Step 1: evaluate your current customer experience
A winning customer experience roadmap is based on one principle: meeting (and exceeding) customer expectations.
To exceed customer expectations, you first have to uncover what they are, and learn where and how your current customer experience falls short.
The best bet for getting your hands on this information? Your customers.
Use the following tools to monitor customer interactions and gather data to share with stakeholders:
Customer interviews
Hop on calls with customers to ask questions about their experience with your brand and product. Find out what works and what doesn't by asking open-ended questions like:
- How does our service/product fit into your daily life?
- What were you doing the last time you opened our app/used our product?
- What is the first thing you do after you open our app/access our product?
By letting the customer lead the conversation, customer interviews help to
- Give you insight into users’ expectations as you hear directly from them
- Uncover overlooked pain points in the customer experience
💡 Pro tip: in addition to talking to customers, go through the journey yourself, so you can get a taste of the experience your company offers.
“This is going to be varying degrees of possible in different types of businesses (i.e., it’s harder to do in businesses with long sales cycles), but do as much of it as you can,” suggests Benyamin Elias, Director of Growth Marketing at Podia.
“Sign up for a product or demo, make sure you’re on your company’s email lists with different segments, go through a sales process, use the product. Put in tickets to support—and if you can’t do it yourself, partner with a customer to do it and see the results. If you have customer segments with very different journeys (i.e., a developer segment/app ecosystem vs customer), go through the journey for each segment.”
All of this will help you find elements that don’t work as well as you thought they did.
Customer surveys
Launching customer surveys at various touchpoints in the customer journey helps you understand where your CX needs improvement, and what’s working well (so you can double down on it).
Ask open- and closed-ended survey questions on key pages (like a checkout page) to learn about customers' struggles in their own words, and understand how they rate specific CX aspects.
You can easily host on-site surveys—including CSAT, NPS®, and CES surveys—with Contentsquare. Use our Voice of Customer tools, like Exit-Intent Surveys and Feedback, to gather user feedback at key touchpoints along the customer journey, including landing pages, product pages, and checkout pages.
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Contentsquare Heatmaps
Heatmaps are visualizations of the most popular and unpopular elements on your web and product pages. Analyze heatmaps to understand user behavior on your site, including where they get stuck and which page elements impact their experience.
Contentsquare’s Zone-Based Heatmaps are especially informative. They reveal where users click, tap, hesitate, scroll, or swipe, and what captures attention in one aggregated view. So you can easily identify which elements draw people in and what makes them leave.
Use tools like Zone-Based Heatmaps to visualize user behavior, learn what holds customers’ attention and compels them to convert, and see which site elements are failing to engage existing users.
Contentsquare Session Replays
Session Replays (or session recordings) capture individual users’ mouse movements, keyboard strokes, clicks, and scrolls across multiple pages to give you a real-life breakdown of how customers interact with your site.
Replays also help identify opportunities to optimize the user experience. For example, you can filter Contentsquare Session Replays by rage clicks or u-turns to watch sessions where users appear to be struggling with a particular page element.
Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool gives you a first-person perspective on what users expect and can help you map the full customer journey.