Templates for customer journey maps, personas and stakeholder maps

For the ones being in a hurry: You can download all paper templates for free, then print and use them together with your team; or you can use our digital templates within Smaply - it’s free!

In the following, we will clearly explain when and how to successfully use paper templates and/or digital templates.

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Overview

• The value of paper templates
• Paper template: Persona
• Paper template: Customer journey map
• Paper template: Stakeholder map
• What the download kit for paper templates contains
• Digital templates for personas, journey maps and stakeholder maps

The value of paper templates

A successful start for any journey mapping activity is doing a pen-and-paper workshop with a group of people – colleagues from other departments, customers, and other stakeholders. For such workshops it helps to use simple paper templates where people can quickly draw personas, journey maps and stakeholder maps and iterate on them.

The great advantage of customer journey templates on paper is that they are easy to use for everybody, no matter their affinity towards technology. Also, they bring quick results that can be immediately discussed and taken further down the process.

Did you know? Pen-and-paper templates for personas, journey maps and stakeholder maps and digital mapping tools are no either-or decision; rather they are useful for different purposes or at different moments of the process. You can use our paper templates for journey maps, personas and stakeholder maps in addition to digital ones, or as a first step towards a digital journey mapping tool.

As stated above, it often makes sense to start journey mapping in a workshop setting - hang up a template on the wall, fill the room with people from different departments and get started! But make sure to keep the journey maps that were created in this informal setting. It would be a pity to lose these rich workshop results. How can you make sure they get stored in a safe place but are still accessible? That's where journey mapping software comes into play.  

Paper persona template

A persona is a rich description of one fictional person exemplifying a specific group of people, such as a group of customers or users, a market segment, a subset of employees, or any other stakeholder group. They help us relate to groups of people as individuals and give context on the specific challenge they’re experiencing. Personas enable us to achieve empathy, create better ideas and challenge them.

Working together on a buyer or user persona template helps you and your team to develop a shared understanding of your customers. The developed personas are a valuable basis for journey map and stakeholder map workshops, as well as for many other tools.

How to work with the persona template?

No matter whether you work with a digital or a paper template for you persona, there are certain topics that you can use in order to relate to the persona as a human:

• What is a fitting quote for your persona?
• How would you describe him or her?
• What are the needs and goals relevant for your persona?
• How does he or her communicate and make decisions?
• What are relevant pain points?

Other topics can help to connect your buyer or user persona to a specific problem, situation, product or service:

• What expectations does he or she have towards a certain product / service / technology
• What is he or her trying to accomplish?
• What is the overall goal when using your product or service?
• What are the pain points your persona is experiencing that he or she tries to overcome?
• What are questions that need to be answered?
• Think about jobs to be done:
  
  "When __________ I want to _________ so I can _________.

Additional helpful data:

• Demographic data, relationship data and behavioral data.
• Portrait image

Paper Customer journey map template

A journey map can help you visualize the overall experience a user or a customer has with a service, a physical or digital product, or a brand. Like a movie tells a story of an actor as a sequence of scenes, a journey map visualizes your persona's experiences as a sequence of steps.

Working together on a journey map template helps you to generate a common and empathic understanding of your user's or customer's experience between all team members. Filling out the journey map template can facilitate finding and communicating customer experience gaps and explore potential solutions.

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How to use the basic fields of a journey mapping template?

• Persona: Describe the experience of a specific persona on your journey map template
• Title: Define the focus of your journey map and give it a title
• Steps: Break down the experience into steps: What is the most crucial part of the experience? What happens before that, what happens afterwards?
• Stages: Summarize your steps into stages or phases.

What to add in additional lanes of the journey mapping template?

• Text lane: Describe what happens by adding more information to describe the experience in each step.
• Storyboard: Draw images under each step to tell a visual narrative. It does not have to look perfect -if you can draw a triangle and a circle you can draw a person ;-) Adding images helps others to navigate faster an empathize more with your persona in this specific situation.
• Emotional journey: Illustrate your persona's satisfaction: assign different values along the scale from -2 to +2 for each step. What is the persona's emotional experience at this point?

By the way, if you want to learn more about how to create a customer journey map, check out our Tutorial:

Paper Stakeholder mapping template

Customers or users interact with many different internal and external stakeholders during their journey. A stakeholder map visualizes this ecosystem of stakeholders involved in a customer experience.

Working together on a stakeholder mapping template helps to create a common understanding of who is involved, what formal and informal relationships exist between them and where frictions occur between them. You and your team can identify new business opportunities in establishing new relationships, fostering existing ones, or creating alternatives.

How to work with the stakeholder mapping template?

In the first step you should do a workshop with many different stakeholders (including customers) in order to co-create a list of relevant stakeholders. Once you have identified your stakeholders, you can dig deeper into the relationships between them and visualize them on a stakeholder mapping template.

• Title: Give your stakeholder map a title or a focus
• Stakeholders (including personas): The actors in your ecosystem can be freely arranged on the large circular map. Their position depends on that you want to visualize and how you prioritize them. But usually your customer should be in the center of the stakeholder map template.
• Relationships / value exchange: Now you try to visualize the certain relationships stakeholders have with each other. In many cases, a transaction or value exchange takes place between them. You can draw little icons or add tome text to explain the relationships.
• Map legend: Define the meaning of the three circles. According to your project, these could for example be "essential / important / interesting" or also "internal / external directly / external indirectly". Just use whatever makes sense to structure your ecosystem.
• Sidebar: The sidebar gives an overview of all stakeholders and relationships involved in the stakeholder map you are working with.

Paper template kit for personas, journey maps and stakeholder maps

In this download kit you'll find different paper templates for personas, journey maps and stakeholder maps in different sizes and for different purposes.

• The small templates (DIN A2-A5) are templates to put on a table and work either alone or with small groups of 2-3 people
• The large templates (DIN A0) are to be put on a wall and work with teams of approximately 5 people. You can print them with a plotter.

Download the paper templates kit

Digital templates for customer journey maps, personas and stakeholder maps

After your pen-and-paper workshop, it comes to digitizing your drafts.

Digital customer journey map templates have several advantages, including:

• Make your insights accessible for the entire team
• Easily sharing them with others
• Continue working on them
• Saving your findings for future projects

On Smaply we provide you with several free digital templates – here's a quick overview on what you'll find and what the templates are useful for.

Digital persona template

The Smaply persona tool offers a template to create customized personas, drag and drop images to create empathy, add quotes and describe personas in the categories you think are relevant. You can create your digital persona template individually, depending on which information you wish to include.

Digital stakeholder map template

The Smaply stakeholder map tool offers a simple stakeholder map template that can be filled with a drag&drop editor. The template can be used for stakeholder maps as well as ecosystem maps. You can add different personas to the map and visualize their relationships online.

Digital customer journey map templates

On the one hand, the Smaply journey map tool offers a fully flexible editor that allows you to create customer journey maps. You can visualize situations and the emotional state of mind of your persona with different steps, stages and lanes

Beyond that, there are four different digital templates available in Smaply that you can use for different purposes; here's a quick overview.

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Digital template: service blueprint

With the service blueprint template, you can connect customer interactions with backstage processes in a classic format.

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Digital template: communication journey

With the communication journey template, you can put your focus on channels of communication.

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Digital template: Empathy journey map

The empathy template helps you to visualize what customers think, say, do, and feel, as well as their pains and gains throughout their journey.

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Digital template: Comparison journey map

Whit this template you can compare the journeys of multiple personas in one map (customer segments, customers and employees, etc.).

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Happy workshopping!