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- What is a Customer Journey Map?
- Types of Customer Journey Maps
- Key Factors in a Customer Journey Map
- Sales Funnel vs Customer Journey Map
- How to Create a Customer Journey Map
- Customer Journey Map Templates
- Benefits of Creating a Customer Journey Map
- Final Thoughts on Customer Journey Map
- FAQ about Creating a Customer Journey Map
How to Create a Customer Journey Map + Templates [2024]
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To build a great brand, you need to know your customers every step of the way.
Of course, we all love the final output — i.e., getting sales and making profits — but that output comes after a journey. Also, this journey goes beyond the initial purchase. Yes, we’re talking about retention and brand loyalty.
A customer journey map helps you not only visualize all these details but also enhance the entire customer journey.
So, in this blog article, we’ll share a detailed guide on “how to create a customer journey map”, the types and key factors of a customer journey map, and the benefits of this entire process.
What is a Customer Journey Map?
To understand the customer journey map, let’s put ourselves in the customer’s shoes.
Imagine this —
You want to buy a new digital camera. First, you’ll try to learn about the available brand options via Google Search and shortlist some brands.
Then, you may go through the specifications, pricing comparisons, and customer reviews to make the decision. And finally, make the purchase.
After purchase, you may also be involved in support interactions or leave a review for the brand. This entire series of interactions with a brand is your customer journey.
During this journey, you may take multiple actions and go through different types of thoughts and emotions.
So, now let’s understand this from a brand’s perspective:
A customer journey map is a visual and hypothetical depiction of your ideal customer’s interactions with your brand and product — in a series of stages covering Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Post-purchase, and Re-purchase.
During all these stages, your customer may interact with your brand at multiple touchpoints and go through various thoughts and emotions.
Although this visual map is hypothetical, it’s created based on real data, research, and feedback from customers. In other words, this map isn’t created based on mere assumptions but on data and logic.
Types of Customer Journey Maps
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Current State
The “current state” customer journey map focuses on the actions and emotions that customers are going through in their current interactions with your brand.
This approach helps identify ongoing issues, fix them in real time, and enhance the customer experience.
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Day in the Life
The "day in the life" customer journey map depicts the typical actions and emotions customers go through in their daily lives regardless of their interactions with your brand.
This approach helps you identify any other pain points of your customers, and build a solution for the same. So, it could be helpful to expand your offerings.
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Future State
The “future state” customer journey map visualizes the actions and emotions your customers are likely to go through in the future when interacting with your brand.
This approach helps set your goals and prepare the strategies.
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Service Blueprint
The "service blueprint" customer journey map focuses on all the touchpoints based on any one of the above types of maps. Then, it aligns a list of fundamentals required for all the touchpoints such as human resources, policies, processes, and technologies.
This approach helps utilize the resources in the best possible manner.
Key Factors in a Customer Journey Map
Depending on the format or template of your customer journey map, you can consider different elements in your customer journey map.
Generally, you may consider all these factors:
Stages of Your Customer Journey Map:
Here are the stages a customer goes through during a journey:
- Awareness: The customer becomes aware of the problem and finds out about your brand and its solution.
- Consideration: The customer starts considering multiple different options or solutions to resolve the problem.
- Purchase: The customer finally purchases your product.
- Post-purchase: This stage covers the post-purchase services and interactions.
- Re-purchase: This stage focuses on the actions and interactions that lead to repeat purchases and building brand loyalty.
Touchpoints Customers Interact With:
A touchpoint is a channel-specific event where a customer interacts with your brand for various reasons — positive or negative. For example, when a customer interacts with your live chat team before a purchase, it may lead to positive emotions or some sort of disappointment.
Action at Different Stages & Touchpoints:
What actions are customers likely to take at each stage and touchpoint? By figuring out all possible actions, you can better prepare your system, processes, and people. For example, if a customer is unable to find an answer through a FAQ or chatbot, the customer is likely to seek human support.
Thoughts & Emotions:
When you’re preparing all the stages and touchpoints of your customer journey map, you also need to map the emotions that customers go through in those phases.
For example, after making a purchase, if a customer reaches out to your customer support team for an issue with delivery, a customer is likely to be annoyed or angry.
Departments Involved Throughout the Journey:
This is somewhat related to the touchpoints that we discussed; however, it is highly possible that multiple touchpoints may fall under a single department. For example, when talking of a marketing department, it covers multiple touchpoints such as the email newsletter, blog, social media channels, etc.
Pain Points & Solutions:
Consider any challenges or barriers that your customers have to face during the journey. Based on these pain points, you can derive new solutions.
Here’s an example of a customer journey map template from Canva that shows how these factors can be placed on a visual map:
Sales Funnel vs Customer Journey Map
When reading about a sales funnel strategy, you must’ve heard about the funnel stages such as Awareness, Interest, Consideration/Evaluation, Purchase, Post-purchase, and Re-purchase.
These stages are almost the same as we discussed in the customer journey map.
So, you might ask —
What’s the difference between a sales funnel and a customer journey map?
A sales funnel is a system created to increase sales by generating leads, nurturing them, and converting them into your customers. As the name suggests, the goal here is "sales".
On the other hand, a customer journey map is created to observe the customer’s entire experience with your brand, identify any areas of improvement, and fix them to enhance the customer experience. The goal here is to make the customer experience better.
GemPages — the page builder app for Shopify — has now got the new sales funnel feature. This feature allows you to create high-converting post-purchase upsell and downsell offers.
GemPages Sales Funnels - The Ultimate Solution for Maximizing Your Shopify Store Profit
Mastering GemPages Sales Funnel Statistics: Key Metrics for Boosting Your Upsell Strategy
[V7] Testing GemPages Sales Funnels Upsell with Shopify Orders
How to Create a Customer Journey Map
A customer journey map may vary for different business models. For example, the B2C vs B2B customer journey maps could be different.
However, this guide will focus on how to create a B2C customer journey map.
Step 1: Define the Scope, Goals, and Hypotheses
First things first — you need to start with the basics.
Before beginning the whole process, brainstorm on the scope of your customer journey map and prepare hypotheses. This will also help you align your goals with the overall scope.
Your brand may have more than one buyer persona, so think about — what specific buyer persona are you looking to target. Be specific about the goals you aim to accomplish through this practice.
For example, your scope for the customer journey map could be different when your goal is to improve the customer experience than what it would be when your goal is to launch a new product line.
Defining the scope, writing down the hypotheses, and setting goals will give you a clear direction and systematic approach.
Step 2: Gather Existing Data
Based on the tenure of your brand, you may already have some level of data available to you. This data is crucial to gathering insights into your customers’ pain points as well as positive points.
These data points could be found through:
- Customer service logs and reports
- Social media monitoring
- Net promoter score (NPS) data
- Store reports and analytics
- Google Analytics 4 data
- Heatmap observations
All these data points will give you great insights into the real customer behavior and touchpoints throughout the journey.
Step 3: Collect New Data for Your Buyer Persona
Nothing can help you better perform buyer persona research than talking to your customers or gathering their direct feedback.
Here are some of the methods you can implement to do this:
- Conduct 1-on-1 interviews with existing customers
- Publish an online survey through email or social media
- Run polls
- Ask for live feedback on the website
This is where you can gather data and observations for specific areas as per your scope for your buyer persona.
Step 4: Build Your Buyer Persona
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional character — created with data and research — that describes key traits of your ideal customer like gender, age, profession, location, income, goals, preferences, pain points, etc.
Here’s a Canva template that you can use to create your own buyer persona:
This is just a simple example to give you an idea of the key information; however, you may go into even more details as long as you have the information from real data and research.
Here’s an example of a detailed buyer persona shared by Single Grain:
Based on all the data and insights you collected, prepare a buyer persona that is as precise and close as possible.
This buyer persona will help you bring your customer journey to life. For example, let’s say your buyer persona is a female professional who loves spending time on Instagram. This piece of information is also helpful to prepare your customer journey map.
Step 5: Map All the Key Factors
Now, you’ll need to map all the important factors that we discussed in the previous section:
- Stages
- Touchpoints
- Actions
- Thoughts & Emotions
- Departments
- Pain Points & Solutions
Also, throughout the journey, customers may interact with your brand through different channels. So, your touchpoints are not limited to just your website but also include other channels such as social media platforms, email, or even third-party customer review platforms.
All in all, you need to make sure that you cover all the possible touchpoints throughout the customer journey.
Step 6: Monitor and Analyze the Results
Ensure that your customer journey map is monitored and aligned with the scope and goals you defined in the beginning.
Identify the areas of improvement in the customer journey. For example, let’s say your sales team is receiving plenty of customer inquiries for a newly launched product; however, the conversion rate is poor.
In that case, you may need to identify how to equip your sales team with a better unique selling point (USP) and value proposition.
Step 7: Update at Regular Intervals
In eCommerce, you must keep up with the ongoing trends and customer behavior. That’s why you must also update your customer journey map regularly.
For example, when you’re launching a new product or sales channel, you need to make sure your customer journey map is updated and relevant.
Customer Journey Map Templates
To simplify and speed up your process of creating a customer journey map, you can use a template. Here’s one of the best resources for various types of customer journey map templates:
HubSpot's 7 Free Customer Journey Map Templates
Alternatively, you can also use Canva’s Customer Journey Map Templates. Here’s one of the examples of a simple customer journey map template:
Benefits of Creating a Customer Journey Map
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Improved systems & strategies:
When you monitor the entire system from a customer’s standpoint, you can find areas that can be developed and enhanced. Thus, overall, it lets you prepare a solid system and strategies.
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Finding areas of improvement & opportunities:
When you visually map the customer journey and combine it with actions and emotions, it helps identify key areas of improvement. Also, you might come across new opportunities that were overlooked. For example, finding an opportunity for a new product launch.
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Enhanced customer experience:
As we discussed earlier, a customer journey map focuses on customers’ pain points, challenges, and emotions during the whole experience. Thus, it helps improve the processes for customers and streamline the buying journey for a better customer experience.
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Better brand loyalty:
Customer retention can be improved, and thus, your brand can get repeat orders from your existing customers. As a result, you can also increase CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) too.
Final Thoughts on Customer Journey Map
Start building your customer journey map with a data-driven approach.
Business decisions shouldn’t be based on assumptions. Even if you have certain expectations from the target market, you must validate them through data and feedback.
A well-prepared customer journey map will help you with all these aspects, and at the same time, it will also help customers to have a seamless brand and user experience.
FAQ about Creating a Customer Journey Map
