Why customers drop off and how journey mapping tools help

Highlights

You’ll learn about why you need mapping tools:

• Identify drop-offs and pain points
• Visualize journeys across channels
• Uncover what’s working and what’s not
• Align teams around real customer data
• Improve engagement, satisfaction and loyalty

Have you tried a road trip without a map? It’s possible to find the path you want by luck, but you’ll probably skip over necessary checks, make some wrong decisions and waste time going back to previous points. That’s what it’s like when businesses try to improve customer experience without understanding the customer journey. You think you’re moving in the right direction, but you’re not.

What you need is a journey mapping tool. These tools work as the GPS for your customer experience. They track and see every step a customer takes from the first time they hear about your brand to the point where they become loyal advocates. Customer journey mapping software doesn’t show where people are going; it reveals:

• Why are they dropping off
• Where were they getting stuck
• What’s working

Apart from giving you customers' behavioral data, these mapping tools are an ideal way of improving customer experience (CX). So, what is customer journey software, which one is best and how do you choose the best one?

What is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping tells the story of your user's experience, from first touch to long-term loyalty. Mapping your user journey helps your team understand the customer’s experience from their point of view, identify friction points and uncover opportunities to improve engagement, satisfaction and conversions. It even extends your customer lifetime value. 

For example, a B2B SaaS company discovers through journey mapping that prospects drop off after the demo because onboarding doesn’t tie features to business value. A cloud provider might see that deals stall during procurement due to a disconnected contract process, and insights are only visible when you map the customer journey.

What are journey mapping tools?

Journey mapping tools collect information on different steps of the customer’s journey and share it with you in an easily understandable form. These tools show the customer path as it moves from one digital channel to another. Journey mapping tools visualize customers’ journeys across different touchpoints and channels. These tools organize customer data like behaviors, emotions, pain points and interactions into an interactive map, making it easier for teams to:

• Spot gaps
• Streamline experiences
• Align efforts across marketing, sales, product and support

In most cases, the tools pull data from analytics and customer feedback platforms to generate a clear picture of the customer’s journey.

For instance, a project management company uses a journey mapping tool to observe how it can gain leads and convert them into signed contracts. It shows that many leads go cold after downloading a white paper because there’s no timely follow-up from sales. Based on the customer insights, the company automates a follow-up sequence and shortens the sales cycle by one week to increase the conversion rates of their project management tool.

Business benefits of using journey mapping software

Improve team collaboration and decision-making

Journey mapping tools ensure everyone stays on the same page. It shows a clear picture of what your customers are experiencing. When teams share that understanding, it becomes easier for you to make informed decisions.

Connect the dots across digital and offline touchpoints

Most of your customers are not just on the internet. Usually, they participate in events, have conversations with sales reps and engage directly. These tools connect all the points, so you can be a part of the entire customer journey, instead of focusing only on one aspect.

Spot and resolve friction in real time

If your sign-up form is not user-friendly or you have a confusing onboarding flow, journey maps help you understand it early on. You don’t have to wait for complaints or churn to know something’s off.

Align your team with a shared view

Even though every team has different priorities, journey maps allow everyone to focus on the customer experience. Working with a shared view promotes better cooperation and fewer mistakes.

Incorporates data and personas

These tools aren’t based on guesswork; they pull in real customer data and tie it to the personas you care about. 

Optimizes experiences

Once you see where people are facing challenges or dropping off, you can resolve the issue. You can simplify a process, speed up a response or personalize an offer. 

Use templates to create customer journey maps faster

You won’t have to work everything on your own. Thanks to templates, you can make professional journey maps quickly and concentrate more on the important points.

Better understand your customers

A journey map builds a deep understanding of your customers. You can witness their experience by wearing their shoes. Using these insights, it becomes easier to build customized services, leading to higher customer loyalty and satisfaction. 

Top customer journey mapping tools

Miro

Miro is an online whiteboard that’s perfect for visual thinkers. It offers ready-made templates and a lot of customization, making it a favorite for cross-functional teams who want to brainstorm, map and iterate in one place. Moreover, Miro offers a visual whiteboard built around drag-and-drop for everything from sticky notes to flowcharts.

Lucidchart

Lucidchart builds detailed, data-driven customer journey diagrams with powerful flowcharting capabilities. It’s ideal for more technical or process-oriented teams who want structure, integrations and a clean interface to visualize complex journeys.

UXPressia

UX Pressia concentrates on user experience and offers tools to draw customer journey maps, build personas and develop impact maps. It helps you model interactive maps, create personas and offer real-time teamwork all in a design-oriented and straightforward platform.

Microsoft Visio

A favorite in enterprise environments, Microsoft Visio is renowned for professional diagramming capabilities. It's not built exclusively for user journey mapping, but its key features include creating structured, customizable journey maps by team members already working within the Microsoft ecosystem.

How Contentstack powers customer journey mapping 

Once your journey map shows where drop-offs occur or which segments need more engagement, Contentstack’s EDGE empowers your team to instantly adapt content, based on real-time data, to fix those issues and optimize the path forward. As part of a composable digital experience platform, it delivers content instantly and intelligently across every touchpoint. Whether spotting friction in real-time, adapting content mid-journey or syncing customer insights across teams, EDGE brings speed, precision and personalization into every step of the experience.

Benefits of using Contentstack for journey mapping

Real-time data collection

Contentstack’s EDGE captures user interactions across web, mobile and connected experiences instantly, even before a customer logs in. This ensures accurate journey mapping, as every touchpoint is recorded and tied to evolving customer profiles.

Centralized content and experience management

Through Contentstack’s headless CMS, content is made available on all types of channels. Using the platform, you can address and oversee marketing, support and sales activities using only one set of tools. It gets simpler to track the customer’s experience and ensure a consistent message.

API-first integration with journey analytics tools

Contentstack integrates with customer journey analytics. Using its API-first approach, you can send and retrieve behavioral, transactional and demographic insights, allowing you to instantly fill your journey maps with insights.

Dynamic personalization at scale

With real-time segmentation and EDGE, Contentstack offers personalized content based on where a customer is in their journey. Using contextual content or ads, you can enhance the experience for all visitors, regardless of whether they are existing or new customers.

Faster iteration through a composable architecture

The journey a customer takes is constantly changing. With Contentstack’s architecture, you don’t need to handle coding when trying different content, websites and workflows. As a result, it becomes possible for companies to adapt with ease to new customer behavior.

Improved collaboration with modular content

When using modular content blocks, marketing, product and CX teams can cooperate well. This makes creating content faster and guarantees consistency in all the customer stages and touchpoints.

Case study: How BISSELL reimagined mobile CX with Contentstack

BISSELL transforms its digital experience with a new mobile tech stack and CMS that could streamline localization and offer better support to global customers. Since the team faced issues with their open-source tools, they switched to Contentstack and launched their site after three weeks. The result? A mobile app that can manage a large volume of content for their products, can be updated in seconds and stays on the air without help from developers. BISSELL increased its mobile and web experiences because it has 100,000 visitors every month and operates in 25 markets.

Read the complete case study here.

Top features to look for in customer journey mapping tools

Businesses can determine how customers use their products or services with customer journey mapping. When looking for such a tool, give preference to the following:

Visual, interactive journey maps

Look for tools that provide intuitive, drag-and-drop visual maps that outline each stage of the customer journey. Such tools can find new paths, examine them more closely and add annotations as needed. Various tools offer different ways to view and arrange your journey so that you can share it with others.

Multichannel integration

Customers interact across various channels, websites, apps, email, social media, in-store and more. The tool should integrate data from all relevant channels to create a unified and accurate view of the customer's journey.

Behavioral analytics integration

Search for built-in analytics or integration with behavioral analytics software. This helps you track user behavior and correlate journey steps with engagement metrics and conversions. For instance, combining journey mapping with behavioral analytics lets you see where users engage most or drop off.

User segmentation and personas

You need a tool that segments customers according to their actions, details or other features and generates several journey maps for various customer groups.

Touchpoint analysis and pain point identification

The tool should highlight where customers experience friction, drop off or get confused. Once you understand people’s needs, you can work on solutions with the most positive impact.

Collaboration and sharing features

Customer journey mapping is cross-functional work. Use tools with features that enable collaboration among marketing, sales, customer support and product teams, such as commenting, version control and easy sharing options.

Customization and flexibility

The individual journey of no two customers is the same with your brand; they are unique. Ensure your tool has options for making a unique sales funnel, customer lifecycle or service model, touchpoints and metrics.

Integration with other tools

To close the loop, your journey mapping tool should connect with your data activation tools, marketing automation and analytics platforms. This enables seamless execution of personalized campaigns and better tracking of customer outcomes. 

FAQs

What is a customer journey mapping tool?

It’s software that visualizes a customer’s experience across all brand touchpoints.

What are the 7 steps to map the customer journey?

Here are the seven steps to map the customer journey:

• Set goals
• Build personas
• Identify touchpoints
• Map the journey
• Spot pain points
• Design improvements
• Measure results

What is the benefit of customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping improves customer experience by identifying and fixing friction points.

What are the objectives of customer journey mapping?

To understand behavior, improve satisfaction and align teams around the customer.

Learn more

The right journey mapping tool depends on how complicated the customer’s journey is, how much you already understand it, how quickly you can adopt it, how structured your teams are and what results you aim to achieve during mapping. Besides picking the proper tool, it’s your use of the insights and how well you use them. While journey mapping tools help you understand the customer path, EDGE responds to it, delivering fast, personalized content based on where each user is in their journey. By pairing your mapping insights with EDGE’s real-time content delivery, you can optimize every touchpoint quickly and precisely. To discover how Contentstack EDGE closes the loop between understanding and execution, driving better engagement, loyalty and growth, talk to us.