What is a Customer Journey Map and How Does it Work? [Free Templates]

You can map the customer journey to gain a better understanding of your customers and their needs. It allows you to visualize the various stages a customer goes through when they interact with your business, their thoughts, feelings and pain points.

It’s been shown that friction from these pain points can cost big: In 2019, ecommerce friction was estimated to have cost US revenue of 213 billion.

Customer journey maps can help identify areas of improvement and problems in your customer experience. We’ll explain the process of customer journey mapping and give you a template to help you create your own map. Let’s get started!

What’s a customer journey map?

What is customer experience mapping? Customer journey maps are a tool you can use to understand customer experience. Customer journey maps can be visual representations of the customer’s journey, from beginning to end. They include all touchpoints along the journey.

There are four main stages to your sales funnel. Knowing these can help you map your customer journey.

1. Awareness or inquiry
2. Interest, comparison, or decision-making
3. Purchase or preparation
4. Installation, activation, and feedback

Customer journey maps can be used to track customer behavior and pinpoint where customers experience pain points. This information can be used to improve customer experience and give customers a positive experience with you company.

To create your maps, you can use customer journey mapping software such as Excel, Google sheets, Google Decks or infographics, diagrams, illustrations, and Google Sheets. You don’t need customer-journey mapping tools. These maps can be created with a blank wall and a set of sticky notes.

Although they can be written on a sticky note or scribbled on paper, it is often easier to create digital journeys. This way you have a record and can share your journey map with colleagues. To make your life easier, we’ve included free templates for customer journey mapping at the end.

Customer journey maps – The benefits

Customer journey mapping provides a great way to understand how customers feel about your business touchpoints. This knowledge will allow you to create strategies that are more helpful for each customer touchpoint.

They will keep coming back if you give them what they want. There are also some great benefits that come with it.

Improved customer support

Your customer journey map will highlight the moments when you can add fun to a customer’s day. It will also highlight any issues that your customer is having. These moments will help you to address them before your customer does. Watch your customer service metrics rise!

Marketing strategies that work

Advertising to your customers will be easier if you have a better understanding of their motivations and who they are.

Let’s suppose you sell a product or service that aids sleep. Your potential customer base would be young working mothers who are short on time.

Your marketing materials can be sympathetic to their struggles. We know that more than half of working moms sleep less than 6 hours a night. We can’t give you more, but we can show you how to make the most of the 6 hours you have. Get better sleep tonight with our Sleep Aid.

The goal of customer personas is to show potential target audiences and their motivations, such as working moms who want the best out of their sleep hours.

Product advancements and service improvements

You can map your customer’s journey to gain insight into what motivates or discourages them from buying. This will give you insight into when and why they return items, as well as which items they purchase next. This information will allow you to identify potential cross-sell opportunities.

More enjoyable and efficient user experiences

Customer journey mapping can help you identify where customers are stuck and bounce off your website. You can use the map to guide you, fixing any problems as you go. The end result will be a logical, smooth-running website or app.

Customer-focused mentality

Instead of focusing on business success, a customer roadmap can help you shift your focus to the customer. Instead of asking “How can I increase profits?” consider “what would best serve my customer?” Profits will come when your customer is first.

Customer journey maps can help you improve customer experience and increase sales. They are a valuable tool in your customer experience strategy.

How to create customer journey maps

There are many ways to create a customer experience map. However, regardless of how you map your customer’s journey, there are some steps you should follow.

Step 1. Step 1.

Are you trying to encourage the adoption of a product? Perhaps you have noticed problems with customer service. Perhaps you are looking for new opportunities for your business. Whatever your goal, before you start mapping the customer journey, make sure you have set it.

Step 2. Choose your buyer personas

First, identify your customers and their needs to create a customer journey map. You will need to identify your buyer personas in order to do this.

Buyer personas are representations or caricatures of people who represent your target audience. These personas are based on real-world data and strategic goals.

Create your buyer personas if you don’t have them yet. Use our step-by-step guide to create one.

Your customer journey map should focus on one or two of your personas. You can always go back to create maps for the remaining personas.

Step 3. Step 3. Perform user research

Interview past or prospective customers in your target market. It is not a good idea to make assumptions about your customer journey. Learn directly from the source about their journeys, their pain points, and their love for your brand.

This can be done by setting up interviews and sending out surveys. Make sure you look at the most commonly asked questions. You are missing out if you don’t have an FAQ chatbot like Heyday that automates customer support and pulls data for your company.

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You should also speak with your customer service team and sales team to learn more about how you interact with customers.

Step 4. List customer touchpoints

Next, track and record the customer’s interactions online and offline with the company.

Customer touchpoints are any interaction your customer has with your brand. This could include your social media posts, where they might be found on your website, in your brick-and mortar store, ratings, reviews, or out of home advertising.

Write down as many as possible, then put yourself in the shoes of your customer and go through the process. Not only should you track the touchpoints but also note how you felt at each point and why. These data will eventually be used as a guideline for your map.

Step 5. Build your customer journey map

Now that you’ve done your research, and gathered as much information possible, it’s time to get into the fun stuff. All of the information that you have gathered should be compiled in one place. Next, map out your customer journey! The templates below can be used for an easy plug and play execution.

Step 6. Analyze your customer journey map

After the customer journey has been defined, you’ll want to experience it. To fully understand the customer experience, you must experience it yourself.

As you go through your sales funnel, consider ways to improve the customer experience. Analyzing your customer’s needs and pain points will help you identify areas where they might abandon your site or become frustrated with your app. You can then take action to improve it. These can be listed in your customer journey map under “Opportunities” or “Action plan items”.

Types and uses of customer journey maps

There are many types of customer journey maps. To get you started, we’ll show you four: current state and future state, a day of your life, empathy maps, and a day in the past. Each one will be broken down and explained to you how they can help your business.

Current state

This customer journey map is about your business today. It will allow you to visualize the customer experience when they are trying to achieve their goal with your product or business. The current state customer journey identifies and addresses pain points.

Future state

This customer journey map is about what you want your company to be. This is your ideal future state. It will help you to visualize the best-case scenario for your customer when they try to achieve their goal with your product or business.

Once you have your future customer journey mapped out you will be able see where you want and how you can get there.

Day-in-the-life

A day-in the life customer journey is similar to the current state customer experience, but it aims at highlighting aspects of a customer’s daily life that are not directly related to your brand.

Day-in-the life mapping tracks everything the consumer does throughout their day. It shows how they feel and think about a particular area of focus, with or without your company.

Knowing how consumers spend their time can help you to better plan where your brand communication can be effective. Are they on Instagram during lunch? Do they feel open to new products and optimistic about discovering them? If so, you should target your ads on that platform directly to them.

Depending on your target audience, day-in-the life customer journey examples may look very different.

Empathy maps

Empathy maps do not follow a specific sequence of events during the user journey. Instead, they are divided into four sections that track what people say about their experience with your product.

After user research and testing, you should create empathy maps. These maps can be viewed as an account of everything that was observed during user research and testing, when you asked questions about how people feel using products. Empathy maps can provide unexpected insights into users’ needs and desires.

Customer journey map templates

These templates can be used to inspire your customer journey map creation.

Template for customer journey map:

The future state customer journey mapping template

A day-in-the-life customer journey map template:

An empathy map template:

A customer journey map example

It is helpful to see examples of customer journey mapping. We’ve created an example customer journey mapping to give you an idea of how they look.

Buyer Persona

Curious Colleen is a 32-year old female who is married to a man with a double-income and has no children. Colleen and her partner work independently. They have limited research skills but lack the time. She is motivated by high quality products but frustrated by the tedious task of sifting through information to find the right information.

What are their main goals and needs?

Colleen is in dire need of a new vacuum. Colleen’s main goal is to find a vacuum that won’t break again.

What are their struggles.

She is upset that her vacuum broke and she must spend time looking for a replacement. Colleen believes that the vacuum she had previously purchased was of poor quality.

What are their tasks?

Colleen must do extensive research on vacuums in order to find one that won’t break. Colleen must then order a vacuum and have it delivered at her home.

Opportunities:

Colleen wants to quickly understand the benefits of our product. How can we make it easier? Colleen believes in social proof as a factor that influences decision-making. How can we show our happy customers more effectively? This is a great opportunity to restructure the website information hierarchy and implement customer service tools to get Colleen the information she requires faster. We can create social campaigns and compare our competitors with them.

Action plan:

1. Install a chatbot to help customers like Colleen get the answers they need quickly and easily.
2. A comparison tool to show the benefits and costs of competitors and us can be created.
3. All landing pages should include benefit-forward statements.
4. To foster social proof, create a social campaign devoted to UGC.
5. Send out surveys to gather customer feedback. When possible, gather testimonials from this area.

Once you have a better understanding of the customer journey mapping process, you can apply these techniques to your business strategy. You can quickly reduce stress for your customers and your staff by tracking customer behavior and pinpointing where they experience pain points.

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