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A customer journey map is a visual of the stages a customer moves through with your brand — what they do, think, and feel at each step, and where your content and touchpoints fit in.
Journey maps align marketing, sales, and product around the same picture of the customer experience. They surface friction points (“no one ever converts here — why?”) and content gaps (“we have nothing for the consideration stage”).

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Three Paths

Ask the project AI:
Build a customer journey map for a B2B SaaS that sells project
management tools to small marketing agencies (5–20 people).
Use the standard 6 stages. Focus on the decision and onboarding
stages — that's where we see the most drop-off.
The AI generates a first pass with stages, actions, emotions, and touchpoints. You refine from there.

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Open the Canvas

Marketing > Customer Journey Pick + New Journey, then pick one of the three paths above.

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What Goes on the Map

A journey map has several layers. Not all are required — start with Stages and Actions and layer in the rest.

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Stages

Chronological phases of the customer experience. The classic six:
  1. Awareness — realizes they have a problem
  2. Consideration — researches solutions
  3. Decision — picks a solution (yours, hopefully)
  4. Onboarding — first days/weeks using your product
  5. Retention — ongoing use, renewal
  6. Advocacy — refers others, leaves reviews
You can add or remove stages. E-commerce might collapse Awareness and Consideration; B2B might split Decision into Evaluation and Purchase.

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Actions

What the customer does at each stage:
  • Awareness: googles “project management for agencies”
  • Consideration: signs up for your newsletter, watches a demo video
  • Decision: starts a trial, schedules a sales call
  • Onboarding: invites 3 teammates, creates first project
  • Retention: logs in weekly, uses 4+ features
  • Advocacy: leaves a G2 review, refers a peer

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Thoughts and Feelings

Their inner experience. This is where journey maps stop being theoretical.
  • Awareness: “We’re losing hours to Slack chaos. There has to be a better way.”
  • Onboarding: “Okay, this is more setup than I expected. Is this worth it?”
  • Retention: “Confident. This is now part of how we work.”
Interview 5–7 real customers for this column. Guessing at feelings produces generic journeys. Real phrases — from real people — make the map actionable. Record the calls and pull direct quotes.

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Touchpoints

Where the customer interacts with you:
  • Website, blog, YouTube videos
  • Email (welcome, nurture, billing)
  • Sales calls, chat, support
  • Product UI, in-app messages, push notifications
  • Reviews, social media, community
Each touchpoint is a chance to design the experience deliberately.

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Opportunities

Gaps, friction, or moments you could make better:
  • “The trial sign-up form asks for a phone number — 30% abandonment spike here”
  • “No onboarding email if the user doesn’t invite teammates in week 1”
  • “The advocacy stage has no asset — we don’t ask customers for reviews”
This column drives your roadmap.

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Build Your First Map

1

Pick a starting path

For most teams, Template Library is the right starting point — less staring at a blank canvas.
2

Customize the stages

Rename, add, or remove stages to match your actual funnel. Don’t force a 6-stage template if your journey is really 4 stages.
3

Fill in Actions from analytics

Pull Actions from real behavior data: top pages in GA, funnel steps in Mixpanel, CRM stages. Don’t invent actions — use what you observe.
4

Interview customers

Schedule 5–7 calls. 30 minutes each. Transcribe. Pull 3–5 quotes per stage into the Thoughts/Feelings row.
5

List touchpoints

Walk through each stage and write down every channel/asset the customer encounters.
6

Mark the opportunities

For each stage, identify 1–3 gaps or friction points. Assign an owner and a target date.
7

Share it

Export as PDF (File > Export > PDF) and walk the team through it. Pin the canvas URL in your team’s shared doc.

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Link to Content and Campaigns

Each touchpoint can link to an asset in your Hiveku project — a blog post, an email sequence, a landing page. Click a touchpoint cell and pick Link Content. Now the journey doubles as a content inventory. This also lets you answer “which campaigns map to the consideration stage?” with a filter instead of memory.

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Test It

1

Open a saved journey

Marketing > Customer Journey > your journey.
2

Walk through each stage

Click each stage header. The preview panel shows actions, thoughts, touchpoints, and linked content for that stage.
3

Export a PDF

File > Export > PDF. Open it. Verify the full map rendered (no cut-off columns).
4

Share with a stakeholder

Send the PDF or the canvas link to a teammate. Ask them which stage feels most off — that’s where to invest research or design next.

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Troubleshooting

Feed the AI more context: your specific product, a customer profile (with firmographics — company size, industry, role), what’s distinctive about your market. “Build a journey for a SaaS” gets generic output. “Build a journey for a workflow-automation SaaS targeting ops leads at 50–200 person e-commerce companies” gets specific output.
Lower-tier plans cap stages at 6. If you need more, upgrade in Settings > Plan, or consolidate adjacent stages that don’t have meaningfully different actions.
If they’re not in your Hiveku project, they need to be invited (see Invite Team), or you share a PDF export — which is read-only and works for anyone with the link.
Start with best guesses and mark every stage’s Thoughts/Feelings as [assumption]. Then run 5–7 customer interviews and replace assumptions with quotes. The map gets more useful every iteration — don’t wait for perfect data to start.
Normal. Journeys evolve as products and customers do. Revisit quarterly. A 15-minute team review every quarter beats a full rebuild once a year.

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What’s Next?

Content Pillars

Align your social content with each journey stage

Brand Guide

Keep touchpoint design consistent across the journey

CRM Contacts

Tag contacts by journey stage in the CRM