A Customer Journey Map is a visual representation of how a customer or user experiences a service over time. Journey Maps can be evaluative tools diagnosing current experiences or they can be generative tools describing desired future experiences for services that do not yet exist. Though they can take many forms, at their core, Journey Maps show time along an X-axis with a pre-service time period, a service time period (which should be broken into different segments) and post-service time period, with the Y-axis indicating the different “touchpoints” at these key moments in time. These touchpoints are the moments when the user interacts with information, technology, furniture, space, staff, and other users — often the moments when they need support in some way. One way to identify or categorize these touchpoints is by the A E I O U framework from ethnography: Activities, Environment, Interactions, Objects, and Users.

Journey maps should be created early on in a project and used to run a variety of scenarios – looking at different personas, current experiences, first-time future experience, established future experiences, times when everything goes right, times when everything goes wrong, and so on. These journey maps will surface key issues and intentions for the project and can be used as a check for Service Blueprints to ensure they answer all the questions or concerns the Journey Maps raise.

Example and Tool

Journey Map Example – Downloadable example (PDF).
Journey Map Template – Editable template for your use. Please download as MS Word doc or log-in to your Google docs account to ‘Make a copy’ and edit directly.