The customer journey map is a visual representation of the grand journey your customer takes from awareness to prospective buyer to loyal and devoted customer, highlighting touchpoints where customers interact with your brand, identifying gaps in service and opportunities for improvement. The five stages of the customer journey are awareness, consideration, conversion, retention, and brand loyalty, each with its own set of goals and objectives, such as reaching potential customers through advertising or providing exceptional user experiences to encourage repeat business. To create a customer journey map, one must first identify objectives, then develop personas representing target audiences, collect data on the journey, map stages, visualize and analyze the journey, and continually improve the map's effectiveness by surveying customers, automating data collection, and tweaking for specific industries.