In Houston, especially in the business world, we face a challenge: Salesforce reveals that while 68% of customers anticipate brands to grasp their specific needs and expectations, a mere 39% believe brands actually deliver on this.

This is definitely 🆖 (not a good sign). So, how can you ensure your business truly prioritizes its customers?

Introducing the customer journey map: a potent instrument for gaining a deep understanding of your customer base, enabling you to forge meaningful connections, enhance their overall experience, and propel sustained business expansion.

Continue reading to delve deeper into customer journey maps, their importance, and the process of crafting one (using our complimentary template!)

Table of contents

• What is a customer journey map
• Why customer journey mapping?
• Customer journey map template
• How to create a customer journey map
• Free customer journey map templates

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map visually represents your customers’ interactions with your business as they navigate your funnel. However, it doesn’t simply depict the entire experience. Instead, it deconstructs the journey into crucial stages and touchpoints, examining the specific intentions, emotions, and behaviors exhibited at each step.

Due to their granular nature, businesses develop customer journey maps for distinct personas traversing specific paths to purchase. Consequently, if your business offers multiple products or services and/or caters to various buyer personas, creating multiple customer journey maps is advisable. We’ll elaborate on this later.

Image source

Why is a customer journey map important?

Customer journey maps allow you to pinpoint the subtle, yet significant interactions that constitute your brand’s complete customer experience. These micro-moments, when carefully analyzed and enhanced, can distinguish between satisfactory and exceptional service, remarkable and unforgettable products, and content customers and enthusiastic brand advocates who leave positive reviews and recommend your business to others.

In essence, customer journey mapping helps you comprehend and refine the customer experience at every level. This allows you to provide the personalized service that today’s consumers demand, which in turn:

• Guides your content marketing strategy
• Enhances your products, services, and marketing materials
• Facilitates cross-channel and omnichannel marketing
• Improves customer retention throughout the sales funnel
• Sets you apart from competitors (You can even utilize a customer journey map to further emphasize this distinction, as illustrated in the following example.)

Image source Ultimately, this leads to:

• Increased sales
• Reduced customer churn
• A more comprehensive growth marketing approach Furthermore, the mapping process itself necessitates gathering customer insights through data analysis, feedback collection, and other methods, which ultimately strengthens your client relationships.

The three elements of a customer journey map

A customer journey map is essentially a marketing fusion. You are combining the buyer’s journey with the offers in your marketing funnel, and then integrating your buyer personas. This creates a comprehensive narrative of the tangible and emotional experience of your brand from the customer’s perspective.

Let’s break down each of these components.

1. Buyer persona

To effectively capture your customers’ intentions, encounters, feelings, and actions at each stage of their journey, you must first grasp who they are at their core: their way of life, their driving forces, their worries, and their passions. This is the essence of a buyer persona—a fictional representation embodying your perfect customer, complete with a unique life, thoughts, and emotions.

This context is vital for pinpointing highly specific details within a customer journey map, underscoring the need for separate maps tailored to each persona. A business owner named Betty, for instance, will be guided by an entirely different set of principles, motivations, and aspirations compared to a marketing manager named Mara.

2. Marketing funnel

The second component of a customer journey map is your marketing funnel. This visual representation illustrates how leads transition into customers and how those customers evolve into loyal patrons of your business. It’s segmented into distinct stages of this process, outlining your offerings at each step.

While there are countless ways to label the stages of a marketing funnel, they generally adhere to the following structure:

• Awareness
• Interest/consideration
• Evaluation
• Desire
• Action/conversion
• Retention

3. The buyer’s journey

The final element of a customer journey map is the buyers’ journey. Your marketing funnel represents a top-down, business-centric perspective, while the buyer journey provides a left-to-right, customer-centric narrative. In the context of customer journey mapping, the five stages of the buyer journey are:

1. Awareness: The customer acknowledges their problem and actively seeks solutions or explores symptoms associated with it.
2. Consideration: Having gained awareness of the solution, including your specific offering, the customer researches to determine if it aligns with their needs.
3. Decision: Prepared to make a purchase, the customer concludes that your product effectively addresses their requirements.
4. Service: The customer utilizes your product or service, receiving necessary support along the way.
5. Retention: Satisfied with your offering, the customer continues engaging with your business for their particular need.

By blending these three components, you create a comprehensive customer journey map.

Get the blank customer journey map template here.

How to make your own customer journey map

Assuming you have a clear understanding of your customer personas and the specific journey you’re mapping, you can begin creating your customer journey map. Divide your buyer’s journey into the five stages outlined earlier and gather the following data points for each stage.

1. Touchpoints

Touchpoints represent the online and offline channels through which customers encounter and engage with your business. These can include phone calls, website pages, social media posts, surveys, flyers, and much more.

While customers can interact with your business through various touchpoints at any given stage, focus on including 1-3 of the most essential ones for your map. For example:

• Awareness: Blog posts, social media updates, advertisements.
• Consideration: Online reviews, product pages.
• Decision: Phone calls, email correspondence, pricing page.
• Service: Help articles, live chat support, interactions with customer support representatives.
• Retention: Help articles, newsletters, communication with account representatives. By outlining these touchpoints first, you establish the necessary context for determining subsequent data points such as pain points, desires, actions, and expectations.

2. Pain points

Customer pain points refer to the specific challenges your customers encounter—problems for which they seek solutions. Naturally, your end product or service aims to address a particular set of pain points. However, in the context of customer journey mapping, you’ll also want to consider any pain points that arise during their interactions with your business.

Let’s imagine your company offers a GPS cat collar with a corresponding app. Throughout their journey, your customers might experience pain points like:

• Awareness: Frustration stemming from constantly chasing their cat around the yard.
• Consideration: Inability to explore the app’s features without first purchasing the collar.
• Decision: Confusion surrounding the collar’s sizing options.
• Service: The app draining their phone’s battery life.
• Retention: Excessively long charging time for the collar.

Important reminder: Don’t mistake solutions for pain points. For instance, “needing a trackable cat collar” doesn’t constitute a pain point. The pain point is the exhaustion of chasing a cat around the yard, for which the collar provides a solution.

Also, remember that your customer journey map shouldn’t shy away from areas that need improvement. It’s alright to acknowledge if your pricing packages are difficult to grasp or your waiting area is cramped. The purpose is to identify and communicate these areas to stakeholders for potential resolution.

3. Desires

Customer desires are not simply about finding solutions to each pain point; they delve into the underlying reasons and the greater benefits customers seek by addressing these pain points. For example, a customer worried about letting their cat roam freely doesn’t desire a GPS cat collar; they desire a solution that ensures their cat’s happiness and safety.

Desires can also encompass what customers look for within solutions to their pain points. For instance, they might want the ability to connect with support online.

Returning to our cat collar example, here are some potential desires:

• Awareness: A content and secure feline companion.
• Consideration: Access to a free trial or an informative explainer video.
• Decision: A clear and concise sizing chart with visuals.
• Decision: A clear and concise sizing chart with visuals.
• Retention: The option to charge the collar in a car.

Free customer journey map templates

There are various ways to present information in your customer journey map, depending on your business model and the audience you’re presenting to.

1. nexus-security’s free customer journey map template for Google sheets

You’ll notice that many templates prioritize aesthetics, but often feature placeholder text. While each business is unique, we believe in providing a more practical template that resembles a worksheet. As demonstrated earlier, our template includes a tab with a populated example to help you get started. Click here to get the free customer journey map template.

2. Slideegg’s customer journey map templates for Powerpoint

Slideegg provides a wide array of free customer journey map templates designed for Powerpoint. The example below is just one of many formats available, which include tables, steps, and infographics.

3. Youexec’s customer journey map slide deck template

Youexec.com offers a collection of slides specifically tailored for customer journey mapping. You can select the most appropriate slide based on the data you’re collecting, or even combine two or three slides to effectively convey all necessary information.

4. Slidego’s customer journey map template for Google slides

Slidego presents another set of visually appealing customer journey mapping templates, compatible with Google Slides. As with the previous collection, you’re not obligated to utilize every template. In fact, it’s best to choose 1-3 that will communicate your insights most effectively to your intended audience.

5. MightyBytes’ PDF customer journey map template

MightyBytes provides a streamlined customer journey mapping template in PDF format. Its most convenient feature is its direct editability.

6. Visual Paradigm’s customer journey map template

Visual Paradigm boasts a wide selection of free customer journey map templates. However, they require creation and customization within the app itself. While the app is free to use, it imposes limitations on sharing and collaboration features.

7. Miro

Similar to Visual Paradigm, our final template comes from Miro, another software program. You’ll need to utilize the program to craft your customer journey map, but it’s available for free.

Get mapping

We understand—creating a customer journey map can feel like embarking on a journey of its own. And while it does require time and effort, the rewards are substantial. As previously mentioned, recognizing and refining these micro-moments can distinguish a good business from an exceptional one.

Give it a try and let us know about your experience!