Customer Journey Map Template

About the Customer Journey Map Template

A customer journey map (CJM) or user journey map is a visual overview of how your customer experiences your product or service. Customers are the lifeblood of your business, so it’s crucial that you empathize with their pain points, wants, and needs so you can design a customer experience with them in mind. With technology constantly advancing, customer journeys are getting more and more complex. This, in turn, results in a poor customer experience. Whether in sales, marketing, product, or engineering, use a CJM to capture your customer’s experience for each persona, solve problems that arise in your products and services, and fill gaps.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map tells the story of your customer's experiences with your brand, company, and experience across all its touch points. A customer journey map (also called a user journey map) may include different touch points a customer will experience. Such as pain points, actions, touchpoints, and more. In a customer journey map, these triggers will normally be placed in a timeline order.

Customer Journey Maps represent the journey a customer will experience. Using customer journey mapping tools helps display the thought processes and emotions customers are facing from the first interaction (how they first interacted with your brand) up to the end (the goal of your map). This, in turn, will help businesses understand whether or not they are achieving their goals or not, which, in turn, can help them find solutions to improve the journey experience, which results in higher conversion rates.

How to create a customer journey map

Here are 6 steps to create a successful customer journey map, in each section we will dive a little deeper, but remember, every map is different, so you may spend more time on one step compared to another and also go back and forth certain steps as well, that is normal.

1. Set clear objectives for the map.

Identify what your goal is for this map. Identifying your ideal outcome is what will help you get started on a successful project. Based on this information, you can create your buying persona.

Ask yourself some of these questions:

• Why are you making a customer journey map?

• What goals are you directing this map towards?

• Who is it specifically about?

• What experience is it based upon?

Based on this, you may want to create a buyer persona. This is a fictitious customer with all of their demographics and psychographics who represents your average customer. Having a clear persona is helpful in reminding you to direct every aspect of your customer journey map towards them.

2. Identify your user personas and define their goals.

Next, you should conduct research. Survey customers to understand their buying journey, or ask the sales team or customer service representatives to see the feedback that was given to them or see what the most frequently asked questions have been. This should give you an idea of what specific pain points are happening and where you fill in the gaps. You would want to hear the experience of people who are interested in your product and who have interacted with you to see what their dislikes are and what can be done to improve.

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

• How did you learn about our brand?

• What first attracted you to our brand?

• What goals can we help you with?

• What problems are you trying to solve?

• How much time do you spend on our website?

• Have you ever made a purchase with us? What was the deciding factor?

• If you decided not to purchase? What pulled you away?

• How customer-friendly is our website?

• Have you ever contacted our support team? If so, on a scale of 1-10, how helpful were they?

• Are there any ways we can improve your experience?

You can use our buyer persona template to fill in any feedback you will receive.

3. Highlight target customer personas.

Once you’ve discovered all the different buyer personas that interact with your business, you will need to narrow the list down and select on one or two to focus on.

A customer journey map is a specific journey one customer takes, so having too many personas on one map will not be a precise indication of their journey and not a reflection of their true experience.

If this is your first customer journey map, we advise picking your most common buyer persona and listing the typical route they may take in engaging with your business or product for the first time. Do not worry about missing certain personas. No customer is the same. You can always use our customer journey map template to create a new map specific to another persona.

4. Identify all possible customer touch points.

Based on your research, you can now use this information to map out all the possible customer touch points your customer will face.

Touch points are instances where your customer can form an opinion of your business and where your customer interacts with your business.

List out all of the touch points your customer is currently having and then make another list of where you would like your customers to have touch points. Then check if there are any overlaps.

This step is vital as it can show you whether you are having too few or too many touch points and gives you a rough idea of how your customer journey experience currently is.

Touch points are not limited to just your website. Look at other areas such as:

• Social media channels

• Paid Ads

• Email marketing

• 3rd party reviews or mentions

Pro Tip: Run a quick Google search of your business and identify all the pages that mention your brand. Verify this using Google Analytics to see what brings in the most traffic.

This step is very important as it can help you understand things like, are the lack of touch points the reason why my customers are turning away? If there are more than expected, are they getting too overwhelmed?

5. Build the customer journey map and try it yourself!

Once you have gathered all the necessary information and identified all the touch points your customer will experience, it will finally be time to start building your own customer journey map!

Ensure that you note down every point your customer will touch your business. However, creating the map alone isn’t the end of the process. You will need to go through the journey yourself and analyze the results! By going through the journey first-hand, you will see the areas where expectations might not have been met. You can also use Jira cards to track and manage issues.

For each persona, go through every journey from beginning to end and take notes.

6. Adjust as needed

Once you have gone through each persona map, you will get a clearer understanding of what your customers are experiencing.

Ensure that all the needs are met, and pain points are addressed. No matter how big or small the changes are, every single change has an impact. And this small impact could be the deciding factor for purchase, signup, or download.

What should be included in a Customer Journey Map?

Every customer journey map will be different. No map is linear so it is okay to not have a direct A to B Journey. Below we have compiled a number of points we would include in a CJM.

1. Identify the significant milestones

In order to begin with a successful customer journey map, it is important to draft a path your customer will be journeying through to reach your business’s goal. This step is also useful as here you can already identify potential hiccups that might ensue.

2. User Engagement

This element is where you map out the details of how your customer will interact with your site or product. Think of how you would like your customer to interact with your site or product in order for you to achieve your goal.

3. Emotions

Seeing as we are seeking positive experiences, it is also important to make sure our customers are feeling relief, excitement, and happiness. Therefore, in order to mitigate any negative emotions, make sure you have a clear and concise process with appropriate branding to avoid creating any negative opinions.

4. Pain Points When your customers are experiencing a negative emotion, there is a reason why. Adding pain points to your customer journey map will help you identify the reasons why and come up with a solution on how to fix it.

5. Solutions

And finally, add solutions. Once you and your team have identified the pain points, brainstorm and implement solutions to improve your user experience.

Why use a Customer Journey Map Template?

One of the significant reasons teams use customer journey maps is to understand better how the customer experiences their product. Mapping out customer journeys helps explain why customers make their choices and which aspect of your product is most valuable to them.

Customer journey mapping helps you figure out how and when to update your product or add new features. By helping you hone in on one of the steps and features that are most important to a customer, you can better understand which updates will benefit them the most and optimize for a better customer experience.

On this journey, customers will have various exposures to a brand. Be it through online ads, customer service representatives, chatbots, etc. These are all points that will affect their customer experience and journey, and in turn, result in a conversion or sale. Understanding this journey alone is not enough. It is more effective to have a visual representation of their journey so other teams and employees can refer to them as a resource and clearly identify issues and find solutions more effectively. This is where we need a customer journey map template.

To drill down further, use our Customer Journey Map Template to better understand how different personas interact with your product. Armed with this understanding, you can create different pathways and provide a more personalized experience for your target customers.

Personalizing the customer journey leads to multiple benefits such as:

• Visualize the end-to-end customer experience

• Optimize the customer onboarding process

• Understand and evaluate complex customer experiences

• Identify pain points

• Unblock any blockers and implement solutions

• Understand the different buying personas and see what makes them tick to convert.

• Creating order in your buyer journey.

Finally, by helping you understand customer needs, a User Journey Map Template will enable you to identify the points in the journey where your customers need the most help and then target your customer support efforts towards those parts.

When to use a Customer Journey Map Template

You can map out a customer journey whenever you want to understand the customer’s perspective, solve a particular problem, or improve cross-functional collaboration inside your organization.

Before building your customer journey map, think about what you want to accomplish. That might be a problem you’re trying to solve, a product you’re trying to launch or update, or an experience you want to learn more about.

Articulate the challenges you’re facing so you can better use your CJM, then write down your objectives and follow the steps below throughout every phase of the customer journey:

Actions

What does the customer do?

For every stage of the customer journey, add what your customer is doing concerning your service or brand. From awareness to decision/purchase, what were your customer’s actions?

Imagine, if you are selling flowers online, what does your customer need to do to deliver them? Do they need to sign-up or open an account? How do they browse through your website? Where do they click? How did they find you, in the first place, through search engines or advertisements?

Touchpoint

What part of the service do they interact with?

Touchpoints are all the places on your website or in your brand journey where customers might interact with the company, your products, goods, or services. List the ones your customers are already using. Next, list the ones you would like them to use in an ideal world.

Customer thought + feeling

What is the customer thinking? What is the customer feeling?

Build a complete picture of the customer whose journey you will capture on your map. Use all the demographic and psychographic data available to you to create your personas.

Process Ownership

Who is leading?

Name who is responsible for and leading each customer journey research and findings.

Customer journey maps can be as zoomed-in or zoomed-out as you need. Working with your team, decide whether you want to plan out an idealized version or the current state of the customer journey, a day in your customer’s life, and how your brand might add value or a service blueprint.

Opportunities

Once you start mapping, you’ll begin to see gaps in the customer journey. As you develop the map, use Miro’s Customer Journey Map Template to draw up a list of resources you will need to fill in those gaps. Flesh out the map by adding those resources and tools. That way, you can more accurately predict how adding or subtracting touchpoints might impact your business and drive revenue.

To finalize, work through the CJM and see if you can answer the questions you posed at the beginning of the process. Then, you can better visualize how to meet your team’s objectives.

Once you’ve test-driven the map, make any necessary changes. You may want to repeat the process over time to add new features and updates.