How the Contentsquare-Microsoft partnership transforms the customer journey

How the Contentsquare-Microsoft partnership transforms the customer journey

Tech industry leader Microsoft is the largest software producer in the world. Here's how the Contentsquare-Microsoft partnership drives innovation and improves digital experiences.

What sets Contentsquare apart?

Contentsquare is a global leader in experience intelligence and analytics. We reveal customer behavior through our all-in-one platform that offers tools like Heatmaps, frustration scoring, and retention analysis.

We aim "to empower businesses to create a world where everybody gets the experience they love, seek, and deserve." In support of that mission, we work toward creating an experience that's accessible, inclusive, trustworthy, and sustainable.

Like Microsoft, Contentsquare offers a marketplace of trusted partners for its customers to choose from. Called the Partner Ecosystem, we provide pre-built integrations and services to complement and enhance users' experiences with our analytics cloud.

What sets Microsoft apart?

One of the premier names in the tech world, Microsoft is a global company specializing in operating systems, software, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence (AI). Its mission is ambitious—"to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more."

As part of this mission, Microsoft listens to the diverse voices of its employees and customers, works toward innovation and artificial intelligence (AI) to extend human capabilities, and creates trustworthy computing experiences.

To achieve this and extend its reach, the company offers the Microsoft commercial marketplace, a centralized platform where organizations can procure and deploy software solutions—from productivity tools to AI-powered applications.

The Contentsquare-Microsoft partnership

Both Contentsquare and Microsoft are mission driven, which makes a partnership between us only natural. We both value innovation, accessibility, and trust—and share a goal of improving customer journeys by driving innovation in AI and predictive analytics.

Since 2021, we've partnered with Microsoft Azure's powerful cloud computing platform to accelerate our growth, achieve peak performance, and drive innovation. And as a trusted partner in the Microsoft commercial marketplace, we help more businesses gain insights into customer behavior.

On its part, Microsoft joined the Contentsquare Partner Ecosystem to accompany us as we build our AI and predictive analytics strategy. Microsoft provides expertise to the team and technical support for research and development.

Digital transformation will continue to accelerate over the next decade, defining the economic performance of every organization. For many organizations, the agility to move forward will come from understanding how their customers behave. That’s why we’re so happy to see this partnership come to life.

Jean-Philippe Courtois

Executive Vice President and President

5 benefits of the partnership

Our partnership with Microsoft has wide-ranging benefits for both enterprises' customers.

Here are just a few:

1. Improved integration: with the partnership, you can rest assured your technologies work together flawlessly across teams.

2. Increased security: Contentsquare runs on Microsoft Azure, which is built on the highest security and regulatory compliance standards.

3. Better performance: Contentsquare is committed to delivering 'better insights, faster'—and Azure's cloud computing platform helps achieve that.

4. Powerful innovation: both companies share a vision to drive the development of new technologies to improve customer experience.

5. Reduced complexity: by choosing vetted solutions in each others' ecosystem, you know they're guaranteed to work together in your tech stack.

From tool adoption to deployment, we work together with Microsoft to make things easier for you and help improve experiences for your customers.

👉 It’s a fact: a 2024 study by global market research company Forrester reveals that cloud marketplaces help you balance speed and agility while minimizing the challenges of software-as-a-service (SaaS) sprawl.

The group specifically found Microsoft's commercial marketplace reduced employee effort required for each procurement by 50%.

This long-term partnership represents a joint investment in customer experience innovation. We work hand in hand with Microsoft to empower brands around the world to offer standout, optimized experiences to all their customers.

Jonathan Cherki

CEO and Founder of Contentsquare

Tips from Microsoft on using Contentsquare

Microsoft uses Contentsquare to understand the customer journey, drive digital formation, and improve accessibility. Here's how you can get the most out of Contentsquare's tools by following Microsoft's lead.

Use case 1: understanding the modern customer journey

The customer journey has never been more important. According to Forrester's 2024 U.S. Customer Experience Index, customer experience (CX) quality among U.S. brands is at an all-time low.

Part of this drop in CX is due to the pace of change. As people remove barriers like technology and infrastructure, the pace of change quickens—and customer experience needs to keep up.

On that front, Microsoft benefits from our insights and recommendations to optimize its own online sales channels (like Microsoft Store) and improve its conversion rate.

Here are 2 ways you can use digital experience insights to improve your ecommerce results, too.

1. Catch every customer signal

The most successful customer experiences aren't created by brands. Instead, they're shaped by the customers themselves.

This means picking up on every signal a customer sends you in their digital journey. Part of that includes ditching the siloed approach for a seamless sharing of information between platforms and people.

Using our all-in-one Experience Intelligence platform can remove silo walls and ensure you pick up on behavior signals like

• Frustration: frustration scoring reveals your users' biggest points of friction on your site—think confusing form fields or slow performance. These moments of frustration automatically get ranked based on their impact on experience, conversion, and revenue, helping you make faster decisions.

• Engagement: use Heatmaps to visualize how users interact with each element on your website and app. Discover what makes them click, tap, scroll, swipe, or pause—and what makes them bounce.

See where customers are interacting with your website and app with Heatmaps

In addition, our platform lets you verify this behavioral data with insights directly from customers. With Voice of Customer (VoC), you can launch AI-powered surveys in seconds to check in with users about their experience with your website, product, or service.

💡 Did you know? Frustration is more than an inconvenience. Our 2025 Digital Experience Benchmarks show that slow-loading pages, delayed responses to visitor interactions, and confusing customer experiences reduce session depth (which is tied to conversion) by -6%.

2. Use insights to optimize and innovate

It's not enough to simply pick up on customer signals—you have to use them to drive your brand forward. For example, if your data shows that customers seem overwhelmed by the sheer number of product options, you might experiment with putting fewer search results on a single page.

Alternatively, you could curate a personalized shortlist of 3 items they might also like on each product detail page (PDP).

The time and effort you put into understanding and optimizing the customer experience often pays off with more satisfying journeys, increased revenue, and fewer negative experiences.

Microsoft created Microsoft Cloud for Retail to show just how dedicated they are to investing in customer experience. This AI-powered solution helps accelerate growth by pointing customers toward trusted retail solutions that integrate with their existing systems to deliver seamless experiences across the customer journey.

You can use customer journey insights to optimize and innovate, regardless of the industry you're in. You just need the right tool.

Contentsquare's Journey Analysis capability shows you intuitive visualizations of how users progress through your site.

Analyze and optimize user journeys at a glance with Journey Analysis

By understanding the customer journey from start to finish, you can learn your biggest opportunities and frustrations, such as looping behaviors and places where unexpected drop-offs occur. You can also narrow your focus by segmenting users by channel or campaign.

By learning which content journeys lead to the most conversions and revenue, you can improve your site to encourage other users along the same path.

The reviews are in ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Contentsquare integration gets 4.8 out of 5 stars on Microsoft's Azure Marketplace. Here are 3 rave reviews from real users.

Incredibly valuable tool With Contentsquare, we are able to understand user behavior on our website in greater detail and precision than we ever could before. And Contentsquare has a wide variety of reports and views, so we are able to answer so many types of questions. For example, page usage, impact of elements on conversion rates or revenue, journey analysis, etc. Also, I have to callout how amazing their customer success and customer support teams are! They are very proactive, fast to respond, amazing to work with, and very knowledgeable. They really helped my team be successful within the tool.

—Parker S

The most user-friendly analytics tool to date! I use Contentsquare on the daily. It is a great tool for not only just quick checks but also for more in-depth analysis, which requires using a combination of the functionalities Contentsquare provides. It is intuitive and easy to understand. We have had good support as well with the tool whenever we've asked for it

—Nik G

An essential tool for your UX utility belt! Contentsquare allows you to find invaluable insights into how users behave on your site, allowing decisions, changes & tests to be data-driven across the business. The tool allows you to really dig deep into your web analytics, finding areas of frustration that users are experiencing, content that is working really well but currently not seen by many users, etc.

—Courtney C

Use case 2: driving digital experimentation

Digital experimentation is the process of testing and iterating on your website or product. Like many successful enterprises, Microsoft relies on this process to better understand their customer journeys and digital behavior—which improves their conversion and add-to-cart rates.

As Asia's Surface Site Merchandising & Experimentation Lead at Microsoft, Yvonne Cheung understands the value of experimentation for business growth.

She says online businesses face a "digital dilemma". You need to optimize to boost conversions, delight customers, and adapt to consumer trends—but, changes carry the risk of negatively impacting your experience.

A/B testing helps mitigate that risk while you decide what site or app changes are worth making—and which ones you'll want to avoid.

In this section, you'll learn Yvonne's 3-step digital experimentation strategy and how you can build a successful culture of experimentation at your organization.

Build an experimentation strategy in 3 steps

Getting started with digital experimentation begins with getting buy-in from leadership. Once you tick that box, you can assemble a dedicated experimentation team.

"It's best if the unit is cross-functional. Involve people with complementary skill sets. You also want people who know analytics," Yvonne says.

Designate someone with excellent communication and analytical skills as your facilitator, and create a meeting schedule. Then, it's time to tackle your testing program, one step at a time.

Step 1: pre-testing preparation

The customer journey is more complex than ever. Someone might click on an ad for a product on their tablet, resume their shopping later that week by searching for the product on their phone, and then open the app to complete their transaction.

This complexity is why it's so important to lay a strong foundation for your testing program. And that, Yvonne says, involves examining critical touchpoints, scoping potential issues, and prioritizing your next steps.

1. Find key customer touchpoints across your homepage: consider the entire customer journey, especially high conversion touchpoints. For example, Journey Analysis helps aggregate data across all your customer journeys, seeing which pages your visitors navigate to and where they might be dropping off.

2. Brainstorm pain points and identify key metrics using web analytics tools Start gathering performance metrics of your customer touchpoints with tools like Google Analytics or Speed Analysis, for a more in-depth performance breakdown.

To learn the 'why' behind what's happening, you need digital experience insights. Yvonne's team relies on our Heatmaps to see how users interact with website elements. They use these easy-to-interpret visual insights to identify potential issues and define problem statements for experiments.

From here, her team can

• Analyze these numbers to identify potential pain points

• Compare the metrics to key performance indicators (KPIs) to identify areas of underperformance

💡 Pro tip: use Product Analytics to see multi-session user journeys across your websites, apps, and other branded experiences to drive better conversion and retention over time. Since it's part of our all-in-one experience platform, you can get a more complete view of your customer, without adding another tech tool to your stack.

3. Prioritize issues to address Yvonne's recommendation? Start simple.

First, rank your touchpoints by gathering visitor metrics and your page URLs by revenue participation. Then, consider problem statements and which metrics could be improved on. This will help to generate ideas for experimentation.

💡 Pro tip: alert your team automatically whenever your digital experience KPIs change. Contentsquare's Microsoft Teams integration lets you get your team's opinion quickly on changes that could impact customer journeys and revenue.

Instead of checking your emails for alerts, get notified in Teams. From there, you can easily click through to Contentsquare to figure out what's happening—such as UX issues, performance problems, or errors—and why.

Step 2: experiments that work

To Yvonne, a well-designed experiment consists of a problem statement, a hypothesis with trackable KPIs, and experiment variants.

First, you need to identify the problem you're investigating. Yvonne uses our Heatmaps and Session Replay tools to quickly gather visual insights to validate potential problem statements. These tools can help to show whether visitors to your site understand the content and how much content they interact with on a page.

Then, you'll want to use these insights to form a hypothesis or investigate other issues. If you're stuck, Yvonne suggests using the if-then-because format to write a clear hypothesis. You can then assign relevant primary and secondary KPIs to track results.

Once done, you should identify your control and experiment variants, and then you're ready to test.

Step 3: maintain momentum

What's next after completing your first experiment? Maintaining momentum.

It takes work. After all, how do you keep the team motivated and demonstrate that digital experimentation is worth investing in?

Yvonne's advice is to keep going after your first experiment.

"Experimentation doesn't always mean proposing a radical redesign of a page. Consistently iterating over time is the key to success. Small changes compound over time," she says.

Part of maintaining momentum is building a culture of experimentation at your organization. To do that, put data tools in the hands of all team members, encourage their curiosity, and incentivize their wins.

💡 Pro tip: encourage a data-driven culture by giving your employees access to the right tools. Use Contentsquare's tech partners to connect to the digital experimentation platforms your employees already know and love. Check out our experimentation and A/B testing partners, including Optimizely, AB Tasty, and Kameleoon, here.

2 tips for improving accessibility

According to the World Health Organization in 2023, an estimated 1 in 6 people worldwide experience significant disability. And at least 2.2 billion people have impaired vision.

While disabilities are common, accessibility isn't. The WebAim Million, an accessibility analysis of the top 1M homepages, finds that 95.9% failed to comply with the WCAG-2 accessibility guidelines in 2024.

Improving this situation is a goal that we share with Microsoft. Here are 2 tips from Dona Sarkar, Head of the Copilot and AI Extensibility program at Microsoft, on how to get started with your accessibility journey.

Tip #1: design for the extremes

Not every user will have a great internet connection, be sitting at a desktop, without any impairments or disabilities. Design for someone with a range of disabilities who has a poor internet connection on their mobile device. If you design for the extremes, the experience improves for everyone.

This might look like

• Using high-contrast text that stands out from the background

• Adding alternative text to images, so people using a screen reader can hear the descriptions

• Applying heading tags to create a clear structure for people to navigate

• Labeling form inputs clearly, such as text fields or radio buttons

Form Analysis points out specific issues users encountered on your form that could affect your conversion rate.

💡 Pro tip: use Form Analysis to see how different user segments interact with your forms. Spot an issue? Click straight to Session Replay to watch an individual user's behavior to get the full picture.

As creators and designers, we want to showcase our creativity, but often the best way to be creative is to showcase your content in the most simple way possible so the maximum number of people can actually access that content.

Dona Sarkar

Head of the Copilot and AI Extensibility program at Microsoft

Tip #2: create with, not for

When creating an inclusive design, work and consult with people with disabilities. Learn the limitations or barriers they might experience early in the design process—not at the end during the testing phase.

Get input from real users using our Voice of Customer. Enter your goal, and ask AI to generate a survey for you. Or put a feedback button on any page of your site, asking users how it works for them.

Unlock customer insights to improve the digital experience

Alongside Microsoft, we have a focus on the future, aiming to make our customers' online experiences as smooth and successful as possible. By creating new features, functionalities, and integrations—and optimizing existing ones—we continue to transform the digital experience for all.

FAQs about our partnership with Microsoft