Customer journey map
A structured picture of the stages a customer moves through — purchase, onboarding, adoption, value realization, renewal, expansion — and the touchpoints, owners, and success criteria at each.
A customer journey map is a deliberate description of the path a customer travels with your product: the stages (purchase, onboarding, adoption, value realization, renewal, expansion, advocacy), what the customer is trying to accomplish at each, which touchpoints happen there, who owns them, and what "good" looks like before the customer should move on. It turns the vague ambition of "a great customer experience" into an inspectable design.
For CS teams the map is not a poster; it is an operating plan. Each stage gets entry and exit criteria, its own plays and automation, and its own metrics — time-to-value for onboarding, adoption depth for the middle game, forecast accuracy for the renewal window. The map also exposes gaps with unusual clarity: the stage nobody owns, the handoff where context is dropped, the segment whose journey was never designed at all. Journey automation then executes the routine touchpoints so the designed journey actually happens for every account, not just the loudest ones.