Use Customer Journey Map to describe what customers need as they discover your business, decide to buy, start using your product or service, and consider returning. The map helps your team see where a customer gets stuck and what should happen next.
Start with one priority customer group and a real offer. This guide uses an illustrative bicycle-repair journey; replace the examples with your own observations and service arrangements.
Open the map and choose whose journey to describe
Open Assistant → Strategy → Plans → Customer Journey Map. Choose Fill it in myself for an empty plan, or Add details, Edit, or Review suggestions on a section. Select Save after editing each section.
Use your Customer Profiles to choose the group and understand its needs. You can save the map in progress, but Customer Profiles must be ready before the journey plan can show Ready to use.
The two essential decisions are Customer touchpoints and Handoffs & next steps. For help with the shared editor and answer statuses, see Setting up your business strategy in Cedros.
Name the customer group in your notes. If different groups follow different paths, label those differences so the team can tell which experience you mean.
Work through the six journey stages
In Customer Lifecycle, edit Customer touchpoints. The editor provides six stages:
- Discovery: the customer recognizes a need and finds possible solutions. A commuter might search for a nearby repair shop or ask another rider for a recommendation.
- Consideration: the customer compares options and decides whether the business is a good fit. They may check repair services, location, estimates, and availability.
- Purchase: the customer buys, books, or agrees to the work. For a repair, this could be accepting an estimate or confirming a booking; use the moment that matches your process.
- Onboarding: the customer starts the service or receives the first useful result. Map what happens at drop-off, during the repair, and when they collect a usable bicycle.
- Retention: the customer uses the result and decides whether to return. This may include help with a problem, future maintenance, or another repair.
- Advocacy: a customer who has experienced value may leave a review or recommend the business.
These stages help organize the map. Customers can arrive through different routes, return to an earlier stage, or skip a stage that does not apply. A returning customer may book directly without comparing suppliers again.
Use the stages to understand the customer's experience, rather than forcing every customer through one fixed sequence.
Fill in the need, key moment, and touchpoints
Each included stage has these fields:
- Customer state: what the customer needs, knows, feels, or is deciding at this point.
- Key moments: what helps the customer move forward, such as getting an answer, receiving an estimate, or completing the first appointment.
- Health signals: how you would tell whether the stage is working. Record measured results where you have them; label proposed measures and unknown baselines clearly.
- Additional touchpoints: interactions that need more detail or are not covered by the available choices, such as a shop visit or a collection desk.
Under Potential touchpoints, select the choices relevant to that stage. Select one again to deselect it. For example, Consideration includes Inquiry, Conversation, Comparison, Customer evidence, Pricing, and Follow-up. Choose the ones you actually use or deliberately plan to introduce.
Selecting a touchpoint records it in the map. It does not create that service or switch it on. In your notes, distinguish what exists today from what is planned.
For the commuter example, Consideration could contain:
- Customer state: “Needs to know whether the repair is affordable and when the bicycle will be ready.”
- Key moments: “The team explains the likely work, gives an estimate where possible, and agrees the next step.”
- Potential touchpoints: Inquiry, Conversation, and Pricing, if those match the business's process.
- Health signals: “Track inquiries that receive an estimate and whether the customer understands the collection arrangements. Baseline not yet measured.”
For Customer touchpoints to count as complete, every included stage needs Customer state, Key moments, and at least one selected or additional touchpoint. Health signals can be added as measurement develops.
If a stage does not apply, change its applicability control from Include this stage to Not applicable, then complete the field explaining why that stage does not apply. Give a reason that the team can review later. An empty stage or an exclusion without a reason leaves the map incomplete.
Describe the first useful result and repeat business
In First Value & Repeat Business, use First value & repeat business for delivery details that need more explanation than the stage cards provide.
Describe what happens after a purchase or booking, who helps the customer, what a successful first result looks like, and what happens if something goes wrong. Include repeat purchase or renewal where relevant.
For the repair example, this could cover confirming the agreed work, explaining any change to the estimate, arranging collection, showing the customer what was repaired, and telling them how to raise a remaining problem. Record only promises the team can deliver.
Consider the return journey too. Explain when maintenance advice, a follow-up, or a review request would be useful. Distinguish an agreed process from an idea that still needs an owner or approval.
Make responsibility for the next step clear
In Handoffs & Improvements, use Handoffs & next steps to connect the stages. For each important transition, record:
- Trigger: the event that starts the next piece of work.
- Responsible person or team: who handles it.
- Information needed: what they need to know, such as the agreed work or booking details.
- Customer next step: what the customer should do or expect.
- Timing and recovery: when it should happen, if known, and what to do if it does not.
A proposed repair handoff could be: “When the customer accepts the estimate, the front desk passes the agreed work and collection arrangement to the mechanic. The mechanic flags any additional work before it proceeds. If completion is likely to be delayed, the front desk contacts the customer with a revised arrangement.”
Check that example against your own roles and process before adopting it. Add specific timing only when the team has agreed it and can meet it.
Pay particular attention to the move from purchase to delivery, and from a support problem to follow-up. These are places where a customer can be left uncertain even when each individual task appears finished.
Choose the improvements that matter most
Use Friction & improvements to record where customers struggle and what you want to change. For each item, name the affected customer group and stage, the evidence, the proposed improvement, an owner, a success signal, and a review date.
For example: “Possible friction at collection: customers may be unsure when their repair is ready. Evidence still needed. Review recent collection inquiries, then decide whether clearer booking information or a completion message would help.”
If you already have evidence, summarize what it shows and where it came from. Keep proposed changes separate from work that has been completed. Avoid inventing a drop-off rate or claiming a problem is solved before checking the result.
Choose the next improvement by its effect on the customer and your ability to deliver it. A clearer next step at one troublesome point can be more useful than adding a new interaction to every stage.
Review the saved map against a real journey
- Reopen the map and follow one actual or carefully labeled example journey from the customer's first need to the result they receive.
- Check all six stages. Each should contain the required detail or a deliberate Not applicable reason.
- Check that someone owns each important next step and has the information needed to carry it out.
- Review proposed answers before choosing Accept reviewed answer, then Save. If the plan still shows Needs decisions, check Customer touchpoints, Handoffs & next steps, and the Customer Profiles prerequisite.
- Choose one improvement, carry out the work in the relevant workflow, and return to the map with the observed result.
When included as context, the map helps Cedros plan pages, content, onboarding, and follow-up around customer needs. Saving it does not create pages, send messages, or measure conversions. Ready to use confirms that the plan's readiness checks are satisfied, not that every interaction exists or works well.
Keep the map current when your offer, delivery process, or customer behavior changes. If a save reports a conflict, preserve your intended edits, use Reload latest plan when offered, and compare the newer version before saving again. For an unresolved editor problem, ask for help with the section name and visible error.