The concept of customer journey has been widely adopted by private and public service providers over the last 10 years, as well as in academia. Customer journeys are used as a lens for viewing services from the perspective of customers when improving existing services or developing new services. Journey maps are diagrams or visualizations depicting the customer’s steps or touchpoints chronologically along a horizontal axis. The granularity and abstraction level of the steps considerably varies from distinct events to the phases of a life cycle. Although the horizontal axis always reflects time, the vertical axis is highly variable and may represent communication channels, emotions, opportunities, or a combination of these elements.

While the journey literature has rapidly grown over the last decade, a common understanding of the basic journey’s constituents has been lacking. Consequently, a plethora of nonstandard descriptions and formats have evolved. Given the prevalence of customer journey methods among practitioners, companies, and academics, there has been surprisingly little focus on formalism, modeling, and theory building.

The target group of CJML are private and public service providers on the one hand and researchers and consultants on the other. Typical target roles in a service-providing organization are business developers, service or product owners, service designers, and system architects. Their main function spans several phases of a service’s life cycle: design and development, operation and maintenance, quality and improvement, and research and innovation.

The challenge has been to make the language simple enough to accommodate inexperienced modelers with varying domain knowledge while maintaining an expressive visual language that can capture the intended semantics of each target user’s domain.

CJML is a process language that contrasts general-purpose modeling languages such as UML and BPMN, which are built from a software- and business-centric perspective. CJML is inherently designed from the perspective of a human end-user, often referred to as the “outside-in” perspective.