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The 9 best customer journey mapping tools to grow your business

Customer journey mapping (CJM) software is a digital tool that collects and presents quantitative and qualitative data about how users interact with your product or website so you can better understand your buyer personas and ensure a delightful user experience (UX).

The more complicated the journey, the more data you’ll need to map it out. The right mix of CJM tools gives you data from multiple customer touchpoints and channels so you can collect as much information as possible to map your journey in detail.

Last updated

9 Apr 2024

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8 min

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Summary

Customers will interact differently with your site or app depending on what part of the journey they’re in. Since journey maps include everything from awareness—when a customer first sees your ad on Facebook—to onboarding and using your product, the data you rely on to guide your map will vary at each stage.

This article walks you through three types of customer journey mapping software, so you understand how each fits into your different workflow stages and can choose the tool(s) that work best for your business:

  1. Traditional website and behavior analytics tools 

  2. Voice-of-the-customer tools for user feedback

  3. Tools to visualize your customer journey map

Website and behavior analytics tools for customer journey mapping

Analytics tools give you insight into who your customers are and how they behave on your website.

Traditional website analytics tools give you quantitative data, including traffic and demographic metrics like bounces and bounce rate, new and returning users, and goal conversion rates.

Behavior analytics tools give you qualitative insight into how users actually experience your website and how they behave during their customer journey. These tools help you pinpoint where users spend time on individual pages, which buttons they click (or don’t), and where they exit from the funnel, so you can improve the user experience.

While traditional analytics tools tell you about the customer’s journey to your website, behavior analytics tools show where their attention goes after they’ve arrived.

Quantitative and qualitative analytics tools work together to help you identify usability issues in your customer journey and highlight opportunities to improve the customer experience.

Here are three popular analytics tools used by marketing and UX professionals to help you kickstart your customer journey mapping process:

1. Hotjar

Hotjar (hi there! 👋) helps you gain insights into customer behavior with tools like Funnels, Heatmaps, Recordings, Surveys, and a Feedback widget, giving you invaluable data on how users experience your site throughout their journey.

Hotjar Funnels shows you the path of the journey, while Heatmaps and Recordings show you how users behave along the way—where they click and scroll, where they get stuck, and the actions they take as they navigate from page to page. Hotjar’s tools also offer built-in automations—like AI for Surveys—and team collaboration features, including Highlights, which makes insight sharing quick and painless.

Hotjar reveals what numbers don’t. Funnels helped me identify where in the customer journey people drop off. Recorded user sessions let me understand what people see when they arrive on our website—what they click and what they don’t click. Heatmaps helped me identify where they spend most of their time and assess if they should be spending time there or not.

Piriya Kantong
Former Senior Google Ads Analyst at Gogoprint

Furthermore, Hotjar Dashboards gives you key user behavior metrics, helping you prioritize how you build and fix your website to provide a better customer journey, which ultimately helps you increase conversions and improve customer satisfaction.

Hotjar complements tools like Google Analytics, giving you a full picture of customer engagement and behavior on your website.

Discover how visitors experience your site

Use Hotjar to gather data and insights into the customer journey so you can make the right changes at the right time for your visitors.

2. Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 is a web analytics tool that tracks and measures website traffic metrics, like bounce and exit rates, goal conversions, sources of traffic, and user demographics.

GA tells you how much traffic your website gets, where it comes from, and which channels convert best. You can also see what your most popular landing pages are and where people are exiting from your website.

💡 Pro tip: traditional analytics and behavior analytics tools work best as a team. 🤜🤛 Combining Hotjar and Google Analytics helps you to paint a more complete picture of your customers’ journey through your site—check out Hotjar’s GA4 integration to unlock the full potential of both tools.

3. Heap

Heap is a no-code product analytics tool that gives you customer data on how people use your product, tracking every stage of the customer journey.

This tool comes in handy when you’re looking for customer pain points with your product and you need data to help you make decisions aimed at increasing customer retention and reducing churn. Heap helps you understand which customer segments your users come from, giving you more granular insight into the customer journey.

Voice of the customer tools for user feedback

Voice-of-the-customer (VoC) tools help you understand your customer needs by capturing what they really think about your business or product, in their own words. 

Learning what your customers have to say about their experience helps you get raw, authentic feedback about how they perceive your brand and product at every stage of the journey, giving you deeper insight into customer emotions and motivations that drive their decision-making.

Here are three customer feedback tools to help you understand your users:

1. Hotjar

Hotjar (hello again! 👋) gives you insights into customer behavior with feedback tools like surveys, user interviews, and a visual feedback widget.

The Hotjar Heatmaps and Recordings tools show you the what and how of user behavior; Surveys and Feedback help you understand the why

Embed a survey or feedback widget on any page to ask customers what they think about your product experience, giving them the opportunity to share their unique perspectives. Use Hotjar’s Microsoft Teams and Slack integrations to receive survey response notifications in real time, so you and your team members are immediately notified of issues and can react promptly.

💡 Pro tip: the way you ask a question determines what kind of answer you’ll get. Open-ended questions will give you more qualitative data (and can be answered in detail), while closed-ended questions (think ‘yes/no’ questions) can help you create charts based on quantitative user research data.

Before you set up an on-site survey, know what information you want to get from your visitors—and how you’re going to use it—so you can ask questions that’ll get you the data you need.

One of our primary goals as a UX team is to understand the customer’s journey and what they’re doing on the website. Surveys give us the ability to reach out to people in context—we can just pop a survey on a page we want insights on.

Sarah Wilson-Reissmann
Team LeadUX & UI Design at Canyon Bicycles

Use Hotjar to gather data and insights into the customer journey so you can make the right changes at the right time for your visitors.

2. Clarabridge

Clarabridge is an AI-powered feedback text analytics tool that collects what people say about your brand or business from every possible source and analyzes how they feel about you.

This tool is the way to go if you want to know how people really feel about your brand and business, and what the general user sentiment is. Use Clarabridge when people are already talking about your company: either on your website (through chats and surveys) or off your site (like on social media platforms).

3. InMoment

InMoment is an experience-intelligence (IX), AI-powered feedback tool that helps you get more detailed feedback from users.

For example, if you ask your users about their experience and they say ‘Good’, InMoment prompts them further: ‘What was good?’ It also offers social monitoring that gathers meaningful feedback on what your customers are saying about you online.

Tools to visualize your customer journey

Classic customer journey mapping tools are visual flowchart builders: the digital version of sticky notes, only these can be saved in the cloud, shared with your team, and turned into a remote-friendly collaborative workspace.

Once you’ve collected data about your users from user feedback and analytics tools you’ll have enough information to map out the user journey.

When you have a flowchart mapped out, it’ll be easier to:

  • Identify all customer touchpoints

  • See which pathways can be simplified

  • Find opportunities to increase engagement and build customer loyalty

  • Visualize which touchpoints belong to each part of the funnel

  • Create clearer CTAs and paths so users can navigate to the next step

  • Make an impact map to clarify and prioritize product decisions

Here are four tools to create visual and intuitive maps using customer journey software:

1. Miro

Miro is an online whiteboard workspace that’s great for remote teams who want to brainstorm and put their thoughts onto a shared digital whiteboard. The software lets you create a board from scratch—so you can still use your sticky note strategy, just digitally—or use one of their pre-made templates.

Use Hotjar with Miro to bring heatmaps, survey responses, and other analytics data to life. This helps ensure you and your team make data-driven decisions while visualizing your journey. Use this tool the same way you’d use a whiteboard for prototyping, wireframing, diagramming, or roadmapping.

2. UXPressia

UXPressia’s main functionality is to create customer journey maps. If you need a little more than a whiteboard, UXPressia helps you create consistently good-looking CJMs for your customer personas. 

This tool has a beautiful and intuitive interface, perfect for those who want to build maps that impress. You can easily visualize customer touchpoints and customize the maps to your own brand.

UXPressia is great for when you need a clean design and a tool that lets multiple stakeholders map data across different departments—very useful for real-time collaboration. This tool is also a good option if you're looking for a customer journey map template to help you get started.

3. Smaply

Smaply is a mapping tool for complex customer journeys, helping you understand channel usage and backstage processes. It lets you create a repository of customer insights, including images, PDF files, and even audio files to link all your data together and get a full overview of the customer journey. Plus, it integrates with project management tools like Jira (which in turn integrates with Hotjar).

Use this tool when you have a complex customer journey and you want to keep everything in one, easy-to-navigate place.

4. Gliffy

Gliffy is a fast and easy-to-use collaborative tool that lets you draw out large diagrams. You can drag and drop shapes from their library and leave feedback comments, and it also integrates with Google Drive. It stores past map versions and tracks changes, so you can always go back to previous iterations.

Gliffy is a great option when you don’t need a fancy customer journey mapping tool, but something simple yet versatile to get your ideas ‘on paper’.

How to choose the right customer journey mapping tool

The right customer journey mapping tool depends on the complexity of your journey, your level of understanding of the journey, how steep the tool’s learning curve is, the structure of your team, and why you’re mapping the customer journey in the first place—that is, what you want to learn from it.

The most important part isn’t really the tool you pick, it’s how you use it and what you do with the insights you get.

In the next chapter, we’ll dig deeper into why you need customer journey mapping tools and how specific features can help you accomplish your customer experience management goals.

Discover how visitors experience your site

Use Hotjar to gather data and insights into the customer journey so you can make the right changes at the right time for your visitors.

FAQs about customer journey mapping tools