How to Create a Customer Journey Map for SaaS Businesses
A SaaS customer journey map is a visual storyline that captures every interaction a customer has with a SaaS company and its software, including touchpoints, emotions, pain points, and actions. It is designed not just as a timeline but as a tool to foster empathy and understanding of how customer needs and feelings evolve throughout their journey, enabling teams to identify opportunities for improvement and innovation.
Mapping the customer journey is crucial for SaaS businesses because it helps understand where customers get stuck, remove friction, enhance customer experience, prevent churn, and boost customer lifetime value by contextualizing upsell opportunities. It also aligns teams around customer needs and business goals.
The SaaS customer journey typically includes six key stages: Awareness and Consideration, Acquisition (including onboarding), Adoption, Renewal, Expansion, and Advocacy. Each stage has specific touchpoints such as reviews, ads, free trials, onboarding emails, in-app notifications, educational content, sales calls, and subscription management features.
Common types of journey maps include Current State Maps, Future State Maps, Day in the Life Maps, Empathy Maps, Service Blueprint Maps, and Circular Customer Journey Maps. These maps help visualize the customer experience from different perspectives and levels of detail.
Creating a SaaS customer journey map involves several steps: deciding the type of map, describing customer personas, identifying interaction touchpoints, laying out the journey stages, marking customer milestones, flagging events requiring action, and continuously optimizing the map based on data and feedback.
Best practices include using data analytics and customer interviews to gather insights, employing tools like Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and customer success software to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs), and automating workflows to guide customers toward success. Real-world examples emphasize the importance of seamless onboarding, personalized in-app guidance, proactive engagement to reduce churn, and contextual upselling.
Aligning the journey map with business goals involves defining what customer success means for your SaaS product, assigning responsibilities across teams for each lifecycle phase, documenting handoffs to ensure smooth transitions, and tying metrics to lifecycle stages to measure and improve customer outcomes effectively.
This comprehensive approach ensures SaaS companies can deliver tailored, actionable insights and practical frameworks to improve customer experience, retention, and growth.
Business Type
SaaS
Industry
Software as a Service (SaaS)
Key Stages of the Customer Journey
- Initial out-of-market stage
- Trigger and evaluation stage
- Acquisition stage
- Adoption and experience stage
- Renewal and expansion stage
- Advocacy stage
Essential Touchpoints to Map
- Website visits and landing pages
- Social media posts and ads
- Search engine results and reviews
- Free trial sign-up or freemium tier activation
- Demo requests and account registration
- Onboarding emails and in-app guidance
- Product usage and feature adoption
- In-app notifications and tooltips
- Customer support interactions and knowledge base
- Subscription purchase and billing management
- Renewal reminders and promotional emails
- Upsell and cross-sell offers
- Customer feedback surveys and NPS
- Community engagement and forums
- Referral and advocacy programs
Common Pain Points
- Onboarding difficulties where customers struggle to learn how to use the product effectively
- Lack of product feature clarity causing confusion about how to use or benefit from the software
- Slow or unhelpful customer service response times leading to frustration
- Complex or lengthy checkout or signup processes that deter potential customers
- High cost of SaaS products especially for small companies and startups
- Technical proficiency required to set up and use the product
- Lack of flexibility in the product to meet specific customer needs
- Concerns about data security and privacy
- Desire for more flexible pricing options instead of long-term contracts
- Fear of data loss when switching products
- Performance issues, particularly with newer products on the market
Target Audience
- Customer Success Managers
- Product Managers
- Marketing Professionals
- Sales Teams
- Customer Experience Teams
- SaaS Startups
- Small to Medium SaaS Enterprises
- Large SaaS Enterprises
- Business Analysts
- Customer Support Teams
- Onboarding Specialists
- User Experience Designers
- Professionals involved in customer lifecycle management and journey mapping
Target Audience
- Customer Success Managers
- Product Managers
- Marketing Professionals
- Sales Teams
- Customer Experience Teams
- SaaS Startups
- Small to Medium SaaS Enterprises
- Large SaaS Enterprises
- Business Analysts
- Customer Support Teams
- Onboarding Specialists
- User Experience Designers
- Professionals involved in customer lifecycle management and journey mapping
Recommended Tools for Journey Mapping
- Userpilot
- UXPressia
Available Templates
- SaaS Buyer Journey Map Template (UXPressia) – Includes stages such as Awareness, Research, Registration, Trial Period, Live Demo, Billing, Support, Feedback, Cross-selling, and Prolongation/Leave, with persona creation and detailed touchpoints.
- User Journey Map Templates (Userpilot) – Includes Experience Map Template, Current State Journey Map Template, Future State User Journey Map, Day-in-the-Life Maps, and Empathy Map Template, designed to capture user actions, emotions, and opportunities.
- B2B SaaS Customer Journey Template (TheyDo) – Pre-loaded with phases and steps from lead generation to contract signing, customizable for marketing, sales, product, and CX teams, with actionable insights and metrics integration.
Real-World Examples
Real-world examples of customer journey maps for SaaS businesses illustrate how companies visualize and optimize the entire customer lifecycle from awareness to advocacy. For instance, Userpilot highlights the importance of mapping key SaaS stages such as Awareness, Acquisition, Adoption, Renewal, Expansion, and Advocacy, with touchpoints like free trials, onboarding, in-app guidance, and upsells to reduce churn and boost lifetime value.
Contentsquare features Rewind, a SaaS backup software company, which mapped its B2B SaaS customer journey to understand the full purchase process before customers even visited their website. This helped identify gaps in marketing and sales alignment and improve targeting and messaging.
Woopra and Five9 provide examples from well-known SaaS companies like HubSpot and Zendesk. HubSpot’s customer journey map is detailed and linear, breaking down stages into substages with customer testimonials to humanize the experience and highlight pain points. Zendesk’s map focuses on customer churn and reconsideration, emphasizing different possible outcomes in the journey.
Other SaaS examples include TurboTax, which created a journey map to launch a new product by combining data research, customer surveys, and expert interviews to identify pain points and improve the overall experience.
Spotify, while primarily a consumer SaaS, used customer journey mapping to enhance its music-sharing features by understanding user emotions and behaviors at each touchpoint, leading to higher engagement and customer satisfaction.
These examples demonstrate best practices such as combining quantitative data with qualitative insights, involving cross-functional teams, focusing on critical touchpoints like onboarding and renewal, and continuously updating journey maps to reflect evolving customer needs and business goals. They provide actionable frameworks for SaaS businesses to improve user adoption, reduce churn, and drive growth through customer-centric strategies.
Best Practices
Creating a customer journey map for SaaS businesses involves a structured approach tailored to the unique characteristics of SaaS products and customers. Here are actionable best practices synthesized from leading industry sources:
- Define Clear Goals and Customer Personas: Start by setting specific objectives for your journey map, such as increasing premium subscriptions or reducing churn. Identify and describe your target customer personas to tailor the map to their unique needs and behaviors.
- Identify All Critical Touchpoints: Map every interaction point between the customer and your product/company, including marketing channels, free trials, onboarding, product usage, support, and renewal processes. Typical SaaS touchpoints include website visits, demo requests, free trial signups, onboarding emails, in-app notifications, and subscription purchase screens.
- Collect and Analyze Data: Use quantitative data from analytics platforms and Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) to understand user behavior and engagement at each touchpoint. Complement this with qualitative insights from customer interviews to uncover pain points and emotional states.
- Map the Six Key Stages of the SaaS Customer Journey:
- Awareness and Evaluation: Customers discover your product through ads, referrals, or content.
- Acquisition (including Onboarding): Users sign up for free trials or freemium tiers and begin onboarding.
- Adoption: Customers start using advanced features and build habits around your product.
- Renewal: Customers decide to continue or cancel their subscription.
- Expansion: Opportunities for upselling or cross-selling additional features or seats.
- Advocacy: Satisfied customers promote your product to others.
- Focus on Self-Service and Friction Reduction: Since SaaS customers often interact with the product without direct sales contact, ensure onboarding is frictionless with accessible how-to content, knowledge bases, and in-app guidance.
- Incorporate Emotional and Behavioral Insights: Capture customer emotions and moments of truth at each stage to understand satisfaction and frustration points, enabling targeted improvements.
- Collaborate Cross-Functionally: Engage teams across marketing, sales, product, customer success, and support to build a comprehensive and actionable journey map.
- Continuously Optimize and Update: Use the journey map to align teams on KPIs and responsibilities, and regularly update it based on new data and customer feedback to adapt to changing behaviors and market conditions.
- Leverage Journey Maps for Personalization and Growth: Use insights to personalize marketing, onboarding, and upsell strategies, increasing customer lifetime value and reducing churn.
By following these best practices, SaaS businesses can create effective customer journey maps that enhance user experience, improve retention, and drive sustainable growth.
Tips for Aligning Journey Maps with Business Goals
To effectively align SaaS customer journey maps with business goals and customer needs, start by clearly defining your objectives and ensuring these goals are tightly connected to broader business strategies such as customer retention, revenue growth, and product adoption. Engage cross-functional teams—including product, marketing, sales, and customer success—to gather diverse insights and foster collaboration, which helps create a unified, customer-centric approach. Use data-driven methods by collecting and analyzing quantitative and qualitative data from analytics tools, CRM systems, customer feedback, and support tickets to understand real customer behaviors, pain points, and emotions at each journey stage. Develop detailed customer personas to tailor the journey map to specific user segments, ensuring that the map reflects their unique goals and challenges. Identify and prioritize key touchpoints and moments of friction to optimize the experience, focusing on critical phases like onboarding, engagement, renewal, and advocacy. Continuously monitor and update the journey map using real user data and feedback to adapt to evolving customer needs and market conditions. Finally, use the journey map as a strategic tool to guide targeted marketing campaigns, product improvements, and customer success initiatives, ensuring every interaction drives customer satisfaction, reduces churn, and supports sustainable business growth. This holistic, data-informed, and collaborative approach ensures that the customer journey map is not just a visualization but a practical framework that aligns customer experience improvements with measurable business outcomes in the SaaS context. (decktopus.com, mouseflow.com, userpilot.com, usermaven.com, loyaltysurf.io)
