How to create a customer journey map

About learning to create a journey map in a workshop setting. This video quickly explains how to create a customer journey map, what steps to take in the journey mapping process and what basic aspects to include in a journey map.

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HOW TO CREATE A JOURNEY MAP

It’s always good to start with a pen and paper workshop and if you can, include your customers or multiple departments in these workshops.

If you like, we have workshop templates for journey maps on our website for free.

So here are the steps to follow when building out a basic journey map.

1. Choose a Scope
Journey maps can have various scales and scopes: from a high-level map showing an end-to-end experience, to a more detailed maps focusing on one step of a higher-level journey, to very detailed step-by-step descriptions of micro-interactions.

For an example, let's take the case of a mortgage-loan. A journey map for a mortgage-loan experience could show 30 years of that experience including everything from searching for a house, signing contracts, living in the house, signing contracts, living in the house and making loan payments until the loan is paid off. Or another journey map can zoom in just one of these steps to illustrate only the experience of searching and comparing mortgage loans. Another journey map can zoom in even further and only illustrate a one-hour consultation.

First decide how far you want to zoom in or out of an experience.

2. Choosing a Persona
You have to choose a main actor for your journey. A journey map always focuses on the experiences of one main actor, such as a group of customers or employees. Some journey maps also combine various perspectives in one map — for example, comparing different customer groups or comparing customer experiences with those of employees. At any way, to get started, choose a persona you want to follow in your journey.

3. Steps
A step is any experience the main actor has, such as an interaction with another person, a machine, or a digital interface; but steps can also be activities, such as walking or waiting. The level of detail of each step depends on the overall scale of a journey map.

As a little hint: To get started with steps, decide what is the the crucial part of the experience and then ask yourself - what happens before this? What happens after? This will help you get going and building out each step.

4. Lanes:
You can add more lanes to your journey map to show or analyze different parts of the experience. For example, you can add a row of images below each step to show visually what is happening. This kind of lane with images is called a storyboard. Or you can expand on each step with more text descriptions. We call this a text lane. If you’d like to look at the emotional journey of an experience you can add an emotional journey lane as well. Or, if you want to start to create a list of ideas or jobs to be done for your organization you can also do this with a text lane. Check out our cheat sheet on the different types of lanes you can add to a journey map. Of course, lanes can always be customized to the type of project you are working on.

5. Save and Edit: Smaply can help you to quickly transfer the journey that you created during a workshop with pen and paper into a polished PDF or PowerPoint presentation.

If you're curious on how to create stakeholder maps, personas or
even get started working with Smaply, check out our learning resources.

[smaply]

What else would you like to know about journey mapping / service design / customer experience? Leave us a comment, we're striving to provide you with new learning resources on your favorite topics!

[wise_nut]

This explains really well. I agree with Mariappan :)

[nasim]

nicely explained, thank you very much

[samuelthamburaj]

An awesomely simple walkthrough of this topic... thanks

[Astillleros]

Great points! Love your points about choosing scope -- it can make all the difference on the journey map.

[AbsentGodz]

simple and straight just what I was looking for...thanks

[AbsentGodz]

btw the download link is broken, could someone please post the new link or somewhere I can get these types of sheets? thanks

[sorcererstone]

Hmm. Tried to download the toolkit twice. File downloaded but failed to unzip in both cases. Error: Unexpected end of archive
Please advise.

[figma_labs]

What is the outcome do we get out of this anyway?

[trantormiak]

Is the actress Olivia Cooke (female lead in Ready Player One) the narrator?

[alaafantazia]

Which program of software can i use for customer journey

[alaafantazia]

How can I share my first juorney without paying ?