8 empathy map templates for a deeper understanding of your customers

What if you could step inside your customers' heads? Imagine understanding exactly what keeps them up at night, what motivates their decisions, and what they want from your products or services. 

This is possible with empathy maps. 

These tools allow you to step into your customers' shoes and see the world from their perspective — and that's incredibly valuable. This enables you to shift from reactive to proactive, anticipate customer needs, and tailor your strategies accordingly.

This article will explore ten empathy map templates offering insights into your customers' unique experiences.

What if you could step inside your customers' heads? Imagine understanding exactly what keeps them up at night, what motivates their decisions, and what they want from your products or services. 

This is possible with empathy maps. 

These tools allow you to step into your customers' shoes and see the world from their perspective — and that's incredibly valuable. This enables you to shift from reactive to proactive, anticipate customer needs, and tailor your strategies accordingly.

This article will explore ten empathy map templates offering insights into your customers' unique experiences.

What is an empathy map template?

An empathy map template is a visual tool that captures a specific customer segment's thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and motivations. Cross-functional team members from marketing, design, sales, and customer service collaboratively create the asset to ensure a 360-degree understanding of the customer experience.

Empathy maps usually include four quadrants: 

• Think and Feel

• See

• Hear

• Say and Do

These quadrants provide stakeholders a glimpse into their target customers’ pain points and how they may react to your product or service.

Empathy map vs. customer journey vs. customer persona

It's easy to get confused between customer empathy maps, customer journeys, and customer personas—aren't they all just tools to understand your customers? 

Yes, but they serve different purposes. Here’s how:

• An empathy map is a deep dive into your customers' minds that captures their feelings and motivations, typically used in the initial marketing strategy or product development stages. 

• A customer journey tracks your customers' path from first contact to purchase and is best for optimizing the customer experience. 

• A customer persona is a detailed profile that summarizes the key characteristics of your target audience, like demographics and psychographics. It’s a great tool for both the planning and execution phases of product design and campaigns.

Who benefits from an empathy map?

Short answer: Any customer-facing or product development team can benefit from an empathy map. It's especially useful for sales representatives, marketers, product designers, and customer service personnel, providing deep insights into customer needs, experiences, and motivations. 

Here’s how each of these teams uses empathy maps:

• Sales: Empathy maps enable sales teams to understand the client's perspective better, leading to more personalized and effective sales strategies that resonate with the client's specific challenges and goals.

• Marketing: Marketers use empathy maps to create targeted campaigns, and messaging that align with the audience's emotional drivers, preferences, and buying behaviors.

• Product design: Product and customer experience designers use empathy maps to create user-centric designs and experiences. Design teams ensure both product features and overall customer interactions match end-user needs and desires during design thinking.

• Customer service: Empathy maps assist customer service reps and help desk teams to anticipate customer issues and identify their underlying concerns, allowing for more empathetic and tailored support solutions.

How to build an empathy map

Start creating empathy maps with these guidelines:

1. Define your user and target personas

Define your user and target personas to get crystal clear on whom you’re designing for. 

You have the option of creating empathy maps for a broad target persona. Here, you create a composite character representing a group of users with similar traits. This method is less granular but more practical for understanding and catering to larger customer segments. 

You can’t go wrong with user persona maps if you want to dig in. User-based empathy maps focus on individual users. They're incredibly detailed, diving deep into one specific customer's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. 

For example, here’s an example of an empathy map of someone navigating an insurance website:

Choose the route that fits into your team's needs and goals. You can even brainstorm multiple empathy maps for each key persona or group if you have the resources.

2. Gather qualitative research

Start by collecting insights directly from your customers through interviews, focus groups, listening sessions, customer service transcripts, or even observing them in their natural environment. 

Listen to what they say, but also pay attention to what they don't say. Understand their experiences, feelings, and motivations on a deeper level and get to the heart of their emotional and psychological state by asking open-ended questions such as:

• How do you feel about [product/service/brand]?

• What do you value most in a [product/service/brand]?

• Can you tell me about a time when you were frustrated with [product/service/brand]?

This research provides the raw material for your empathy map and gives you a rich, nuanced understanding of your customers.

3. Categorize the research according to each quadrant

Once you’ve gathered your research, categorize it into each quadrant of the empathy map.

Pro tip: organize the user research individually first. A diverse team may interpret the same information differently, and this can lead to deeper insights. 

Do this in real time on an online whiteboard for detailed discussions. Every individual then places sticky notes into each quadrant to visualize and group the research.

Apart from ensuring different points of view are included, this collaborative process promotes a comprehensive understanding of the customer. You better picture your customer's experience and mindset by categorizing your findings into these areas.

4. Synthesize the research to identify key themes

Look for patterns and commonalities across the different quadrants. Analyze the information and synthesize it into key themes.

Focus on these areas:

• Emotional state: What are your customers' main emotions and feelings? Are there any recurring patterns?

• Needs and desires: What do your customers want or need from your product/service/brand? What motivates them to seek out your business?

• Pain points: What are your customers' frustrations, challenges, or obstacles about your product/service/brand?

• Delightful moments: Are there any positive experiences or moments your customers have had with your product/service/brand? What made these experiences memorable for them?

Note down outliers, too. Any unexpected findings or information that doesn’t fit into the four quadrants can be just as valuable in providing insights.

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8 empathy map templates to leverage 

The more specific your empathy map, the better. Below, we’ve created eight empathy map templates for different types of customers to help you get started. 

1. Basic empathy map template

This empathy map canvas covers the four main quadrants: Think, Feel, See, and Hear. It applies to any general customer research, making it a great starting point for beginners.

2. Empathy map template for small businesses

A small business owner or entrepreneur has a unique perspective and set of challenges compared to larger businesses. Small business owners can use this empathy map template to understand their customers’ needs and behaviors.

3. Empathy map template for real estate businesses

Real estate professionals constantly interact with a diverse group of individuals, each with unique needs and concerns. Providing exceptional service and creating successful transactions requires understanding buyers' and sellers' emotions and motivations.

4. Empathy map template for B2B SaaS businesses

B2B SaaS users are often busy professionals looking for solutions to streamline their workflow and increase productivity. Build empathy maps using this template:

5. Employee-centric empathy map template

Employee empathy maps offer a glimpse into the day-to-day experiences and feelings of employees within an organization. 

6. Healthcare patient empathy map template

No industry focuses more on empathy than healthcare, which puts patients' well-being first. This empathy map examines healthcare patients' perspectives and behaviors to improve their hospital or doctor's office experience.

7. User experience (UX) empathy map template

A user experience (UX) empathy map details what a person thinks, feels, sees, says, and does about the product’s functionality. 

8. Product development empathy map template

How can you build a product that truly meets your users' emotional and practical needs? A product development empathy map gives you insight into your target audience's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

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Create your own empathy maps

An empathy map template is the best starting point to get a sneak peek into your users' minds. 

But don't just fill in the blanks—immerse yourself in the process. Reflect on the data, consider different perspectives, and really put yourself in their shoes. Use these Freshworks templates to embolden cross-functional teams to provide more personalized, data-backed experiences. Ultimately, your customers — whether internal or external — will ultimately thank you!