Customer journey map template

This template uses six: awareness, consideration, decision, purchase, onboarding, and advocacy. Awareness is first contact with the brand, consideration is active evaluation, decision is the commitment to buy, purchase is the transaction itself, onboarding is reaching first value, and advocacy is recommending you to someone else.

Some models compress this to three stages and some expand it to nine. Six is the version most cross-functional teams can agree on without argument, which matters more than theoretical completeness.

Start from what the customer does, not from what your teams do. We recommend following this process:

1. List the moments a customer moves from one mindset to another by noticing, evaluating, committing, using, recommending.
2. Name each moment as a stage, in the order the customer experiences it rather than the order your teams get involved.
3. Mark which team owns each stage, and look hard at every point where ownership changes hands.
4. Add what the customer needs at each stage, and what you currently give them. The gaps are the work.
5. Draw it in the tool your audience already uses. A free template removes most of the layout work.

Because a map is not a simulation. Real customers skip stages, go backwards, and re-enter months later, but a diagram that tries to draw every possible path becomes unreadable, and an unreadable map does not get used.

The linear version is a shared reference for what the intended journey looks like, which is what you need when four teams are arguing about who owns onboarding. If you need the loops, add them as branches once the straight line is agreed.

A journey map is drawn from the customer's point of view; a sales process flowchart is drawn from yours. The difference matters in practice:

• The journey includes stages you do not control, like awareness and advocacy.
• A sales process includes steps the customer never sees, like qualification and internal approval.
• The journey continues after the deal closes; the sales process ends there.

Most teams keep both, and join them at the purchase stage. The sales process flowchart template covers the internal half.

A journey map follows one customer through the stages of a relationship with one company. An experience map is broader — it looks at how someone solves a problem generally, including the parts where your product is not involved at all.

Use a journey map when you are improving your own funnel. Use an experience map when you are trying to find out what else the customer is doing that you have not thought about.

Because a customer who buys once and never mentions you is a worse outcome than one who buys once and brings two more. Ending the map at purchase treats the transaction as the goal, which is how companies end up with a strong funnel and weak retention.

Advocacy also feeds back into awareness for someone else, which is the only stage on the map that generates new entries to it. That is worth making explicit to whoever owns the marketing budget.

Every stage should have a named owner, and the handovers between them are where journeys break. A common split:

• Marketing: awareness and consideration.
• Sales: decision and purchase.
• Customer success: onboarding.
• Customer success or marketing: advocacy, which is why it is so often owned by nobody.

If two teams both think they own a stage, or neither does, that is the stage to fix first.

PowerPoint can do it with SmartArt, but the layouts are fixed: you get a preset chevron or process graphic that cannot be extended without breaking its spacing, and adding a stage reflows everything you already positioned.

A faster route is the Lucen Flowchart tab, which snaps connectors to shape anchors and reflows the chain with Auto Layout when you insert a stage. Either way, the result stays a set of native PowerPoint objects on your slide.

The download is a free .pptx made of native PowerPoint shapes, so anyone can open, read, and edit it, and you can share it as you would any deck; recipients need nothing installed.

The smart connectors, Auto Layout, and Lucen AI come from the Lucen Flowchart add-in, which adds a Lucen Flowchart tab to the ribbon and runs on Windows with PowerPoint 2016 or later and with PowerPoint for Microsoft 365. PowerPoint for the web, Mac, and mobile are not supported. Setup and troubleshooting steps are in Lucen Support.