How to create a Customer Journey Map in 4 easy steps

Businesses of all shapes and sizes can benefit from mapping out the customer journey. This blog will focus on how these types of maps can help when interacting with your customers.

A customer experience map can help you see the entire customer journey in more detail and create an action plan to ensure that your customers get the best experience possible.

What is the purpose of customer journey mapping?

Put simply, these maps show the customer behavior and interactions during the moments when they become aware of your business, consider making a purchase from you, and then share their experience with others.

Essentially, this allows you to analyze your customers' thoughts, feelings, and actions in simple terms before converting them into sales.

No matter what you're selling or promoting to your customers, you always need to focus on understanding their needs so that you can cater your messages in order to reach them at just the right time. The Customer Journey Mapping is an excellent tool for doing just that!

Customer journey process

Journey maps come in many different forms, all of which are purpose-built for individual client needs. At the core of customer journey mapping lies one commonality: a bird's eye view of the customer's decision-making pathway or process.

For the purpose of this article, I'll give you an example of a simple customer journey map. The following steps represent only the core stages which are incorporated in almost every model of journey maps.

1. Define buyer personas

A persona is a fictional character that represents an average user of your product or service. They provide commonly-held customer attributes that help shape internal team orientation and they can be generated based on research or intuition.

Once you define your customer persona you can jump to the next step.

2. Define phases

The concept of customer journey maps is typically organized by customer stages. For example, you can organize a customer journey map by stages of the sales process, such as “awareness,” “consideration,” “decision,” “post-experience,” “advocacy,” etc.

In other words, it represents a visual representation of the customer path from start to finish.

It is important to note that these steps should reflect how your business works. So please don't use a template one to one, but make it your own by analyzing your customers' journey when interacting with your business.

3. Identify customer touchpoints

It can be difficult to keep track of all the touchpoints a customer has with your company. Focusing on mapping out key touchpoints can give you a deeper understanding of what you need to do to reach your business goals.

The different touchpoints include website, social media, ads, their in-store experience, phone call, web chat, live chat, email, etc.

4. Research

Conducting your research is a crucial step in the buyer journey map process because it provides the foundation of your customer map.

So when you conduct some customer research, take careful note of what customers are saying and showing you through their behavior. Then based on these findings, use this information to build out the flow of your customer journey maps.

For each stage of that journey, try to identify:

• What are the goals of your customers?
• What are their expectations?
• What are key touchpoints?
• Customer emotions during each touchpoint?
• Customer thoughts during each stage of the process?

Best Customer Journey Mapping Tools

Here is our shortlist of the top 4 journey mapping tools:

1. Make a copy of our free template

We use this template as a starting point for mapping out customer journeys for our clients.
Please note that you should adapt it to fit your needs.

Feel free to use it! You can make a copy of this google slide by going to File > Make a copy > Entire presentation.

2. UXPressia

UXPressia is a platform that helps organizations improve user experience by mapping customer journeys with real-time collaboration tools.

In addition to customer journey mapping, it offers a wide range of prebuilt buyer personas templates which you can customize to your needs.

3. Lucidchart

Lucidchart is another visual tool for mapping out the entire experience of your customers. It is packed with customizable templates and extensive formatting options.

With it, you'll be able to visualize the user journey map, allowing you to discover new ways to improve customer engagement and conversion rate.

4. Diagrams.net

Diagrams.net makes drawing diagrams an effortless process. Not only can you use it for user journey mapping but you can also create any kind of flow chart with this powerful tool.

Conclusion

Journey maps are one of the best ways of helping you understand the needs and priorities of your customers. They're a great method for developing well-rounded customer personas, which can help empathize with their pain points and then focus efforts on finding ways to satisfy them.

When you put together journey maps, you can analyze how your products or services interact with the users throughout their experience, as well as identify any flaws or issues that arise.

As a side note, the journey mapping process is actually meant to be ever-evolving – this helps keep things fresh and original every time.

If you're thinking about optimizing the user experience for your website, reach out. We'd be happy to make some recommendations, or even get involved in the process.