Customer journey mapping can help you better understand your customers and their needs. As a tool, it allows you to visualize the different stages a customer goes through when interacting with your business; your thoughts, feelings and pain points.
And friction over these pain points is shown to be costly: in 2019, friction in e-commerce accounted for about $213 billion in lost revenue in the US.
Customer journey maps can help you identify any issues or areas where you could improve your customer experience. In this article, we’ll explain what the customer journey mapping process is and provide a free template that you can use to create your own map. Let’s start!
What is a customer journey map?
So what is a customer journey map? Basically, customer journey maps are a tool you can use to understand the customer experience. Customer Journey Maps are often visual representations that show you the customer journey from start to finish. They include all points of contact along the way.
There are often four main stages in your sales funnel, and knowing them can help you create customer journey maps:
- Request or awareness
- Interest, comparison or decision
- Purchase or preparation
- Installation, activation or withdrawal
Customer Journey Maps are used to track customer behavior and identify areas where the customer is experiencing pain points. By disclosing this information, you can improve your customer experience by giving your customers a positive experience with your company.
You can use customer journey mapping software such as Excel or Google spreadsheets, Google decks, infographics, illustrations, or charts to create your maps. But you don’t really need customer journey mapping tools. You can create these cards with a blank wall and a sticker pack.
Although they can be scribbled on a sticker, it is often easier to create these journeys digitally. Thus, you have a record of your travel map, and you can share it with colleagues. At the end of this article, we have provided free customer journey map templates to make your life a little easier.
5 Benefits of Using Customer Journey Maps
The main benefit of customer journey mapping is a better understanding of how your customers feel and interact with touchpoints with your business. With this knowledge, you can create strategies that better serve your customers at every touchpoint.
Give them what they want and make it easy to use and they will keep coming back. But there are a couple of other great benefits as well.
1. Improved customer support
Your customer journey map will highlight the moments when you can add some fun to your customer day. And it will also highlight the pain points of your customer experience. Knowing where these points are will allow you to resolve them before your client gets to them. Then watch your customer service scores skyrocket!
2. Effective marketing tactics
A better understanding of who your customers are and what motivates them will help you market them.
Let’s say you’re selling a product or service that promotes sleep. A potential target market for your customer base is young working mothers who are short on time.
The tone of your marketing material can empathize with their struggles, saying, “The last thing you want is for someone to ask if you’re tired. But we do know that more than half of working moms get less than 6 hours of sleep a night. While we can’t give you more time, we know how you can make the most of those 6 hours. Try our sleep aid today and sleep better tonight.”
Creating customer portraits will show the potential target audience and their motivation, such as working moms who want to make the most of their sleep hours.
3. Product or service improvements
By mapping the customer journey, you will get an idea of what motivates him to make a purchase or prevents him from doing so. You will have a clear idea of when and why they are returning items and what items they are buying next. With this and other information, you can identify upsell or cross-sell opportunities for products.
4. More pleasant and efficient user interface
A customer journey map will show you where customers get stuck and leave your site. You can work your way around the map, fixing any points of friction as you go. The end result will be a smoothly running, logical website or app.
5. Customer focus
Instead of working with business success motivation, a customer journey map can shift your focus to the customer. Instead of asking yourself, “How can I increase profits?”ask yourself, “Which will serve my customer best?”Profits will come when you put your customer first.
After all, customer journey maps will help you improve your customer experience and increase sales. They are a useful tool in your customer engagement strategy.
How to create a customer journey map
There are many different ways to create a customer journey map. But there are a few steps you should take no matter how you map your customer journey.
Step 1: Set focus
Do you want to stimulate the introduction of a new product? Or perhaps you’ve noticed problems with your customer experience. Perhaps you are looking for new opportunities for your business. Whatever it is, be sure to set goals for yourself before you start mapping your customer journey.
Step 2. Choose a buyer persona
To create a customer journey map, you first need to identify your customers and understand their needs. To do this, you will need access to your buyers.
Buyer characters are caricatures or images of someone who represents your target audience. These characters are created from real data and strategic goals.
If you don’t already have them, create your own customer personas with our easy step-by-step guide and free template.
Choose one or two of your personas to be the focus of your customer journey map. You can always go back and create maps for the remaining characters.
Step 3: Conduct User Research
Interview potential or former customers in your target market. You don’t want to risk your entire journey with a client based on the assumptions you make. Find out directly from the source what their paths are, where their pain points are, and what they love about your brand.
You can do this by sending out surveys, scheduling interviews, and exploring data from your business chatbot. Be sure to check out the most frequently asked questions. If you don’t have an FAQ chatbot like Heyday that automates customer service and pulls data for you, you’re missing out!
You’ll also want to talk to your sales team, customer service department, and any other team member who might have an understanding of your customer interactions.
Step 4: Make a List of Customer Touchpoints
Your next step is to track and list customer interactions with the company, both online and offline.
Customer touch point means any place where your customer interacts with your brand. It could be your social media posts, wherever they might end up on your website, in your physical store, ratings and reviews, or outdoor advertising.
Write down as much as you can, then put on the client’s shoes and go through the process yourself. Keep track of common ground, of course, but also write down how you felt at each stage and why. This data will eventually serve as a guide for your map.
Step 5: Create a Customer Journey Map
You’ve done your research and gathered as much information as possible, now it’s time for the fun stuff. Collect all the information you have collected in one place. Then start planning the customer journey! You can use the templates we have created below for easy plug-and-play implementation.
Step 6: Analyze the Customer Journey Map
Once the customer journey is in place, you’ll want to go through it yourself. You need to experience first hand what your customers are doing in order to fully understand their experience.
As you travel your sales funnel, look for ways to improve your customer experience. By analyzing the needs and pain points of your customers, you can see areas where they might abandon your site or become frustrated with your app. You can then take action to improve it.
Types of customer journey maps
There are many different types of customer journey maps. Let’s start with four of them: current state, future state, a day in the life, and empathy maps. We will break down each of them and explain what they can do for your business.
Current state
This customer journey map focuses on your business as it stands. With it, you visualize the customer’s experience as they try to reach their goal with your business or product. The client’s path to the current state identifies and proposes solutions to pain points.
Future state
This customer journey map focuses on how you want your business to be. This is the ideal future state. With it, you visualize the best customer experience when they try to achieve their goal with your business or product.
Once you chart your prospect’s path, you can see where you want to go and how to get there.
Day in the life
The daily customer journey is similar in many ways to the current customer journey, but it aims to highlight aspects of a customer’s daily life beyond how they interact with your brand.
The daily life map looks at everything the consumer does during the day. This shows how they think and feel in the spotlight with or without your company.
When you know how a consumer spends their day, you can more precisely strategize where your brand’s communication can meet them. Do they check Instagram during their lunch break, do they feel open and optimistic about new products? If so, you’ll want to target ads on that platform to them at this time.
Examples from the daily life of a client can be very different depending on your target demographic.
Empathy cards
Empathy maps do not follow a specific sequence of events along the user’s journey. Instead, they’re divided into four sections and keep track of what someone has to say about their experience with your product as it’s being used.
You should create empathy maps after studying and testing users. You can think of them as a record of everything that was observed during research or testing when you asked questions directly about how people feel when using the products. Empathy maps can give you unexpected insight into the needs and desires of your users.
Customer Journey Map Templates
Customer journey map template for current state:
Future State Customer Journey Map Template:
Daily Customer Journey Map Template:
Empathy Map Template:
Customer Journey Map Example
It may be helpful to see examples of customer journey maps. To give you some idea of what they look like, we’ve created an example customer journey map for the current state.
Buyer identity:
Curious Colleen, a 32-year-old woman, is married with no children on double income. Colleen and her partner work for themselves; although they have research skills, they do not have enough time. She is motivated by quality products and frustrated by having to sift through content to get the information she needs.
What are their main goals and needs? Colleen needs a new vacuum cleaner. Her key goal is to find one that won’t break again.
What is their struggle?
She is frustrated that her old vacuum cleaner is broken and that she has to waste time looking for a new one. Colin believes that this problem arose because the vacuum cleaner she bought earlier was of poor quality.
What are their tasks?
Colleen must examine the vacuum cleaners to find one that won’t break. She then has to buy a vacuum cleaner and have it delivered to her house.
| Sales funnel stage | Define | Compare | Negotiate | Purchase |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actions | Colleen starts by looking at reviews of her old vacuum cleaner online and starts making a list of features she wants to see in her new vacuum cleaner. | Collin starts researching the “best cordless vacuum cleaners”and comparing products. She browses our site but bounces pretty quickly, although she also bounces quickly from our competitors’ sites. She searches for “the top ten cordless vacuum cleaners”and finds our product on the list again. | Collin researches vacuum cleaner offerings from competitors, focusing on “the top ten cordless vacuum cleaners.”Colleen is specifically looking for quality. She also factored in shipping costs, as she doesn’t want to spend more time assembling the vacuum cleaner. She calls her current vacuum cleaner company to inform them that the model she bought is broken. | Colleen decides to buy our cordless vacuum cleaner. In her review, she gives us 3 out of 5 stars for her web experience and 5 out of 5 stars for her product experience. She comments on the difficulty in getting the information she wanted. |
| Emotional condition | She is frustrated with how much time she now has to spend researching vacuum cleaners. She is also excited about the prospect of getting a new vacuum cleaner that might work better. | She is frustrated with all the vacuum sites she looks at because they don’t immediately and concisely describe the benefits. | She is frustrated with her old vacuum company’s lack of customer service and having to wait on the phone. | She feels safe because we have a 5-year warranty and good customer reviews. She feels confirmed by free shipping and is happy to share her feedback. |
| Points of contact | She hears about us because of our ads on Google and Instagram. | She goes to our website, uses the search bar to find “cordless vacuum cleaners”and finds one of our models. She clicks on our link through the “top ten”list. She reads customer reviews of our product on Reddit and reviews on Google. | After looking at the competition, she returns to our site, puts the cordless vacuum cleaner in her shopping cart, but waits for the purchase in case she changes her mind. In the meantime, she returns to our social media feed to view post comments and “tagged photos”. She wants to be sure that this is the right choice. Colleen receives an email from our abandoned cart email thread giving her free shipping and a money back guarantee if anything happens to the vacuum cleaner within the first five years. | Colleen receives an email survey asking about her experience. |
Opportunities: Colleen wants to quickly and immediately understand the benefits of our product; how can we make it easier? Collin supports social proof as a factor in decision making. How can we better showcase our satisfied customers? There is an option here to restructure the information hierarchy on our website or implement customer service tools to provide Colleen with the information she needs more quickly. We can create comparison tables with competitors, show benefits immediately and clearly, and create social campaigns.
Action plan:
- Implement a chatbot so customers like Colleen can get the answers they need quickly and easily.
- Create a tool to compare competitors and us, showing the benefits and costs.
- Embed benefit claims on all landing pages.
- Create a social campaign dedicated to user-generated content to promote social proof.
- Send out customer feedback surveys. Pull quotes from reviews here whenever possible.