With the empathy map the customer is always the centre. It is a collaborative tool teams use for a better understanding and acting according to customer needs. For diverse customer types more than one empathy map can be used to gain better insights. Additionally, members of different departments of a company should be involved to put their input in the according fields to get a holistic view of a typical customer from all angles. The empathy map can also be used via asking a small number of typical customers to fill it out and afterwards compare those results with company internal ones. If there has not been a customer segmentation beforehand it can also be used to do that and use it as a basis for planning of customer approaches.
When to use it
The goal of the empathy map is to name the customer needs as a basis for coming marketing and other business actions. In contrast to the Persona concept or the customer journey map it is focussing more on customer emotions and feelings of a potential customer orientating on the human sense organs.
Content of an empathy map
There are six fields and questions that have to be answered:
What does the customer see? Describing the surrounding of the customer. What visual impression does he/she get during an average day?
What does the customer hear? This is a matter of akkustic influence. This can be concrete information but also undetermining sounds. Examples are discussions with friends or at work or information on the radio…
What does the customer think and feel? This is about getting in the shoes of the customer. What motivates and drives him/her.
What does the customer say and do? Customers interact with their environment, how and what do they say and do?
What are the customer pains? This point can have concrete Info for product and service development
What does he/she gain? This is about the motivating elements for the customer. What makes him/her happy?
Once all the questions are answered it is a model for further actions in every part of the company like product development, content marketing,… New ideas and elements should be constantly added to the empathy map to keep it up to date.
Sources:
https://www.pinuts.de/blog/webstrategie/empathy-map https://avidmode.com/blog/creating-customer-personas-using-an-empathy-map https://www.marketinginstitut.biz/blog/empathy-map/
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