Definition of a customer journey map
A customer journey map features visuals to demonstrate how customers engage with your company, starting from their discovery of your company to their purchases. Common elements of a map include touchpoints, pain points and action points.
It’s typically arranged in chronological order to create a storyline of the average customer’s journey with your brand. These maps can be created using different formats, including diagrams, illustrations and infographics.
Benefits of creating a journey map
The mapping process has several purposes, including:
- Identifying gaps: Maps might help you identify gaps between departments, services and products. You might determine if customers have access to the necessary information and resources to create a seamless experience.
- Creating empathy: Deeply understanding your customers helps your team serve customers effectively. It can encourage them to look at situations from a different perspective to treat customers with care. The information may also inspire improvements to your products or services.
- Discovering new pain points: Mapping can help you find new pain points that you hadn’t previously considered, letting you improve existing products, create new products or market current products more effectively.
- Aligning internally: Having the customer journey map to guide your team helps everyone align around the common understanding of the customer. It can help the team work efficiently.
Types of customer journey maps
There are various types of customer journey mapping templates, including:
- Current state: This type of map evaluates how customers interact with your business to describe the current customer experience. It can help you identify issues or gaps.
- Day-in-the-life: These maps analyze the lives and actions of customers during an average day. This analysis helps you determine their pain points and how new services and products could address them.
- Future state: Future state maps describe how you want customers to interact with your business in the future. It helps identify ways to change the customer journey to accommodate new experiences or services.
- Service blueprint: This option helps you visualize the processes, technologies, policies and people that go into customer touchpoints.
How to create a customer journey map
Customer journey mapping templates can help you construct a customized version for your business following these steps.
1. Identify your objectives
Clearly define the goals and audience for your customer journey map. For example, to improve the online experience for your web-based business, you might focus on mobile apps and website SEO. The map would be for your web and marketing departments.
2. Create a customer persona
Identify your target audience to establish a customer persona. This can help you understand how your customer base interacts with your brand.
Analyze the demographics and age of your most frequent customers. If you have a variety of customers, you can create several personas and customer journey maps.
3. Conduct research
Get feedback from interested customers to improve the accuracy of your customer persona and journey map. You might try these methods:
- Social media: Analyze engagement, including posts your company is tagged in and what people say about your products.
- Website analytics: This information can tell you the geographical location of your customers, how many clicks your site gets, which pages and items receive the most engagement and how long the average customer spends on each page.
- Questionnaires: This customer feedback may give you valuable, honest information directly from customers.
- Anecdotal research: Listen to customer feedback and experiences on the phone, online or in person.
4. Outline customer touchpoints
For an online business, touchpoints may include:
- Ad clicks
- Online shopping
- Reading blog posts and customer reviews
- Watching video content
- Using live chat or email customer service
If you operate a brick-and-mortar store, some touchpoints are:
- In-person traffic
- Using customer loyalty programs
- Trying in-store samples
- Viewing product displays
- Interacting with staff members
- Seeing ads for sales
5. Take the customer journey yourself
You may gain a better understanding of the buyer experience by going through touchpoints yourself. For example, if you have an e-commerce site, you might navigate through your individual product pages on both mobile and desktop devices to see whether the design is accessible on both. This can help you identify ways to make the experience faster and easier to create a customer-centric organization.
6. Resolve issues and make changes
You can use the information you gather to identify changes and develop actionable steps to create an effective customer journey. Then, revisit the customer journey to see how the changes affect the experience.
Customer journey map template
A customer journey map template like this one can serve as a guide.
- Objective: [List the goals and the departments or people the map will aid.]
- Customer persona: [Detail characteristics of your target audience.]
- Data: [Outline the customer’s patterns and concerns when interacting with your company based on your research.]
- Touchpoints: [Explain where and how often the customer interacts with your business.]
- Personal experience of the customer’s journey: [Describe your thoughts and impressions of the customer journey.]
- Resolutions and changes: [Provide a plan for improvements by addressing gaps and needs.]
Customer journey mapping example
Seeing customer journey map examples may help you customize your template.
- Objective: This map is for the internal marketing department to identify effective marketing strategies.
- Customer persona: Janett is a single woman in her early thirties. She lives in a condo in Nashville, Tennessee, where she has a demanding but successful career as a reporter. Because of the unpredictable nature of her job, she primarily shops for clothing and accessories online.
- Data: Janett goes online about once a week to browse clothes for work and leisure. Janett usually finds sites on social media platforms through ads and influencer recommendations. She wants the clothing to be chic and unique, and she wants a simple return policy or shipping process. She clicks on the photo for each item, analyzing it for up to a minute.
- Touchpoints: Janett read our item reviews and FAQs to learn about our products and policies.
- Personal experience of the customer’s journey: The photos on your social media platforms and website would benefit from better lighting to help customers imagine what the pieces look like in person. On the site, I’m unable to zoom in on the items to see the details of the material. This raised more questions about an item’s fit and quality.
- Resolutions and changes: Hire a professional photographer to take new photos of our products. We may also need a web developer to prioritize image quality and accessibility.
FAQs about customer journey mapping templates
Do I need multiple user journey maps?
The number of journey maps you create depends on your objectives. Creating a journey map for different personas can help you customize your approach to more effectively improve your brand. If you want to focus on a particular buyer persona, you might only create one map.
Who should be involved in creating customer journey maps?
Collaborating with different departments may help you create a well-rounded user journey map with different perspectives and data. Your customer service team can share common issues they encounter. Marketing team members have analytics on how customers interact with marketing campaigns. Product designers can give details about current models and the feasibility of proposed changes.
What tools should I use to create a map?
You can use general software for creating diagrams and infographics, such as Visio or PowerPoint. Specialized customer mapping software, such as Custellence and Smaply, is available. However, it may be more cost-effective to use products you already have and know how to use.
