When you’re developing your journey maps, it’s important to remember that one journey map template will not meet all your needs. You need to tweak (or sometimes completely redesign) your journey map based on two key considerations:

1. What kind of story you want to tell. You might want to show the pain points and highlights in your customer journey. But that’s a different story than, say, trying to show how often customer cross channels or how often they interact through digital touchpoints.
2. Who your audience is. Your CEO needs a different level of detail to make a budgeting decision than your development and operations teams need to implement solutions. Edit the type and amount of details you include accordingly.

In case you missed it, we recently launched a free PowerPoint journey mapping template. And while it absolutely will not be a match for every story and audience, it’s a good fit for a lot of them. Here’s why:

• It tells a pain point story. Highlighting customer pain is by far the most common business goal behind our clients’ journey mapping efforts.
• The amount and type of details are up to you. You can choose how much (or how little) information to include. You can change (or delete) the rows for Needs & Expectations and Voice of the Customer. You can include icons, or text, or both.

Here’s the rationale behind a few of the template’s design elements. I hope this gives you some additional ideas of how to tweak our template to tell your stories.

• The persona. DO NOT DELETE THE PERSONA INFORMATION. The readers of your map need to understand who’s going through this journey. A Millennial? A recent retiree? A single mom who’s going back to school? Without the context of a persona, they won’t be able to understand why the pain points are a problem and what types of solutions might remedy them. And yes, that means if you’ve got different personas, you need to create a different journey map for each one.
• The phases. Having a higher-level categorization of all the steps will make your map easier for readers to understand. We’ve put the phases into a handy table with columns that you can pull to make wider or thinner.
• The Y-axis and color coding. Journey maps are visual stories—and the most effective visualizations are discernible at a glance. We’ve used the Y-axis to show the degree of goodness/pain in the journey (up is good, down is bad) and punched up the steps with red and green to drive the point home.

Happy mapping!

***

Are you using our template? We’d love to hear your stories and suggestions!