this way and runs both an online store and a brick-and-mortar store.

This is just a base for a ready-made CJM, but here you can see every stage of the customer journey and two different approaches to it - using a website and a brick-and-mortar store. This map shows crucial things that need to take place at any stage so that the order can be completed successfully.

Additionally, it’s good to include pain points (why did the customer visit the store in the first place?), additional touchpoints (how did the customer arrive on the website?), and possible user actions (what they were looking for?). Although the customer journey map cannot be overloaded, it should comprise all the relevant elements.

Moreover, your map should also include more details about the online channel:

• What happens before, during, and after the purchasing process (what steps the user needs to take to find the product for them and buy it)
• How can customers find your online store (via social media, Google Ads, any other way?)
• What are the ways of engaging users who have purchased something in the past

Example 2: The e-commerce retailer

Some time ago, Columbia Road made a very nice customer journey map template for an online store offering groceries. Take a look at it:

That’s, in short, how your map should look. It comprises all the relevant elements organized in a logical order. This template shows every important stage of the purchasing process, including possible sources of knowledge about the store and spreading the news about the company among friends and family (the advocacy stage).

What’s also crucial, the whole map is 100% customer-centric - it shows customer behavior at each stage, along with their motivations and current state. Additionally, each stage has its business goals and KPIs that enable the store to measure the success rate.

If you’re running an online store, you can use this template as a base for your future customer journey map. However, to make such a map, you need to master your store’s analytics and its performance.

Example 3: The Solopreneur Retailer

These two examples above refer to well-established businesses - companies that have several departments working for their success and multiple communication channels set up for their customers. But what if you’ve just started? That's a different story.

Perhaps you think that all that is too complicated and unnecessary. After all, there is so much going on at each stage, and you don’t even feel like some of these elements are relevant to what you do.

If that's the case, don’t worry. If you run a small business or even if you are a solopreneur, you can still implement a customer journey map and benefit from it.

The key to success in your situation is simplicity. You don’t need to overwhelm yourself with hundreds of boxes and fields to fill in. Concentrate exclusively on the things that matter to you and your customers. Here’s a good example of a relatively straightforward customer journey map:

This map is divided into five essential stages, and it comprises just the most important elements, including touchpoints, customer experience, and business goals. If you’re on your own (or you have just one or two people to help), you can discard the last row (team(s) involved).

Where to start

Of course, you still need to fill in these 25 boxes, but they will give you a better view of your business. Analyze each point, and every time, ask yourself these questions:

• How can I improve this stage of the purchasing process?
• What potential problems can occur at each stage? What can I do to prevent or minimize them?
• How can I fulfill customer expectations at this stage (and what are these expectations)?
• How does my customer feel when they’re going through a given stage?
• What more can I do to achieve the intended KPIs/goals?

This way, your customer journey map is more than just an abstract chart that has little to do with reality. On the contrary, it’s a nice and effective summary of how your store works and interacts with customers. It’s a perfect starting point to improve these operations, fix potential problems, and strengthen things that work well.

And what if you aren’t even sure where to start? Well, in this case, you have two options:

1. Study market research to see what modern customers expect from online stores
2. Analyze your competition, read their reviews, and draw conclusions: What do other people value in my competitors? What makes their offer attractive? How can I make my store more user-friendly?

The information you obtain this way will help you start working on your customer journey map and then - your whole store.

Conclusion: Make The Most Of CJM In Your Retail Business

Whether you’ve just started or you’ve been in the business for years, you always need to make sure your retail company is 100% customer-focused. And that’s what CJMs are for; they should help you make the most of your store and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Only this way will you be able to grow your business and retain (satisfied) customers. Use available tools and examples to come up with your own CJM, but don’t go overboard with it. It has to be, above all, useful and practical. Creating an overly-complicated user journey map just for the sake of having such a document doesn’t make much sense, especially for small companies and start-ups.

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