Table of contents
What is a customer journey map?
What does a customer journey map include?
Here’s how to gather information for a customer journey map from customers and target audiences:
What are the benefits of using customer journey maps?
How do you create a customer journey map?
Types of customer journey maps
Customer journey map templates
What is a customer journey map template?
To succeed in business, it's important to understand how your customers' needs and behaviours are changing over time. A transactional relationship is not enough anymore; you need to engage with them more effectively and build long-term, trusted relationships. One way to do that is to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and observe from their perspective.
That's where a customer journey map template helps. An integrated customer journey map plots the various stages a person goes through in their purchase cycle when interacting with your company or brand. This lets you better understand customer journeys, enhance the customer experience and increase Customer Lifetime Value.
So how exactly can you create an exceptional customer journey map and use it to effectively manage your customer journeys?
What is a customer journey map?
A customer journey map is a diagrammatic representation of a customer's experience with your brand. It helps businesses to understand the customer's journey and touchpoints with the brand and identify pain points and opportunities for improvement. Since it records individual interactions, a journey map is unique to every customer or to a group of customers with similar attributes.
What does a customer journey map include?
Touchpoints – Channels and interfaces where the customer interacts with your business.
Moments of truth – High-impact experiences that define how customers perceive and relate to your brand.
Potential customer feelings – Alignment of customer experiences at every stage to the most likely customer sentiment.
A customer journey map typically includes a timeline of events that reflects the customer's experience throughout the entire customer lifecycle. This timeline can include various events such as the customer's first visit to the company's website, interactions with customer service, marketing and sales communications, purchase and product delivery, and post-purchase support.
While tracking your customer journey, make sure that you customise and fine-tune it by researching and interacting with your target audience. This ensures that the customer journey map accurately reflects their actual experience and needs, letting you create more relevant and personalised customer experiences. To achieve this, you need to combine first-party customer data and analysis with customer feedback and target audience research.
Here’s how to gather information for a customer journey map from customers and target audiences:
What are the benefits of using customer journey maps?
When designed using thorough research and data-led insights, a customer journey map is a powerful tool that helps businesses boost customer-centricity.
Here are some more benefits of using customer journey maps:
92% of customers agree that the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. (Salesforce State of Connected Customer report)
Customer journey maps point to areas where customer experience can be improved, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. For example, you can use customer journey maps to compare the average time taken to resolve customer queries at different points of contact. This lets you identify where support can be improved and redesigned so that queries are addressed within consistent time frames across all touchpoints.
Understanding changing customer needs and expectations is the #1 challenge for sales organisations. (Salesforce State of Sales report)
Mapping the customer journey allows businesses to track the behaviour of their customers at each touchpoint, providing valuable insights into how they interact with the brand. This lets you identify changes in behaviour, shifts in preferences, priorities, and expectations.
How do you create a customer journey map?
Types of customer journey maps
Each customer journey map serves a specific purpose and offers different insights. Choosing the right type can help businesses achieve their objectives more effectively.
A few of the top customer journey map types are:
Customer experience map: Lets you measure a range of factors, such as brand consistency, purchase convenience, and service efficacy. It allows you to identify your business's weaknesses and strengths when offering a delightful customer experience.
Current state of the customer journey map: Beneficial for optimising operations across points of contact. It gives clear, visual insights into top-performing and least-performing touchpoints regarding delivered value.
Future state of the customer journey map: Helps you lay the path for multiple teams regarding future performance and operations scaling. For example, it informs your marketing team about the type of digital assets they should build to support the ideal customer journey.
Empathy customer journey map: Understanding how customers feel, think, and act about your product, services, and brand is critical to business growth. This map lets you analyse customer sentiments at all engagement points and learn how and where you must make minimal but relevant changes for maximum impact.
Device experience journey map: In a mobile-first environment, smooth UI and UX are critical to winning and keeping customers. A device-focused map lets you identify gaps and opportunities in the app, website, or any other asset design; it enhances your device experience at increased speed-to-market.
Customer support journey map: Buyers increasingly link customer support with the overall customer experience. This map is an effective tool for understanding the ease of access to customer support and the efficacy of your query resolution.
Path-to-purchase journey map: In an ideal environment, customers experience a smooth and quick path to purchase. This map lets you identify how your channels perform in this context, as well as opportunities for improvement.
Product discovery journey map: A smooth and consistent product discovery across touchpoints keeps a visiting customer engaged. Use this customer journey map for insights into the earliest interactions and experiences that shape a customer’s perception.
Customer journey map templates
In a digital-first customer environment, mapping integrated, complex customer journeys is time, resource, and effort-intensive. Effective customer journey management needs cross-functional collaboration as well as customer journey analytics and mapping tools.
Sounds complex? To ensure that you don’t have to start from scratch, you can leverage customer journey map templates - frameworks that help simplify the process and let you save precious time.
What is a customer journey map template?
The initial customer onboarding experience often defines if customers will stay with you in the long run. An effective customer journey map template ensures that you cover all the necessary steps in the onboarding journey, letting you optimise and enhance the customer experience at this crucial interaction.
Unresolved customer pain points are the fastest way to lose business. Customer journey map templates provide structured frameworks that outline each step of the customer journey, making it easier for you to quickly identify areas of friction and rally your teams for prompt resolution.
Templates enable businesses to understand and analyse customers based on customer journey mapping goals. For example, a product discovery map template may quickly let you categorise customers into:
Assuming your goal with such a customer journey map is to engage potential customers more effectively, this template lets you understand what touchpoints will best work for a customer segment or persona.
When to use a customer journey map template
73% of customers agree that they lose trust in companies when there’s a lack of consistency across touchpoints. (Salesforce State of Connected Customer report)
A customer journey mapping template provides a standardised framework for businesses to visualise and analyse the customer experience. Templates help ensure that all touchpoints are accounted for and aligned with the overall customer journey strategy. They ensure consistency across multiple maps, making customer journey analysis easier across different engagement points and channels.
What does a sample customer journey map look like?
Here is an example of a customer journey map for a SaaS company, outlining the customer journey for a new asset:
By mapping out this customer journey, the SaaS company can better understand the customer's needs and pain points at each stage, and tailor their communication and support accordingly.
Customer journey mapping is becoming increasingly important for organisations looking to improve their overall business results. By identifying pain points and developing strategies for improvement, customer journey mapping is your golden ticket to winning and keeping customers, engaging more efficiently, and building lifelong trusted relationships.
Unsure where to start? Check out our free journey builder demo for more productive brainstorming sessions around customer journey mapping. This structured framework helps you to capture data, identify high-potential moments of truth and take the first step towards creating a more engaging and satisfying customer experience.
Here are some more resources to help you create impactful customer journey maps and achieve success now:
Using technology to connect the dots in the retail customer journey
Using technology across touchpoints for a digital-first customer insurance journey