A customer journey template is a useful tool for the critical business process of mapping out your customer journey. By doing this, you will uncover the potential and existing friction points that your customers may encounter when engaging with your company. The goal is to optimise your sales and marketing processes so that customer experience (CX) drives up revenue.
Wordstream reveals that only 39% of customers feel that brands understand their unique requirements. So, if your business is keen to deliver smooth, personalised, and hassle-free customer experiences, there may be plenty of new customers to scoop up.
In this blog, we help you understand what customer journey mapping is and provide you with a free customer journey map template so that you can take action without delay.
What is Customer Journey Mapping?
Customer journey mapping is the act of creating a visual representation of your customer’s interaction with your brand at each touchpoint along the path to conversion. It encompasses the entire experience, providing insights into the customer's motivations, behaviours, and decisions.
Visually, your customer journey map will be unique to your business and will align with how stakeholders best receive information. A Miro board or a similar infographic-building tool can help you to create a customer journey map that resonates with your desired audience once you’ve collected all the necessary data - which is where your customer journey map template comes in.
Why Use a Customer Journey Template?
A customer journey map serves as the foundation for optimising and improving CX by gaining a better understanding of your customers and what your business can do to serve them in the most effective way as they identify a need for your offering, interact with your sales team, and eventually make a purchase.
When your customer’s journey is well documented, it enables cross-departmental alignment and helps you to save on costly or ineffective activities in your sales and marketing funnels.
All roads lead to Rome, but a standardised approach to mapping your customer journey can speed things up and ensure you’re not missing any key elements when analysing your customer’s experience.
A customer journey template will prompt you to think about the most impactful and critical areas of your customer journey, as well as the more nuanced aspects that we often ignore in the rush to get products and services out to market.
If you target multiple buyer personas, it’s even more critical to map out your processes, and this is, in fact, one of the first steps that a RevOps specialist performs when they start work on optimising your processes across the board.
If you’re growing your marketing stack, a customer journey map is critical to ensure that you’re building the right integrations to support your strategy - especially if you want to effectively implement personalisation and create unique customer journeys that factor in client preferences, past purchasing behaviour, and other key attributes.
What Data Do You Need to Complete Your Customer Journey Template?
If you want actionable results, there’s no room for guesswork when mapping out your customer journey. Before you sit down to fill out your template, you must have the necessary data and have conducted research to effectively analyse past customer behaviour.
Data will typically come from sources like customer surveys and interviews — a net promoter score (NPS) survey, information collected from social media, and objective interviews with your buyer personas will help you to enter accurate, data-driven information into your customer journey template.
Unsolicited data is another way to access critical data about your customers, without having to engage them specifically. Purchase history, web traffic metrics, and chat transcripts can inform your customer journey mapping strategy too.
The Real Benefits of a Customer Journey Template
Whether someone buys from you or not is influenced by multiple external and internal factors. If your sales and marketing teams aren’t working harmoniously and don’t have a shared perspective on the customer journey, your business will forever be missing out on opportunities — and this can so easily be solved by mapping the customer journey and helping these key teams with a foundational understanding of the factors that come into play. This will not only drive collaboration, but it will ensure better outcomes and ROI.
Did competitor ads or reviews lead your customer to explore more options? Was someone on your sales team unable to follow through on essential conversion tasks? Plenty of vital information will be revealed when you map your customer journey. From there on, you can decide whether your resources are being used adequately, whether your marketing campaigns are having the right effect, and if your sales team requires any training or sales enablement tools to facilitate more productive sales cycles. Ultimately, the goal is to remove friction and ensure that customers feel fully supported throughout the purchasing process.
A Customer Journey Template Can Be Used To:
- Deliver a truly personalised experience to customers
- Promote accountability amongst key stakeholders
- Inform and steer your content marketing strategy
- Improve the services and products your business offers
- Optimise the sales funnel and support client retention efforts
- Gain competitive advantage
Ultimately, customer journey mapping is necessary for businesses that take their goals seriously. And your goals will likely shift as your business experiences growth, making your customer journey map the go-to tool when looking to scale faster.
Introducing BEE's Customisable Template
Customer journey mapping is an everyday activity at BEE. We’ve used our expertise and knowledge to create an easy-to-use customer journey map template that you can work through on Google Sheets, giving you the freedom to explore the key elements that impact your customer journey in your own time.
Follow the instructions to populate the fields in the template then reach out to us so that we can take a deeper dive into your customer journey together, or you can use the information you’ve gathered to analyse and improve your customer journey strategy more effectively.
Ready to optimise your customer journey?
Download BEE's customisable template now and schedule a free consultation to learn how we can help you enhance your customer experience strategy.
