Customer Journey Map Template

What is a Customer Journey Map

Using data gathered from feedback surveys, online reviews, and other customer satisfaction metrics, a customer journey map tells the story of a customer’s lifetime relationship with a company. Depending on the customer persona, this relationship can be as short as a few minutes or as long as many years. Customer journey maps are useful tools for visualizing the quality of each interaction and the customer’s reaction to that touchpoint as they move up the brand equity pyramid.

A customer journey map is a visual representation of every experience your customers have with you. It helps to tell the story of a customer's experience with your brand from original engagement and into hopefully a long-term relationship.

Why is Customer Journey Mapping Important?

As we briefly mentioned earlier, customer journey maps are tools that help you visualize the specific steps customers go through when interacting with your business. Using buyer personas (a semi-fictional representation of a type of customer based on market research and real customer data, as defined by Hubspot) you can track the path different customers take on the road to conversion and pinpoint failed or successful interactions. This ultimately helps you do things like:

• Allocate advertising budgets to channels that produce the most positive responses
• Collaborate across teams to improve touchpoints that continuously produce a negative reaction
• Retain and satisfy existing customers by improving previous customers’ churn points

How to Create a Customer Journey Map in 7 steps

Step 1: Determine Target Personas

Each customer journey map is meant to demonstrate just one segment of your customer base, so it should be built specifically for each persona.

Step 2: Define Your Customer Touchpoints, Actions, And Reactions

Once you’ve decided on your target persona, the next step is to define the customer touchpoints you want to track.

Step 3: Break Out Touchpoints And Actions Into Phases

Once you have all of your touchpoints, actions, and reactions listed, put them in a logical order that follows the actual buyer journey.

Step 4: Test The Customer Journey Map

Now that you’ve established the basic structure of your map via touchpoints grouped into phases, you should have a few different people run through the map to make sure your model is sound.

Step 5: Complete The Customer Journey Map With Persona Data

Now that you’ve properly set up your customer journey map and tested it for any missing pieces, all that’s left to do is fill in the persona data.

Step 6: Identify Areas Of Improvement

The main purpose of creating customer journey maps is to display your data in a way that’s easier to visualize than numbers in a spreadsheet. If you’ve displayed your persona data accurately, then it should be simple enough to determine where customers are dropping out of the buyer’s journey.

Step 7: Create A Corresponding “Business Actions” Map

Now that you’ve pinpointed steps on the customer journey that are causing negative reactions, you should be able to identify what your company needs to do to improve these interactions

Download our free template to create your customer journey map today