A customer journey map is a critical tool in understanding complex customer journeys, enabling companies to become more customer-centric and address customer needs. It encourages looking at the brand story from the customer perspective, identifying pain points, and nurturing relationships across every phase of the journey. Customer journey maps identify meaningful customer behaviors, look at the customer journey across multiple channels, and reduce customer pain points while motivating them to take the next step. There are two key types of customer journey maps: strategic and tactical, with strategic roadmaps providing the business functionality and mission, and tactical maps illustrating how that happens on various channels. Building a customer journey map requires defining a clear understanding of what you want the customer to do, creating a baseline journey, researching common objections, brainstorming creative solutions, and testing hypotheses. Ultimately, a customer journey map is a complex series of different customer touchpoints with guardrails and levers used to motivate customers and bring them back to the journey when they stray.