Use the customer journey map template to better understand customer touchpoints, needs, motivations, and obstacles by illustrating the customer journey from start to finish. When possible, use this map to document and summarize interviews and observations with real people rather than relying on your hunches or assumptions.
Customer journey maps are a visual representation of a customer’s experience with a brand, product, or service. Journey maps often include key steps a customer takes, their interactions, goals, positive moments, negative moments, and more.
Journey maps are crucial for understanding the customer experience, allowing teams to understand what pain points users or customer experience, create better solutions for the end-user, reduce frustrations, and make areas of opportunity clear from the onset.
Customer journey maps help teams:
- Step into a customer’s shoes and understand their perspective
- Gain empathy to understand customer needs, perceptions, and overall experience
- Identify problems and roadblocks that a customer may experience
- Align with other team members and stakeholders to solve cross-functional problems
How to use the customer journey map template
Follow these step-by-step instructions to build a robust customer journey map from the template.
1. Establish your customer scenario
Choose a customer persona or segment that you want to understand, and decide on a specific scenario that your customer would find themselves in (i.e.: browsing, booking, attending, and rating a local city tour).
If possible, choose a user persona informed by customer data and user research. This prevents teams from making incorrect assumptions and ensures that your target audience benefit from any changes in the customer journey.
2. Define the steps your customer or buyer persona takes
What steps does the customer persona take during the scenario you defined? List out each step and describe any smaller steps that are involved. Think about what someone may experience during this step and what the desired future-state of that experience would be.
Dig Deep: For each of the following sections, ask the following questions:
- Entice: How does somebody initially become aware of this process? Where is the starting point?
- Enter: What do potential customers experience as they begin the step or process?
- Engage: In the core moments in the process, what happens?
- Exit: What do people typically experience as the process ends?
- Extend: What happens after the experience is over?
3. List the different interactions customers might have
Mention what interactions users face during each step of the process. This includes the people they see or talk to, where they are, and the digital touchpoints or physical influences used to move them into the funnel.
This could be anything from learning about a new product from a promoted social media post, to contacting customer support for an issue the user faces. Keep in mind that interactions and touchpoints can and should be different depending on where someone found you, or how they got to your website.
4. Think about the customer’s goals and motivations
Step into the customer's shoes. For each step, what is the customer's primary goal or motivation? What can you do to fulfill their needs? For an emphasis on how your customer or user is feeling during the journey, an empathy map can help you tap into their thoughts and emotions.
5. Highlight the customer’s positive moments
List the steps users found enjoyable, productive, or motivating. Take inspiration from positive moments to improve weak areas. Positive moments can help you to gain a deeper understanding of your customers and how to communicate with them on other channels.
6. Consider a customer’s negative moments
List which steps the user found frustrating, angering, or time-consuming. Identifying pain points, in particular, helps to make changes and improve the user experience.
For more instructions, check out our guide to creating customer journey maps.
Tips for creating better customer journey maps
- Use market research to guide your assumptions: Conduct surveys or interviews that ask customers how they came to learn about your company and how they interact with your brand. You may be surprised. Real customer interactions will make your journey map more accurate and successful.
- Revisit and optimize the customer journey map: Your customer journey map will likely need to be updated and adjusted over time. Just as customers' wants, needs, and expectations change, so must your strategy.
- Share the customer journey map with involved stakeholders: The user journey will likely span multiple efforts in your organization, so be sure to let stakeholders know if they can help make the buyer journey more customer-focused.
- Get real customer feedback: While you should be creating your customer journey map based on interviews and real-world data, try validating your assumptions by getting feedback from a customer on how accurate the user experience matches the different stages in your finished map.
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