Everything you need to know about customer journey maps and 25 customer journey map templates to help you get started
Customer journey maps are used to anticipate the needs and motivations of customers as they embark on various journeys in relation to your brand.
Not only does mapping out these processes step-by-step help you to understand and visualize the journey your customers make with your brand, but it also improves and streamlines this process over time so you can provide a memorable and positive customer experience in the future.
A customer journey map is a visual representation of the different stages your customers go through when encountering your brand and provides a detailed picture as to the customer experience. While many use customer journey mapping to visualize the buying process, customer journey mapping can also be used for other journeys such as the sales process, or onboarding.
Some key features of a customer journey map is the division of the journey into specific stages, the use of a customer persona (a profile of your target customer), a consideration of all touchpoints where your customer interacts with your brand throughout their journey, as well as a really thoughtful approach to how your customer feels during the journey — what their actions, thoughts, and obstacles are.
A customer journey map can be a hugely beneficial thing for any business by helping them clearly see the journey that their customer experiences with their brand and enabling them to understand where they can improve for the future to provide a better customer experience. For those of you looking to create a customer journey for the buying process, assessing the journey, as well as your customer persona in detail, will make it easier to convert inbound leads into customers by reducing friction at each touchpoint, thereby allowing leads to more easily progress through the journey and turn into customers.
However, customer journey maps, when done right, also have the added benefit of showing you where your actual product or services are lacking. By putting yourself into your customer’s shoes, you can more easily identify desirable new features and solutions you can introduce to solve your customers’ problems.
Customer journey maps aren’t beneficial for simply external purposes; crafting a customer journey map can clarify internal roles and processes by pinpointing where each team is interacting with the customer and at which stages, as well as effectively keeping all teams within your business aligned on the same customer-focused goals.
Further reading: Strengthening customer loyalty
Building your customer journey map can be simpler with a template. Check out our range of customer journey map templates in Adobe Express:
Before you begin to create your customer journey map, it’s crucial that you identify why you’re creating your map in the first place and what you’re looking to achieve. Setting goals before you begin will make sure that you are focusing on the right aspects during the crafting of your map, as well as ensure that you are creating the right kind of customer journey map to fit your purpose. Some examples of goals might include increasing sales and retention, or improving onboarding.
A customer persona is a document that outlines exactly who your ideal customer is. While information such as age, gender, location, and industry are all important, your customer persona document should go deeper by including information such as motivations, frustrations, habits, lifestyle, income, job level, and professional skills. When researching your customer persona, you may choose to talk directly to your customers, use surveys to collect information, examine your social media analytics, practice social listening, or check in with your customer service reps.
Further reading: How to create a buyer persona in four steps
Now it’s time to loosely begin mapping out the journey your customers go through. If you’re creating a customer journey map of the sales process, you might start by considering where your customers first encounter your brand, through to what interactions they have with your business, before finally making a purchase. Make a list that covers all the key steps involved, including whether your leads are inbound or outbound, how they discover your brand, if they visit a certain number of pages on your website before deciding to make a purchase, and if they have any contact with your customer service or sales team, among others. A customer journey map template can help you visualize and lay out the appropriate stages in your process, before adding in the details.
A customer buying journey will typically feature four distinct stages:
Following along with the journey you’ve begun mapping, it’s time to work out where your touchpoints are, a.k.a. all the ways in which your brand encounters a customer at any stage in the journey.
You can easily categorize your touchpoints into digital customer gateways, such as social media, online ads, emails, live chat, website content, influencers, video demos, and product reviews, or physical customer touchpoints like events, print marketing materials, product packaging, and business cards.
Listing every touchpoint will provide an even clearer picture of when and where your brand makes contact with your customers throughout their journey.
Now it’s time to take your list of stages that your customer experiences with your brand, and start combining it with your touchpoints. Begin by defining your customer journey map stages and then go into detail for each stage on what exactly your customer is experiencing and at what stages your touchpoints are occurring. After you’ve completed this, it’s time to think a little deeper by adding actions, emotions, and pain points.
Using the research you carried out on your customer persona, try to predict how your customers feel at each stage, where they might have questions, what actions they may take, any pain points they could encounter, and what their motivations are at any particular moment.
Keep things flexible — not all these elements will be easy to associate with specific stages or touchpoints, so feel free to make the connections where you see them. If you’re working with a customer journey map template in Adobe Express, it’s simple to adapt your design to your liking by adding or removing sections as you see fit.
Now it’s time to begin sharing your map with your team for feedback and additional thoughts that you might have not considered. You may also want to run a test of your customer journey map to ensure that you haven’t neglected to include any touchpoints or learnings along the way. Once your customer map is complete, you can then share it with your wider team as well as use it to look for opportunities for improvement.
A customer journey map will provide the ultimate clarity on where you can do better by shining a light on any obvious gaps in your process or areas in which an additional touchpoint may be necessary to improve your customer experience. While the hard work might be out of the way once your customer journey map is complete, the real benefit of this exercise is to understand the customer’s point of view and where you can continue to improve in the future.
Ready to get started? Check out our range of customer journey map templates in Adobe Express:
