Foundations of Customer Journey Thinking

If you’ve ever mapped a process only to realize the customer’s experience didn’t match the flow, you’re not alone. Too often, we focus on internal efficiency while overlooking the human journey—where frustration, delight, and expectation shape outcomes. This section reorients your thinking: from pure process logic to customer-centric design grounded in BPMN.

Here, we lay the essential building blocks for modeling real customer journeys. You’ll learn how to translate everyday CX concepts—like touchpoints, emotional highs and lows, and key decision moments—into meaningful structure within BPMN. It’s not about changing your tools; it’s about changing how you see the journey.

By the end of this section, you’ll have the vocabulary and methodology to design models that don’t just show what happens, but how it feels—making collaboration, stakeholder alignment, and experience improvement far more effective.

What This Section Covers

Let’s explore the foundational elements every modeler should understand to create truly customer-centered BPMN diagrams.

• Understanding Touchpoints, Moments of Truth, and Channels: Learn how to define and represent touchpoints and micro-moments across digital and physical channels in your BPMN diagrams, ensuring every interaction is accounted for.
• Mapping Customer Emotions and Expectations to Process Steps: See how to link emotional states like frustration or satisfaction to process elements like wait times and handoffs—making invisible experiences visible.
• Identifying Actors: Customers, Frontline Staff, and Back Office: Differentiate between customer, frontline, and back-office roles in your BPMN model to maintain clarity and accountability in every journey path.
• Scoping a Journey: From Trigger to Outcome: Master the art of defining clear start and end points for journeys, avoiding overly broad or narrow models that hinder decision-making.

By the end you should be able to…

• Define and represent key touchpoints and BPMN interactions across channels like web, mobile, and in-person.
• Map customer emotions and expectations onto BPMN process steps to align internal performance with perceived experience.
• Properly identify and visualize all actors—customers, frontline staff, and back-office teams—within BPMN pools and lanes.
• Define the correct scope for a customer journey using BPMN start and end events, avoiding common pitfalls.
• Use BPMN to model moments of truth in BPMN with precision, ensuring critical experience points are not overlooked.
• Apply these principles to real-world scenarios, from service recovery to onboarding, with greater empathy and clarity.

These aren’t just technical skills—they’re CX terminology for modelers that transform how teams talk about and improve customer experience. With each chapter, you’ll gain the confidence to build models that serve people, not just processes.