In 2025, customer expectations are dynamic, shaped by AI-driven interactions, personalised experiences, and the ability to switch brands in seconds.
Loyalty is less about legacy and more about relevance. For global organizations operating across time zones and touchpoints, fragmented customer experiences aren’t just frustrating, they’re costly.
A well-structured journey map acts as both a mirror and a roadmap: it reveals what’s really happening across every customer interaction and helps you proactively shape those moments using smart technology, including AI.
In this article, we’ll explore how to build a customer journey map that’s more than a visual — one that becomes a functional asset inside your marketing automation platform, like HubSpot.
We'll also share how AI is transforming the way customer data is interpreted and used to create journeys that are more adaptive, relevant, and actionable.
What is a customer journey map (and why it needs to be smarter in 2025)
A customer journey map is a structured visualisation that helps your team decode this complexity. It outlines how customers discover, evaluate, and interact with your business across channels and over time.
But in 2025, simply plotting steps on a timeline isn’t enough. The modern journey map is a living asset, fed by data from multiple systems, website behaviour, campaign interactions, purchase patterns, even post-sale engagement, and enhanced with AI to surface hidden patterns, decision delays, and moments of drop-off or friction.
When AI is embedded into your journey mapping process, it doesn’t just report what’s happened, it helps anticipate what comes next. Predictive signals like intent scoring, churn risk, or content engagement velocity give cross-functional teams the insights they need to respond proactively rather than reactively.
To build a journey map that reflects reality (not assumptions), you need visibility into:
- Digital touchpoints: Every page viewed, email opened, or campaign interacted with
- Emotional signals: Frustration, confidence, hesitation, inferred from behaviour and sentiment data
- Post-purchase engagement: How advocacy, upsell, or support interactions shape long-term value
In the next section, we’ll explore which type of journey map you should create based on your goal, whether it’s to improve today’s experience, reimagine it for the future, or build the connective tissue between your teams and your technology.
Choosing the right type of customer journey map for your organization
Not all journey maps serve the same purpose, and for large, distributed teams, choosing the right format is crucial to turning insight into action.
Whether you're looking to streamline fragmented experiences, support a transformation initiative, or bring teams into strategic alignment, the right map provides a focused lens on what matters most.
Here are the four foundational types of customer journey maps, along with how AI can enhance the value of each:
1. Current state map
This map documents the customer experience as it exists today, across every known interaction, platform, and process. You can use this format when the goal is to identify friction points, inconsistencies, or opportunities to optimise existing journeys.
How AI adds value: Advanced analytics can surface behavioural anomalies, highlight bottlenecks, and correlate experience gaps with revenue impact in real time.
2. Future state map
This version outlines what the ideal customer journey should look like after a change — whether that’s a product rollout, tech consolidation, or market expansion. This map can be used to define how experience needs to evolve and align teams around a shared vision.
How AI adds value: Predictive modelling can simulate future customer paths and forecast the potential business outcomes of experience changes before they're implemented.
3. Day in the life map
This map zooms out beyond your brand to explore your customer’s broader context, behaviours, and frustrations. Organizations can use this map to uncover unmet needs and whitespace opportunities, particularly during early-stage product or experience design.
How AI adds value: By combining persona data with behavioural insights, AI can detect underlying motivations, emerging intent signals, or unmet expectations that aren't visible through direct touchpoints alone.
4. Service blueprint
This internal map layers the customer journey with the supporting systems, processes, and teams behind each interaction. You can use this to uncover where internal complexity is undermining external experience and where coordination breakdowns are occurring.
How AI adds value: AI tools can trace the dependencies across systems, identify where delays or handoffs occur, and recommend automation or restructuring to improve efficiency.
Each type of map serves a unique purpose. Together, they offer a framework not just for understanding customer behaviour, but for activating it across marketing, sales, service, and product functions, especially when powered by data and intelligently applied AI.
Next, we’ll walk through the step-by-step process of building a journey map that’s both actionable and future-ready.
How to build a customer journey map that drives action
For organizations operating across time zones, business units, and digital platforms, the value lies in building a journey map that doesn’t just reflect reality, but actively shapes it.
At this stage, clarity is key. The process of building your map should prioritise real customer behaviour over internal assumptions and create a foundation that scales across teams, technologies, and customer segments.
Modern journey mapping is both a human and a machine-led process. Cross-functional teams contribute first-hand knowledge of touchpoints and friction. AI then layers on insight: surfacing unseen connections, emotional patterns, and behavioural signals that are easy to miss when viewed in isolation.
Here’s how to approach the process in 2025:
- Lead with intent, not just structure
Begin by identifying what you need the map to solve: Is it to reduce churn? Accelerate deal velocity? Improve onboarding consistency? The map should be built with a clear business objective and a defined audience in mind, whether that’s new buyers, returning customers, or high-value accounts. - Build from real data, not intuition
Map out the full lifecycle using data pulled from analytics, CRM systems, content interactions, and support logs. Consider the complete arc of the journey, from first impression to post-purchase follow-up. Tools like HubSpot can centralise much of this data, while AI models can uncover behavioural signals that point to friction or intent. - Involve the right people early
A customer journey isn’t owned by one department. Marketing, sales, customer success, product, all contribute to the experience and should have a role in shaping it. The map becomes exponentially more useful when it reflects the reality seen by different teams, not just the view from the top. - Prototype before platforming
Resist the urge to build directly into a system too soon. Use flexible mapping tools like Lucidchart or Miro to shape the journey in a technology-agnostic way first. This lets you explore “what should happen” before being constrained by “what the system allows.” Once the logic is sound, then you can map the journey into platforms like HubSpot, using automation, branching logic, and AI-driven triggers to bring it to life.
The most effective journey maps are designed to evolve, fed by continuous data and responsive to shifts in customer behaviour, business priorities, and market conditions.
How to build your customer journey map into HubSpot
Once your customer journey map is complete, the real work begins: operationalising it. For globally distributed organizations, this means translating insights into scalable workflows, coordinated touchpoints, and consistent experiences, all without adding friction for internal teams.
HubSpot, with its all-in-one architecture and embedded AI capabilities, is uniquely positioned to support this kind of execution at scale.
1. Start with system alignment, not just tactics
Before launching automations or redesigning emails, ensure your customer data is structured around the journey stages you've mapped. HubSpot’s CRM objects, custom properties, and lifecycle stages should mirror the logic of your journey, allowing every team to interpret customer behaviour through the same lens.
This alignment becomes especially valuable across time zones and departments, where misaligned systems often cause gaps in communication or inconsistent outreach.
2. Use AI to power journey-based personalisation
HubSpot’s AI tools can now do more than just recommend subject lines or generate content. They help you:
- Surface behavioural trends across regions, personas, or product lines.
- Score leads more intelligently based on cross-journey engagement.
- Optimise send times for multi-time-zone audiences.
- Predict drop-off points and proactively suggest next-best actions.
These features reduce manual oversight while keeping your journey responsive and personal at scale.
3. Automate key transitions and triggers
With the map in place, identify where automation can reduce latency or guide the customer forward.
This might include:
- Triggering onboarding workflows based on deal stage movement.
- Sending targeted content when a user engages with a certain product feature.
- Notifying account managers when a strategic customer shows signs of disengagement.
Using HubSpot’s workflows and branching logic, these triggers can mirror the complexity of the real journey, without adding layers of manual coordination.
4. Create consistency across touchpoints
In a large organization, one of the biggest risks is fragmented communication. Customers might receive disconnected messaging from different teams, especially during transitions from marketing to sales to post-sale support.
With HubSpot’s unified environment, it’s possible to manage the full lifecycle in one place, meaning:
- Email branding remains consistent across functions.
- Content sequencing can be mapped across the entire funnel.
- Data doesn’t need to be exported, stitched, or reconciled to create visibility.
The result: A smoother, more coherent experience for the customer, and less complexity for your internal teams.
In the below video, Laura Susnea, Senior CX Consultant, and Matthew Creswick, CMO at Huble, discuss how HubSpot’s Customer Journey Reports can be used to map and optimize customer experiences by aligning CRM touch points with internal processes.
Unlock global customer insights and drive consistency at scale
When integrated into a platform like HubSpot, enhanced by AI-driven automation and insights, a customer journey map empowers your teams to respond to customer needs faster and more precisely, regardless of geography or organizational complexity.
At Huble, we guide organizations through every step: from strategic journey mapping to the hands-on implementation within HubSpot’s evolving ecosystem.
Together, we’ll help you transform fragmented touchpoints into a cohesive, efficient journey that supports your customers and your business ambitions alike.
Ready to elevate your customer experience and unlock the full potential of your HubSpot investment? Reach out to our team to start your journey towards smarter, AI-enabled customer engagement.
