How to Build a Customer Experience Roadmap to Improve CX

What is a customer experience (CX) roadmap?

A customer experience roadmap is an internal guideline that includes all the CX initiatives and tactics that your business should implement, as well as their priorities and deadlines.

Its goal is to provide a unique blueprint to deliver an exceptional customer experience that delights users consistently across the user journey. And it’s built based on deep customer research, so it can successfully satisfy your ideal customers.

How to create a customer experience roadmap?

Now, there are four steps to building a useful customer experience roadmap:

1. Collecting customer data to understand their behavior, expectations, and preferences.
2. Mapping out the ideal customer journey that provides the shortest path to success.
3. Design the customer experience vision for every step of the journey.
4. Measure results and iterate your strategy to keep enhancing the customer experience.

Let’s get into the details.

1. Collect data and understand customer behavior

You can’t get to an endpoint without a starting point.

How are your current users interacting with your product? What do they expect to get from it? Where are they trying to get? What are they getting right now?

And most importantly, what’s getting in their way and generating friction?

For this, you need to conduct deep customer research so you can determine your starting point.

Let’s discuss some methods:

Use surveys to understand customer expectations

Surveys are going to be one of your main channels to collect valuable data and measure user’s sentiment toward your company.

For this, it’s wise to trigger a customer experience survey during or after a specific interaction (be it using a feature, contacting support, etc.) while also making sure that your surveys are as easy as possible to respond to.

This way, your surveys will get more replies, and automatically.

For example, your first opportunity to apply this is during the signup process. You can plug a welcome survey that asks new users about their use case, goals, and problems—allowing you to determine customer pain points and expectations with your product.

Gather behavioral data to monitor customer interactions

When it comes to creating your customer experience roadmap, behavioral data can help you identify gaps, prioritize the most impactful actions, and design solutions to exceed customer expectations.

That’s why event tracking is a powerful way to collect first-party data. As you can use feature tags or custom events (like in the screenshot below) to record the interactions that users have with your product.

This way, you can easily tap into your customer’s preferences, behaviors, needs, and pain points. While at the same time measuring what users engage with, how they engage with your product (such as click, hover, text input), and which features are popular or unpopular.

Analyze engagement patterns to identify friction

One of the most important things you can do when creating a customer experience roadmap is to identify areas where your customers are experiencing friction.

To do so, you need to track your user’s in-app activity. This way, you can analyze your customers’ engagement patterns and look for any areas where they are dropping off or abandoning your product (or where they experienced friction).

For example, if you notice that a lot of users are abandoning your product after signing up, it could be because they are having trouble understanding how to use it. Or, if you notice that a lot of users are contacting customer support with the same question, it could be because the information they need is not easily accessible.

2. Build an ideal customer journey map for success

Once you own the data, the next step for building a customer experience roadmap is to define the ideal customer’s journey with clear steps and tasks.

For this, it’s essential to create a customer journey map where you can lay out and visualize the user’s path to success.

Let’s go over some crucial steps:

Define activation goals and other important milestones

With enough data to truly understand what’s happening inside your product, the next crucial step in creating a customer experience roadmap is to define the milestones your users need to achieve for success.

For a social media app, for example, the onboarding milestones could be as simple as creating a profile, adding friends, or posting for the first time.

Remember, these activation goals are the ‘Aha!’ moments that make a user realize the value your product brings to their life. Which means it’s going to depend on whether or not they’re aligned with your product’s core value proposition—not on any random task at all.

Once you have a clear understanding of user milestones and activation goals, it’s time to outline the journey from a user’s first interaction with your product, all the way to their ultimate success.

Map the happy path to each milestone

After determining each milestone, it’s time to map each key touchpoint between milestones. For this, you need to identify the happy path so you can replicate success and scale positive product experiences for every user.

For a feature adoption milestone, for example, users are more likely to adopt a feature if they receive a personalized onboarding experience. So, the ideal path would look like this:

1. The user sees an in-app tooltip introducing the feature with a call to action.
2. They click the link and watch a video tutorial.
3. The customer decides to use the new feature after watching the tutorial.
4. The customer finds it useful and uses the feature again after receiving a reminder the next day.

In this instance, each point of contact is meant to onboard the user to the new feature, educate them to use it successfully, and motivate them to keep engaging. Enhancing the user experience every time a user needs to adopt a feature.

3. Define and build the CX vision across each touchpoint

The reason you need a detailed customer journey map is because it makes it easier to plan and execute your customer experience tactics throughout the milestones.

So let’s explore what you can do during this step:

Build an activation playbook

An activation playbook is a structured plan that outlines the tactics to onboard users and help them reach the activation stage as soon as possible. Building one repeatedly ensures that your customers have a positive experience during the onboarding process.

Here’s what you’d need to include in your playbook:

• Outcome: the definition of success from the customer’s perspective.
• Entry point: where the user must be in the journey to trigger the playbook.
• Exit point: where the user needs to get with the help of the playbook.
• Product activation milestones: steps or subgoals your new customer must go through to reach the activation goal.
• Tasks: specific actions the user must take to progress.
• Segment: user base segment that your playbook is designed for.

Plan customer interactions to drive adoption

For every touchpoint in your journey map, ask yourself how you want the customer experience to look like. Do you want to communicate with your users during this stage? What message do you want to deliver? And in what format?

For example, let’s say one of your touch points involves engagement with core features. One tactic you can apply here is to trigger a tooltip that incentivizes users to engage with a feature (like in the screenshot below), with the hope that they’ll successfully adopt it.

Implement customer retention strategies

A delightful experience will inevitably lead to better customer retention and less churn.

So, as you start planning your customer experience roadmap, it’s a good idea to include retention tactics to deliver value across the journey—increasing your company’s customer centricity.

For instance, you can target a new feature announcement to relevant user segments, such as power users or customers who submitted a feature request. Just like this example:

A/B test to optimize customer experience

When you’re defining the customer experience tactics you’re going to apply, how do you know which type of flow will make it easier for users to achieve success?

Thankfully, you can use A/B testing software to find out and provide the best customer experience possible.

For example, there are controlled A/B tests, where you can test how a new in-app experience (e.g. onboarding checklist, tooltip) performs against a controlled group. Allowing you to tell if there’s a significant improvement in product adoption or other testing metrics.

There’s also head-to-head A/B testing, where you can compare the performance of two different variations against a segmented audience. Which is useful when your goal is to optimize the performance of a specific stage of the journey.

This way, by performing A/B experiments with statistical significance, you can identify what leads to better outcomes and optimize the customer experience.

4. Measure and iterate to enhance customer experience

Remember, a customer experience roadmap evolves with your product and customers’ needs. It’s important to regularly revisit and update the roadmap based on data to ensure it always aligns with your CX vision.

So if you want to provide the best customer experience, let’s see how you can measure the success of your CX roadmap:

Collect and act on relational customer feedback

Customer feedback plays an essential role in shaping your customer experience strategy. It helps you identify trends so you can make decisions and prioritize features that lead to a better user journey.

NPS surveys, for example, are a great way to gather relational feedback. By sending an NPS survey on a quarterly basis, you can measure customer loyalty and gauge their likelihood of recommending your product.

Segment customers to monitor product usage

Segmentation categorizes your customers into different groups based on specific criteria such as journey stage, in-app behavior, or location. It allows you to see how different groups use your product and provides a granular view of your customer base so you can optimize their overall experience.

For example, if you create a segment of disengaged customers and detractors (like in the screenshot below), you can observe if your customer experience initiatives have reduced their churn rates and increased their product usage.

This way, you can adjust your customer experience roadmap to include re-engagement campaigns and turn disengaged users back before they churn.

Use industry benchmarks to measure growth

Measuring customer satisfaction metrics such as CES, CSAT, and NPS is excellent for finding improvement opportunities. But how do you know if your current scores are urgently bad or too good to be true?

Customer satisfaction benchmarks can help you with this, as they can give you an idea of what the average performance of companies in your industry actually is. This way, you can know if you need to either set your customer retention tactics as a top priority or start revamping your onboarding process.

For example, this benchmark conducted by Retently shows that the average NPS in SaaS is around 40%. So you can rest assured that your brand is still competitive if your score sits around this number.

How to measure your CX strategy success?

Now, what specific metrics should you track in order to improve your customer success approach?

Let’s go over four essential product metrics that we deem as some of the most important to measure your customer experience success.

Net Promoter Score for customer loyalty

Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer loyalty and satisfaction in a quantitative way. It simply asks users how likely they are to recommend your product or service to others so you can determine if it meets their needs and expectations.

With a feedback analytics tool (like Userpilot), you can watch over your NPS results and track your score over time on a dashboard. Plus, you can tag survey responses to identify recurrent keywords used by your detractors to find areas that need attention—allowing you to adjust your customer experience roadmap in the process.

Customer satisfaction score to track your CX efforts

Customer satisfaction score measures how satisfied your customers are with your product by sending a CSAT survey. It is simply measured by calculating the percentage of happy customers (as seen in the image below).

Tracking customer satisfaction scores helps you see if your efforts to improve the customer experience are working or not.

For instance, it’s quite good to identify unhappy customers before they churn. If you notice a drop in your customer satisfaction score, you can reach out to those unhappy customers and address their frustrations before they decide to churn.

Customer effort score for CX improvements

Customer effort score (CES) measures the usability of your app by asking users how easy it is to navigate your product. This score is particularly useful to tackle your product’s UI/UX aspects and make visible usability improvements.

Plus, it can be targeted to specific features. For example, you can trigger a unique CES survey for users who finished using a particular function of your app (like the screenshot below). This way, you can focus your attention on one part of your app instead of the whole product itself.

Customer lifetime value for growth impacts of CX initiatives

Customer lifetime value (LTV) is a metric that represents the total amount of money a customer is expected to spend during their lifetime. It’s calculated by multiplying the average customer lifespan, the frequency of purchases, and the average amount spent per purchase (like the screenshot below).

As for your customer experience initiatives, it helps you understand the long-term value that a customer brings to your business. This way, you can identify the most valuable customers and focus on providing them with the best possible experience.

Delivering exceptional customer experiences with Userpilot

Building and implementing a customer experience roadmap is already a very daunting task. Using software to accelerate, centralize, and automate your processes can really make a difference in your progress.

Obvious biases aside, Userpilot is a tool that we know deeply and can help you fulfill every single task covered in this article. So, it’s natural for us to recommend it as the most cost-efficient product in the market.

Don’t believe us? Here’s what Userpilot can do for your customer experience process:

• Collect data first-party data. Either by tracking in-app events (feature usage, clicks, milestones) or by triggering in-app surveys that are targeted to specific user segments.
• Goal-based tracking. You can track how users reach milestones and get a birds-eye view of how your users are progressing through their journey.
• In-app experiences. Includes multiple ways to enhance the product experience with in-app guides, onboarding checklists, modals, self-service centers, and more.
• Personalization. There are options to deliver personalized experiences and contextual in-app flows based on in-app behavior and segmentation.
• Advanced product analytics. Where you can measure your product’s performance, watch over different user segments, perform A/B tests, spot patterns, and make data-driven decisions.

Conclusion

Building a customer experience roadmap can be what you need to do in order to improve your product’s CX and foster customer loyalty.

To do this, you have to collect data, design the customer journey, create your roadmap, and iterate it based on data. And with Userpilot, you can enhance your product’s adoption and create a loyal customer base. So, why not give Userpilot a try and book a demo today?