Why and how to create a Customer Journey Map

Customer Journey Mapping has been around for some time now, but many companies are not taking full advantage of the business opportunities a well-thought-out Customer Journey Map can bring. When choosing a template for your business’ needs, it’s critical to think about what you want to achieve with this exercise and if you have the resources to implement the changes.

Mapping customer journeys should always aim for business impact. Creating a customer journey map might feel like something that is fairly easy and even fun to do but it should not be taken lightly. Finding a pretty template and putting it up on the wall does not help you run your business - and customer journey maps should, first and foremost, be tools for customer-centric business management.

A customer journey map can be a powerful tool to help you visualise and clarify current or future states of customer experience in all stages of the customership. It's the next step after you have defined the buyer personas for your business, but make sure all actions are based on the Customer Experience Strategy you have established. A comprehensive customer journey map consists of customer actions, motives and experiences but also of organisational activities and roles that are responsible for these activities. Concentrating merely on optimising individual touchpoints is a route to failure, as stated in this blog post

Unfortunately, most of the available customer journey map templates represent only the customer side, which is why we decided to create an all-encompassing template targeting specifically those items that have a business impact. The key is to include the organisational side of your business into the mapping and nurture the interactions between your company and customers. In addition to organisational roles and activities, we recommend adding metrics, goals and KPIs to mappings in order to make the customer journey map more actionable. For reference, take a look at Mari Silvennoinen’s post about measuring customer experience - it’ll give you an idea of how to add the above-mentioned attributes to your company’s customer journey.

To make your first Customer Journey Map exercise as easy as possible, we have used an online grocery store as an example case to help you grasp the essence of the mapping tool. It’s important that you adjust the template based on the unique needs of your company and the goal you have set. So take a minute to ask yourself what do you want to achieve with this map and then get cracking!

You can download the online grocery store example and the editable Customer Journey Map template with short instructions by filling the form below.