Why mapping the customer journey is so important for improving CX

Today’s savvy, well-informed buyers want an excellent customer experience (CX) every single time they interact with your product and brand.

Creating a customer journey map (CJM) helps you deeply understand every aspect of your users’ experience and act on your insights to boost conversions, customer satisfaction, and retention—and keep up with your competitors.

Our comprehensive guide of the 10 most important benefits of customer journey mapping explains why mapping the buyer journey is so crucial, how you can leverage the right tools for even deeper insights, who should map out the customer journey, and which challenges to look out for. 

Let’s go. 

10 reasons you need to map your customer journey

A customer journey map is a visual representation of how your customers interact with your brand, website, and product across different stages—from external touchpoints like social media, ads, and events, to internal touchpoints like website landing pages, CTAs, signup forms, and onboarding processes. 

To understand your users’ experiences, desires, and pain points, you can use a powerful Customer Journey Analysis tool like Contentsquare, which provides data-driven visualizations of how visitors progress through your site from beginning to end, or you can manually do customer journey map research. 

Either way, you’ll want to complement your map with additional qualitative and quantitative data from customer interviews, surveys, digital experience analytics (DXA), and product analytics (PA) tools to make it even more effective. A data-informed customer journey map helps you understand your users' jobs-to-be-done as they engage with your site or product—and what they’re thinking and feeling as they navigate.

Let’s take a look at how customer journey mapping can benefit your company—and your customers.

1. Walk in your customers’ shoes

Collecting real-world insights helps you dig deep into how customers interact with your brand, which makes it easier to empathize with their experience. A strong customer journey mapping process lets you challenge your assumptions—you’ll see customers don’t always act or think how you expect. 

Understanding where users struggle to complete actions, get frustrated, or drop off helps you prioritize website and product improvements to give them a smoother experience. Maybe that’s changing the position of CTAs, or adapting your navigation architecture so important information is easy to find. 

If you build a culture of putting yourself in your customers’ shoes, all stakeholders can see your brand from the customer perspective (outside-in) as well as the business perspective (inside-out). 

In order to understand if a product is working well or not, Contentsquare helps us deep-dive into why people are buying this product or not compared to another.

Geraldine Servouze

Global ecommerce Director

Pro tip: Zoom in to watch what happens at specific points of the customer journey. Session Replay lets you see exactly how customers navigate your site, so you can understand which areas they gravitate to, which parts they avoid, and where they get blocked or drop off.

Watch session replays in Contentsquare to discover how users experience your page and improve low-performing touchpoints

2. Identify unmet user needs

A strong understanding of customer needs across different interactions lets you identify gaps in the journey and offer additional touchpoints or improve existing ones, which means no more guesswork.  

Mapping out how customers navigate your site or app lets you pinpoint blockers, where they’re trying to engage but can’t, or where completing an action takes too much effort. 

Increase your awareness of customer needs to minimize frustrations by providing the right information and features at specific stages for a better user experience (UX). For example, if you see customers struggling with onboarding touchpoints, you can deliver an explanatory video or pop-up tooltip exactly when they need it. Or if they’re caught in an endless help-page loop, you can update your pages to provide the most relevant information at key points in the website journey.

Pro tip: use Heatmaps to see where user needs aren’t being met. Heatmaps are visual aggregations of where users scroll, click, tap, and get frustrated, revealing which parts of your site or product engage them and which ones don’t.

Use them to understand whether key information, CTAs, and contact forms are optimally positioned so visitors can find them at the right point in their customer journey. If not, you can easily modify your layout for a better experience.

Heatmaps show you an intuitive aggregated view of which parts of your site are attracting attention and which aren’t to help you make changes that improve UX

3. Understand complex journeys across several customer touchpoints

The average customer uses multiple channels to research and interact with brands. This creates highly complex, non-linear journeys with several customer touchpoints. 

Touchpoints also vary by customer: maybe Gen Zers typically come to your website from social media and seek out video content, while Gen Xers might be more likely to arrive directly from Google searches and want written content and comparison charts before they buy.  

For B2B businesses, multiple decision-makers are also often involved—and they all have different ways of conducting research and choosing a solution.

This complexity makes creating an excellent customer experience across the board difficult. 

Customer journey mapping visualizes all these different experiences in one place—showing you exactly what customers are thinking, feeling, and doing at each stage so you can provide the right information at the right time, in the right place, and through the right channel.

Pro tip: use customer segmentation to get granular insights about specific user cohorts. Analyze your customer journey maps, session replays, heatmaps, and other data based on how users behave (behavioral segmentation) or shared traits (demographic segmentation) to spot differences in how they interact with your site or product, and use the insights to create more personalized, tailored experiences for each group.

Customer (or user) segmentation lets you dive even deeper into your data to understand how different audience cohorts behave, enabling you to create more targeted experiences for them 

4. Visualize emotions, not just actions

Buyer journeys are often emotional, but it’s hard to turn feelings into concrete data, and it’s even harder to imagine what your customers will actually feel when designing your product and site. 

A well-researched customer journey map helps you visualize what customers are thinking, feeling, and doing: the key to understanding their deepest needs and providing a better service. Gathering insights on customer emotions—and acting on them—helps customers feel you ‘get’ them and builds brand trust.

Pro tip: Use Frustration Score to quickly surface moments of friction on your site or product. Discover issues negatively impacting the customer experience, conversions, and revenue, like rage clicks and slow page performance, and instantly find frustration-filled replays to see exactly what happened and why.

Use Frustration Scoring to get AI-generated insights that let you quickly identify (and fix) friction in the customer journey

5. Create personalized experiences

Personalization is key to great customer experience, even with self-serve products, because customers value brands that understand their unique needs.

Customer journey mapping lets you dig deeper into user intent and interactions, allowing you to create personalized experiences across all touchpoints. 

For example: 

• Create targeted landing pages with use cases for different customer segments

• Show relevant social media ads to potential customers browsing online

• Provide personalized support over multiple channels 

• Improve onboarding by tailoring the process to each customer

• Customize the post-onboarding experience so users can adapt your product to their exact needs, boosting adoption

Our Merchandising team uses Contentsquare to look at the customer’s experience on the site—and to test, learn, and play around with what could be the optimal model to improve conversion and acquisition.

Matt Spowart

Head of Digital Enablement & Brand Optimisation at Cotton On Group

6. Align cross-functional stakeholders

Mapping the customer journey works best with perspectives from UX, marketing, product, sales, customer service and success, shipping, management, and other teams. This can mean getting different roles physically in a room together, or collecting their feedback to understand how they interact with your customer. These diverse insights help speed up the process of solving customer journey issues—so users see improvements faster. 

With Contentsquare, we’re now able to share digestible information with other teams, including our executive team. Plus, we can share it fast—we definitely save time on reporting.

Sarah Massey

Director of eCommerce

7. Improve ROI and cost-effectiveness by creating satisfied customers

Between paid ads, marketing, and sales, customer acquisition is costly—so retaining customers is important to help boost your return on investment (ROI). 

Customer journey mapping provides you with opportunities to improve onboarding and feature adoption, which increases customer satisfaction, loyalty, and product advocacy.  

Use digital experience analytics tools like heatmaps to spot technical issues that prevent users from signing up for a trial, or identify points when ecommerce customers abandon their shopping carts, and fix them to boost conversions and revenue generation. 

8. Get a competitive edge 

Mapping tells you exactly how you can improve your customer experience to make your product stand out from the competition. CJMs also reveal product strategy opportunities to differentiate your brand by identifying new ways to provide customers with additional value.

These product experiences and user insights help your brand stay relevant, adapt your product and business model as customer needs change, and gain a competitive edge in a moment where having a great product is no longer enough on its own. 

Crucially, mapping helps you identify your ‘halo’ customers—the group that, when you land them, makes everyone else sit up and take notice—as well as influencers and early adopters. That’s the first step in learning how to attract more of them.

9. Improve marketing and product-led growth

Many companies assume the customer journey starts when someone lands on their website or blog. In reality, it starts way before that—often with the customer searching for solutions or doing research in professional groups or community forums. 

Mapping the journey from start to finish helps you get to know your users, be a part of their conversations, and create content for all stages of the buyer journey that help convert visitors into paying customers. This process is particularly valuable for businesses with long, complex buyer journeys and high-value products, like the SaaS or B2B customer journey. 

Building a CJM also reduces guesswork and helps you validate ideas—from identifying the right channels, messaging, positioning, and content to building credibility and trust with customers.  

Use an all-in-one experience platform to see where users get blocked—and use the information you glean to make your product itself more intuitive, user-friendly, and well-positioned for growth. The goal here is to make your product (and the user journey within it) so good that it starts to act as its own marketing channel and practically sells itself, which is every team's dream.

10. Minimize future roadblocks

Customer journey mapping requires some time and effort up front, but it increases efficiency and saves resources later on. 

Conduct customer interviews and combine them with product analytics and digital experience insights tools to collect qualitative and quantitative data. This minimizes customer roadblocks further down the line, which ultimately helps reduce assumptions across your team and lets you anticipate challenges so you can prevent them.

Pro tip: use Voice of Customer tools—like Surveys, User Tests, and Interviews—to get user feedback about your site or product. For example, use AI to quickly spin up surveys based on your target research goal and effortlessly analyze the responses, then jump straight to relevant session replays to get more context for user answers.

Place surveys or feedback widgets on key pages in the customer journey to understand how users feel about them—and how you can improve

Who should map the customer journey? 

Every company, no matter its size or niche, can benefit from mapping the customer journey. Customer journey mapping is particularly useful for giving startups and SMEs a competitive edge. 

Aligning yourself more closely with your customers by getting to know and understand their needs and blockers will allow your company to give customers exactly what they want and differentiate you from the competition. 

What are the challenges of customer journey mapping? 

Customer journey mapping can be a quick and easy process—take a look at our guide to creating a customer journey map in six steps—but it comes with some challenges: 

• You need a strong understanding of all your customer profiles and user groups to avoid leaving anyone out. Don’t rely on assumptions: run customer interviews and collect user feedback to inform your user personas and map.

• Multiple teams usually need to be involved, which isn’t always easy to organize. To get other teams (and execs) on board, share the above benefits of customer journey mapping and explain how their involvement will help.   

• It can be frustrating if you don’t have the resources and staffing to immediately act on the insights revealed by customer journey mapping. However, a strong customer journey map will help you see what to prioritize, and can even help you get buy-in for more resources to make changes.

• It can be hard to collect enough data for a thorough customer journey map. Contentsquare’s Journeys aggregates data from 100% of your customers to give you a full picture of CX on your site or product, which you can enrich even further by combining with session replays and heatmaps.

Journeys in Contentsquare makes it even easier to get insights about common customer journeys

Customer journey mapping is a continuous process 

Mapping the customer journey tells you exactly how users interact with your brand, website, and product at different touchpoints—and what they’re doing, thinking, or feeling at each stage. 

Your customer journey map is a living record. Refer back to it regularly during every stage of your product's design, testing, and launch to make sure you’re delivering what your customers really want and need. 

This crucial process will help you understand and improve the customer experience, create customer delight, and boost adoption and loyalty.

Frequently asked questions about customer journey mapping benefits