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Customer journey map templates are an excellent tool for getting inside your customer’s heads and exposing areas of your business that need improvement.
If you have never used one in your business before, here is a look at what a customer journey map template is, why your organization needs one, and best practices for mapping the customer journey.
It's a visual representation of every customer touchpoint and what your customer goes through.
A customer journey map template is simply a tool for visualizing an individual customer’s experience with your organization across multiple phases of their journey.
This typically includes the following stages of the sales cycle:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
- Delivery and Use
- Advocacy
At each stage, you can evaluate the customer’s perspective by noting their goals, expectations, activities, touchpoints with your organization, and overall satisfaction with their user experience.
You can then evaluate your organization’s role in the experience by noting the business activities involved, the responsible departments, and the technologies utilized for each customer persona.
While journey mapping can be a helpful tool for managers to use on their own, the most effective customer journey mapping exercises utilize real input and research from actual customers, so you can get a deeper understanding of the buyer journey and ideas to create exceptional customer experiences.
That way, a customer journey map can also be an empathy map, showing that you understand what potential customers go through.
Why map out the customer journey?
There are many reasons why you would need a map for every type of customer journey. To improve the customer experience, have better customer retention, help the sales team crush business goals, to collect customer feedback, and much more.
To see the world from your customer’s point of view
One of the main benefits of using a customer journey map template free is that it allows you to see the entire customer experience from your customer’s point of view. You may think that you know your customer base and every customer scenario, but the reality could be vastly different.
You probably already know your business operations inside out. However, by putting yourself in your customer’s shoes, you are in a much better position to serve and delight them, as you'll understand every customer journey phase and customer sentiment more accurately.
It also works on potential customers and loyal customers, so you can map out each type of customer journey instead of just one that you are familiar with.
To help employees develop empathy for their customers
Having empathy for customers and their perspective is key to offering good customer service. By mapping out the entire customer journey, your employees are better able to see and understand what your average customers go through. In turn, they can provide an improved customer service experience.
This is why a customer journey map is often called an empathy map. It puts your customer service and customer success teams in the shoes of your customers, guiding them through product experiences. This way, those teams can not only develop empathy, but also come up with potential solutions to customer problems and develop opportunities for innovation.
For example, product teams can understand the daily activities that their target customer persona goes through. When this happens, you can expect better customer loyalty as you'll make better-informed decisions around customer experience.
To identify pain points and areas of improvement
This is the ultimate goal of your customer journey map editable template. Customer journey mapping exercises expose areas of the business where customer expectations are not being met. As a business leader, you can then use this information to make necessary improvements.
For example, a customer experience map can reveal that some customer segments run into problems when they want to make a purchase decision, or in the consideration stage.
Tips for creating a customer journey map
You don't need to use a customer journey mapping tool to create a proper customer journey and make more data-driven decisions about your current customer journey. With our tips and customer journey mapping template, you can create a successful customer journey map in no time, resulting in happy customers and more revenue.
Do some research ahead of time
Customer journey mapping exercises are the most effective when they are based on real research with real customers. Before setting out to complete your customer journey map template, try to gather feedback from existing customers. You can do this by taking surveys, conducting interviews, or hosting focus groups.
Some of the ways you can do research include:
- Customer surveys
- Customer interviews
- Researching online reviews
- Collecting mentions and sentiment from social media posts
Create one for each buyer persona
If your organization has multiple buyer personas, it is worth mapping out the customer journey for each persona separately.
This can give you insight into specific pain points that each type of customer may have. If the same pain points occur across multiple personas, widespread changes may be necessary.
There will be different customer pain points, different customer actions, and with them, different user jouneys.
Tailor your user journey map to your industry
There is not a “one-size-fits-all” customer journey map for all industries. For example, an ecommerce customer journey map template free may be slightly different from a b2b customer journey map template. Each map fits different customer types and one specific user persona.
To ensure that your customer journey map is relevant and useful for your company, don’t be afraid to tailor it to suit your exact needs. For example, you may want to dive deeper into certain stages within the sales cycle, or you may even want to adjust the evaluation criteria for each stage.
Prioritize action points
After completing your customer journey map template pdf, make sure to include specific action points that you would like to take based on your findings. If you are feeling overwhelmed with everything that needs to be done, try to prioritize tasks and action points based on what is needed the most.
Revisit every 3-5 years or more often
Customer expectations and the business environment can change fast. Always make sure to update and reevaluate your customer journey map regularly. For some companies, this can be once every few years.
If your organization is growing or if you are in a fast-paced industry, you may need to revisit it more frequently and document new customer behaviors.
As you collect more customer feedback, you may find it necessary to update your map to reflect each customer journey stage and customer profile more often.
