Customer Journey Map Template

While working on a new component of a project, I had occasion to build out a Customer Journey Map. Even though I’ve done this several times before, I’d kind of just cobbled together a map using Omnigraffle or LucidChart or some other drawing program. But this time I had to do a few of them and wanted a more common format template. What I found was a ton of examples in image search, but very few usable editable templates. (There were a few behind some paywalls and seemingly sketchy download requirements, but not much else.)

So I made one. Actually, two. First, a simple one-pager. And another two-pager with a bit more space and room to draw small flow.

And as usual, if I’m going to go to the trouble to make something, I figured I might as well share it. So here you go.

Here is a link to my PowerPoint format Customer Journey Map Template on a Google Drive. I’m sharing it under a Creative Commons License.

Why Bother Building a Customer Journey Map?

• It’s a great customer understanding tool as you consider their decision-making moments and criteria.
• Such maps can help you determine abandonment points or inefficiencies from marketing through delivery. You can find ways to decrease wasted effort, increase profitability and increase satisfaction.
• The full customer experience is something many marketers are looking at more closely. Your competitors are likely to be among them. Do you want them to find the best insights before you do?

And the Risks

• Your Map will likely fail to be exhaustive. Tracking customers’ multi-channel experiences is somewhere between challenging to impossible. You can perhaps get close, but there will likely be gaps.
• If you do these maps part way, by gut feeling and assumptions only, you could easily head down multiple incorrect paths, from actual product-craft to marketing messaging and spend.
• Journey maps are persona, (or cohort), specific. Missing a target is obviously bad. But not even selecting the correct target is arguably worse. You must be sure you’re building the right map(s) for the right people. You may need more than one.

How to Use the Templates

There is no Customer Journey Mapping Society that has put down any hard and fast rules. This is your map. Your story. Or rather, your stakeholders’ stories. Do what you need to express their experience(s) in ways that are useful. Everything here is just a guideline. This model suffers in the way of most models… in that “all models are likely wrong, but some are useful.” Your goal should be more about insights and general understanding vs. seeking a perfect map artifact.

1. Define Your Goals – Are you trying to understand what’s generally happening? Figure out where marketing nudges might work? Something else?
2. Discuss with Team – If you have an internal team, verify your common objectives for this effort.
3. Determine User Persona(s) to Study – You may need more than one map per user cohort. It’s possible you may discover cohorts during the exercise.
4. Plan Research Needs and Objectives – How are your going to approach your research? Secondary sources? Surveys? Field observation?
5. Run Your Research Project – Collect, reduce and summarize data. Identify gaps if possible. Consider value of filling in such gaps later.
6. Review Research Results – Not all results will have value. Consider filtering which data will be important to emphasize.
7. Build Your Journey Map –
8. Create simple maps if possible. For complex flows, consider entirely separate flow diagram for the process.
9. Share, Verify, Nudge, Update – Share results with team, determine ‘nudge’ points to impact market as desired, update as things change.

One Pager Map – High Level Summary

• The one-page map is meant to be a high-level summary.
• Because of its compact size, you’ve got to force rank the most important points. More complicated user journys may not be fully expressed in such a small space.
• Your goal is to focus on the most critical touch points. The user journey map indicates not only user iterative behaviors, but their lived experiences along the way. However, in most cases it also represents a conversion funnel. When done, it should suggest where consumer “Zero Moments of Truth” exist; where they make fundamental decisions about what to do next. (See more about Zero Moments of truth and decision-making.)

Two Pager Map – In Depth on the User Flow

• The main difference between the one-pager and the two-pager is just more space. Especially for the user flow and for user experience chart.
• Customer Flow / Reactions: Instead of short descriptions, some people like to draw a user flow, since the flow can wander around as opposed to being a straight line. You can of course use whatever PowerPoint tricks you like to draw flowchart-like items here, or just insert imagery from other graphics products. However, PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides, etc. are not really the best tools to use if your user flow is deeply complex. For depiction of complicated user flows, you may prefer to use a more robust chart drawing program, (LucidChart, Omnigraffle and the like), and then copy / paste it in. (Or just refer to your separate depiction.)
• Experience Chart: Instead of being manually built as in the one-pager, this chart is generated by spreadsheet data. So, you can drive that info into a sheet using automated means if you like.
• Note on Data Gathering: In this example, the scale goes from 5 (happy) down to 1 (unsatisfying). Make sure your chart / scale and labels match. That is, with any such scale, such as Likert Scales or Semantic Differential Scales, behind the scenes there are probably numbers. Make sure the numbers match the scales. Since Amazon and others have trained consumers to rate things from 1star being bad to 5 stars being great, being Number 1 is not always good! (You may occasionally see a brand manager upset at their product rating when a consumer review says how they love the product, so the reviewer thought “this is a one” and really trashed an average rating. Lesson: Be careful with data labels and data reduction.

That’s it! Hope you enjoy using the templates.