 In this video, I'll show you three of the most useful customer journey mapping templates that you can download today for free and help you decide which one is right for you. Let the show begin. So you'll have a customer journey mapping workshop coming up next week that you need to prepare or maybe your boss has asked you to create a customer journey map and present that next week. What do you do? You go online and you start looking for a customer journey map template, which you can build upon, which is pretty smart because a template can help you to get up to speed faster. There's just one small problem. You type in Google customer journey map template and then you get all these results. They look all sort of similar, but are they really how do you pick one? You don't want to be spending most of your time evaluating all these templates. You just want to be creating a customer journey map, but you also don't want to pick the wrong one because you might end up just wasting your time on a template that didn't work. If you've been in this situation, don't worry, I've heard many similar stories to help you. I've created an overview of the most useful templates that are available online right now for free. And that overview also includes the pros and cons of each template because not every template is suited for every situation. In this video, I want to show you three templates that are in that overview. So you can see the differences that exist between different journey mapping templates. And if you want to see all of the templates listed in the overview, the link to that article is down below. But for now, let's jump onto the computer. I'll share my screen and show you three very useful journey mapping templates. The first template that I want to show you is one by the online whiteboarding tool Miro and they have a customer journey map template, which you can see here in the overview. If we open the template, you'll get an article explaining what the journey map template is. And when we open the template in Miro over here, you'll get this picture. So this is, as you can see, quite basic. I'm not sure if I would call this a customer journey map, but they've listed it as such. So let's take a look. The good thing about this template is that it's very minimalistic. So there is almost no distraction. It lets you focus on the customer journey. The one big flaw that they made in this journey map template is that they incentivize you to map out touch points. And if there's one thing you shouldn't do in a customer journey is to start by mapping with touch points. You should always start by mapping customer activities and situations, but as long as you keep that in mind, this can be pretty useful. So when would I use this very basic journey map template? Probably as a conversation starter. When I need to have a conversation with somebody who isn't familiar with the idea of customer journeys, this could be a very quick and easy way in. Now Miro also has, let's see, there it is, a service blueprint template that looks like this. This already is a bit more fleshed out and looks more similar to what you might expect from a customer journey. If you want to read what the pros and cons are of this service blueprint template, check out the guide and it's listed over here and the link to the guide is in the description of this video. And the second template that I want to look at is by the team from Coastal Lens. Coastal Lens is an online, a professional online journey mapping tool. If you're still using and creating journey maps using Excel or PowerPoint, give Coastal Lens a try. I've reviewed the tool and the link to that review will pop up above my head right now. The team from Coastal Lens created seven example, seven customer journey map templates, which you can read about. They are ordered by industry and situation. And in this example, I want to look at the vacation travel journey map template. When you open that article, you can read a little bit about the background of the template when it works and you can download the PDF version and also open the template in the Coastal Lens app. So let's do that. A few only modes. Yes, that's great. When you open the template, you'll see something like this and when you zoom out, you see that it's already much more elaborate than what we just saw in Miro. That might be scary, but it isn't because what I like about this template is that it gives you a starting point to what to fill in. One of the big challenges with templates is that you often don't know what the creator of the template intended with the blank spots. And Coastal Lens gives you a starting point like, what do I need to fill in? Give me some good examples and that can really help you to start faster. So I think that's a big pro. Now in your situation, this might be a bit too elaborate depending on what you're trying to achieve, but I think this template by Coastal Lens is a really good starting point if you want to create a customer journey map that goes beyond a single visualization of a journey map. If you want to create a journey map that you'll use to make business decisions and that helps you to drive customer-centric innovation, then this is really a good starting point. And now let's look at the third customer journey map template. And that's one by Nielsen Norman. Nielsen Norman is a very respected UX consultancy and they have also created a customer journey map template. And what's interesting about this template? Let me open it. Now there's an entire article around this template. What I like about the approach they took is they divided the template up in three zones and basically three perspectives which you can use to look at a customer journey. And it's really good that they also included an internal slash business perspective. I think that's super smart. The article that goes along with this template is also useful. Like I said, they will help you to sort of understand what is it that I need to fill in in this template. It would have been nice if they had a downloadable version of this template, but it's quite easy to recreate using Cosolence or Miro, so that shouldn't hold you back. Again, you can find the links to these templates in the overview which is linked down below. Now the big question. And that's of course, which of these three journey map templates should you use? Well, it depends. If you're just trying to have a conversation with somebody about customer journeys, use the template from Miro. It's quick, easy, no distraction might work. If you're trying to kick off a journey mapping workshop, well, the template from Nielsen Norman might be a very good start, especially if there are stakeholders and you want to involve the business side of the company. And if you want to create a map that you can use beyond a single visualization and use it to make smarter business decisions, then the template by Cosolence might be the thing you need. But I'd really encourage you go to the article, go to the overview, check out all the journey mapping templates that are there, read about the pros and cons and decide for yourself which one is right for you. The templates get updated frequently, new templates come out. I'll be updating that overview so you can find the most recent useful journey mapping templates over there. So the link again to the overview is in the description of the video. Check it out. I'm sure that you'll find it useful. In the next video, we're going to talk about what is a customer journey map anyway? And most importantly, how do you explain that in simple way to the people around you? So click this video and let's continue the conversation over there.