WEB-STIL

The other day, the igniter in my oven needed replacing. I called a nearby electrician, who came over and told me how he could fix it. After agreeing to the initial quote, I instinctively had my checkbook out ready to pay the paper invoice. However, the repairman said, “Don’t worry – our app will take care of this.”

Instead of sitting down for 30 minutes to review the paper invoice and pay, the app – or a point of sale (POS) system – cut the transaction time in half. Moreover, that electrician gained a loyal customer in me for finishing the job in record time.

In fact, digital payment is becoming so prominent that 90% of consumers have used some form of digital payment in 2023, according to McKinsey. Offering different payment options allows your company to reach more customers and simplify the payment transaction and customer experience.

Just like my example with the electrician, the POS experience is an important transactional moment for your customers. In this post, I’ll explain why, and then explore ways you can make your own POS experience better.

In this article:

• What is POS experience?
• Why is POS experience important?
• Six Ways to Improve POS Experience

Now, a POS system is what actually allows you to accept multiple forms of payment while connecting customer transactions to the back end of your business — thus creating your POS experience.

You can use your POS system to build revenue reports, transfer money to and from your bank account, check inventory, and track order history. A POS system can either be a hardware or software tool – making it flexible for use across multiple industries. It also collects data points centered around your buying preferences, order history, and frequency of purchases.

This versatility makes a POS system a vital conduit to influence a seamless POS experience.

Why is POS experience important?

A positive POS experience can bolster all of your interactions with your customers. Beyond the reports you can pull, a positive POS experience represents your company’s commitment to your customers.

This aligns with a trend – growth projections estimate the entire POS industry will be worth over $30 billion by 2032. This represents a huge opportunity for businesses to prioritize the investments they put in technology to engage with their customers and ensure they have a good experience.

But beyond the total addressable market, I’m going to review a few benefits that outline why the POS experience is worth placing importance on.

Satisfied Customers

A positive POS experience can create satisfied customers. A 2023 study from the Journal of Retail Technology Innovations noted an 18% increase in customer satisfaction when they used an effective POS system to enable a seamless checkout process.

Customers like it when your company’s POS enables them to purchase easily from your business. There’s also a benefit to logging your customers’ preferences, demographics, and other attributes for future interactions. Making it easy for your customers to interact with your business is one of several tips that defines a great customer experience.

Satisfied Employees

Your POS experience can influence more than just your customers. Your employee morale can be high when they know that the POS they work with daily is intuitive and causes minimal issues when working with customers. Happy employees mean that they are increasingly willing to work with customers, leading to higher rates of satisfaction and even revenue.

Prioritizing the POS experience is an opportunity for your company to invest time and resources in a particular tool. This tool needs to remove any blockers, make the checkout process seamless for employees, and reduce friction in the customer journey.

Repeat Purchases from Loyal Customers

A positive POS experience can influence your company’s ability to retain customers, influence future purchases, and garner customer loyalty. Customers are more willing to come back to you when they have a positive experience with your company. The POS acts as a key touchpoint for this positive experience to occur. Statistically, repeat customers spend 67% more than net new customers, consistently increasing your company’s overall revenue.

Your POS can also be the conduit to develop a customer loyalty program. POS systems can quantify the products and services customers have purchased, represent that in a membership program to monetize customer loyalty, and provide your marketing team content for promotional campaigns and further re-engagement ideas. If this is something you want to explore, grab this free guide that we at HubSpot put together with Calendly.

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Six Ways to Improve POS Experience

As I have discussed above, the POS experience is a crucial touchpoint for creating satisfied customers and employees, and retaining customers to drive repeat business.

Now, how do you successfully improve your POS system and experience? Here are six actionable ways.

1. Make the checkout process seamless.

Simplifying the checkout process is key to delivering an effortless POS experience. By removing friction, you ensure your customers can quickly and easily complete their transactions, leaving them with a positive impression of your business.

Implementing features like barcode scanning, minimizing wait times, and providing clarity through the purchasing journey can all aid this.

2. Offer multiple and flexible payment options.

Today’s customers expect payment flexibility. Ensure your POS system accommodates various payment methods like credit cards, mobile payments like Google Pay and Apple Pay, and even installment plans using technologies like Affirm.

By offering these diverse payment options, you not only provide convenience but also capture revenue from customers who may prefer alternate methods.

Pro tip: Analyzing payment trends through your POS system can give you further insight into evolving customer preferences and help you refine your strategy.

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3. Ensure uninterrupted operations with power backup.

A reliable POS system should function seamlessly, even during internet outages. Look for systems with a robust offline capability to maintain consistent service. This lets your team remain productive and mobile, ensuring customers can complete transactions without a hitch.

Consistent performance under all conditions strengthens customer trust and protects your business from operational hiccups.

4. Leverage personalization at the POS.

Personalization is central to a superior POS experience. Use order history to suggest relevant products and services, tailor touchpoints based on preferences, and develop targeted customer touchpoints in loyalty programs. A well-optimized POS experience sees your team applying data you have collected from customers to inform customer interactions, turning one-time customers into repeat buyers and brand advocates.

5. Ask for and act on customer feedback.

Feedback is always a valuable resource for continuous improvement. Incorporate short surveys into your POS experience to gauge customer satisfaction.

One way I often see this done is to ask customers to rate their experience for that particular engagement or transaction. You can also leave space for customers to type in additional comments.

I recommend using this feedback to identify areas for improvement in your customer interactions. This can demonstrate your commitment to enhancing the POS experience. The HubSpot Blog has loads of resources on this, too — things like how to design a customer satisfaction survey, how to actually get customer feedback, and then what to do with it — so don’t sleep on this great way to improve your POS experience. Hearing directly from the people involved is a no-brainer.

6. Offer options for receipt delivery.

Customers appreciate flexibility in how they receive receipts, just as they do with payment options. Whether it’s email, text, or a physical copy, offering multiple options aligns with modern and evolving customer expectations. Moreover, the method of receipt delivery adds another data point that allows you to personalize future interactions based on their preferences.

A positive POS experience can be your conduit to success.

I used the word conduit in this piece – a driver or channel – to describe POS systems. These are powerful tools that can be used to collect customer data points and measure their preferences against your company’s overall performance. Furthermore, an effective POS system can influence customer satisfaction, increase staff morale, and capture a consistent amount of revenue.

By implementing strategies to improve the POS experience, your business can ensure smoother transactions, generate happier interactions, and increase customer loyalty. Investing in your POS system is not merely a technical upgrade but a commitment to delivering superior customer experiences that set your business apart.

Ever tried chatting with a bot that seemed more confused than helpful? I know I have, several times. And while it may seem like a good idea to take out the frustration on the poor bot — forgive me, AI — the problem is almost never with the bot itself. AI chatbots, like human beings, are only as good as their training.

In our State of Service report, one recurring theme we heard from leaders was how the advent of the AI-powered chatbot transformed customer service. According to our data, AI chatbots have become so vital that they are now not only the most effective but also the most preferred customer service channel. But while they may be changing the customer service game, their (continued) success depends on how well they’re trained.

In this article, I’ll share insights I found on how to train AI chatbots effectively, ensuring they deliver seamless, human-like service experiences every time.

Table of Contents

• How AI Chatbots Help Service Teams
• How to Train Service Chatbots
• When to Get Your Tech Team Involved
• Tips for Training a Service Chatbot
• Building an AI Bot

How AI Chatbots Help Service Teams

AI chatbots are revolutionizing customer service. But how? What exactly do they do for the human agents already tasked with the responsibility of addressing the needs and concerns of the organization’s customers?

1. Respond to Questions and Inquiries 24/7

To borrow the words of Kieran Flanagan, HubSpot’s senior vice president of marketing, “In an AI world, support is live 24/7.” This couldn’t be more relevant in today’s always-online environment where customers expect immediate responses, whether it’s 3 p.m. or 3 a.m.

What this means is that if your company is setting up a pop-event with amazing offers and discounts and you’ve done all the hard work of attracting the customers, someone — something — is there to ensure that your business never sleeps, providing instant (and reliable) answers to customer inquiries around the clock.

2. Personalized Customer Interactions

Today, 78% of customers expect more personalization in interactions than ever before. They don’t want to be just another ticket in the queue — they want to feel seen, understood, and valued. I learned that this need is driving how businesses approach customer service, and AI chatbots are at the forefront of this shift.

Many Customer Relationship Management (CRM) leaders (86%) already confess that AI makes customer correspondence more personalized, especially as it can do things like analyze customer data to tailor responses and recommendations in real time. These are things a human agent may be unable to do, especially at scale.

3. Lead Qualification and Escalation

An AI system can handle hundreds or even thousands of support tickets per day compared to a human agent. Still, some requests are best handled by a human support agent.

In this case, the chatbot acts as a first line of engagement, ensuring only the most valuable or complex inquiries reach human reps. AI chatbots can also engage with potential customers, ask qualifying questions, and pass along valuable leads to human agents when necessary.

4. Collect Customer Feedback More Efficiently

Which would you respond to faster — a lengthy email with an embedded link asking you to please respond to a survey? Or a message that pops up right after your interaction, asking for quick feedback? Instead of relying on traditional, time-consuming methods like email surveys, I love how chatbots can seamlessly integrate feedback collection into the customer journey.

For instance, after completing a purchase or resolving a support issue, a chatbot can instantly prompt the customer with simple questions like, “How satisfied are you with our service today?” or “Is there anything you would like us to improve on?”

How to Train Service Chatbots

Now that it’s clear what service chatbots do, how do you train them to do these tasks well? Here’s what I found.

1. Clarify the goal of your service chatbot.

AI chatbots could serve service teams in many different ways. Therefore, the first step in the process is clearly defining what you want the chatbot to achieve. Do you want the chatbot to answer frequently asked questions (FAQs)? Process transactions? Help customers troubleshoot?

Remember that this is determined by your customers’ overarching needs. There is no need to build a chatbot that solves the wrong problems.

2. Gather relevant data.

Like I said earlier, your chatbot is only as good as the data it’s trained on. Start by compiling FAQs, past customer interactions, support scripts, conversations on social media, online reviews and other feedback data, live chat transcripts, conversations in online industry forums and communities, and even publicly available datasets relevant to your industry.

The chatbot can pull from this knowledge base during conversations with your customers.

3. Categorize the data.

Two key categories your data needs to be sorted into are intents and entities. Intents represent the specific goal a user wants to achieve when interacting with an AI system. This means that every user query falls into different intent categories.

For example, if a common need among your customers is tracking their package, you may organize that intent this way:

It’s not set in stone how many intent categories your service chatbot should have, but ideally, you should aim to cover the most frequent requests.

Entities, on the other hand, are specific pieces of information in the user’s input that provide context to the intent. Check for nouns or named objects within a query — often specifying people, organizations, locations, etc. — and you’ve found an entity. Extracting these entities helps the chatbot tailor each response to the specific needs of each user.

4. Design conversational flows and generate natural responses.

“Just like in any conversation flow design, it is important to know the persona of the customers, the domain of the expected question, goal of the chatbot, etc.,” Srinivas Njay, CEO of Interface.ai, shared in an interview with HubSpot.

During this stage, you map out the structure of interactions to ensure the chatbot can guide users effectively. This means anticipating user intents, designing logical pathways for different scenarios, and deciding when and how the chatbot should ask clarifying questions or redirect users to human agents.

Check out HubSpot’s AI Chatbot Builder

But just structure is not enough. Companies like Interface.ai, which have spent over a decade fine-tuning a library of conversation flows, emphasize the importance of combining structure interaction design with personalization.

“A combination of fine-tuned standard flows with personalization and recommendations makes the conversation very natural,” Njay continues. Using conversational language, adding some personality, and even incorporating some multimedia elements go a long way in making customers feel better supported during the entire process.

5. Test your service chatbot.

Testing is a critical part of training your AI service chatbot. Run it through a variety of scenarios to see how well it handles different intents and user queries.

During this stage, I suggest checking for metrics like accuracy, response time, how long it takes to complete a request/goal, relevance of the responses, and so on.

6. Monitor and update continuously.

“We collect detailed data on customer’s experience with our chatbots across our customer base and have created powerful analytics to track the performance of each engagement. This data includes customer feedback, transcript of the call, tone and emotions on the calls, type of intents, ability of the chatbot to answer all questions, and much more,” Njay offered when I asked how his company evaluates the performance of a chatbot they have deployed for a specific use case.

Constantly collecting, analyzing, and updating their system is how they make sure their chatbots are up-to-date with evolving customer needs and language patterns.

When to Get Your Tech Team Involved

While training a service chatbot may seem like a customer service initiative, the tech team plays a crucial role at various stages of the process.

1. Selecting a Platform and Integrating It

Choosing the right platform or chatbot service is a technical decision. I recommend your tech team helps evaluate and select the tools that align with your existing systems, such as CRM software, databases, and other APIs.

After selection, the tech team will also need to integrate the chatbot into the relevant platforms to ensure smooth data flow. Customers already using HubSpot’s CRM, for example, may find selecting HubSpot’s free AI Chatbot Builder more useful because it integrates directly with the CRM, allowing for streamlined data management and customer interactions.

2. Monitoring Performance and Optimizing the System

We’ve established that monitoring the performance of the chatbot and improving the system based on the feedback received is crucial. Whether it is tracking response times, ensuring uptime, handling any technical issues that arise, troubleshooting, or implementing improvements, this process is best handled by your tech team for optimum efficiency.

At Interface.ai, Njay says their “AI platform team is constantly collecting and analyzing the LLM and Execution Manager data and retraining the LLM to improve accuracy and performance and improving the conversation flows and transaction workflows.”

3. Ensuring Security and Privacy

A lot of data is exchanged throughout the customer journey, and technical expertise is required to ensure that the chatbot is not just compliant with relevant data protection regulations but also capable of safeguarding sensitive customer data during conversations.

Because Interface.ai deals mainly with financial institutions (FIs), securing authentication to ensure security and privacy could be a major challenge — one that only the tech team can mitigate. “Most customers contact FIs for banking transactions. Depending on the type of transaction, the customer needs to be authenticated with one or more factors.

“Using voice and device authentication can help make it easy for the customer to authenticate and also provide a very secure way to authenticate the out-of-the-wallet questions,” Njay comments. Additionally, they’ll also monitor the system for vulnerabilities to avoid breaches of any sort.

To gain your tech team’s support, don’t just stop at listing how AI chatbots can help the service team resolve more queries faster. I suggest involving them early in discussions to ensure they feel valued and heard in the decision-making process.

Keep the buzzwords and technical jargons aside, and use a common language of business objectives and business metrics. By positioning the project as a collaborative effort, you are more likely to get their full commitment.

Tips for Training a Service Chatbot

Njay graciously shared some tips with me for training a service chatbot, and I’d like to share them with you.

1. Streamline training with structured data.

The first tip Njay shares is to reduce the chatbot’s training needs. “Training the chatbot on full conversational input/output text is inefficient and requires a large data set for LLM to infer the underlying knowledge.”

Using a semantic knowledge graph tailored to your specific domain can simplify the training process and enhance the chatbot’s understanding. This reduces the volume of data needed and improves the chatbot’s accuracy in interpreting user queries.

2. Leverage domain-specific AI platforms.

Choosing an AI platform designed for your industry can significantly boost training efficiency. This is also relevant for automatic speech recognition (ASR) accuracy. According to Njay, “Choosing a vendor that supports a client-specific voice model, especially if your customer base has very specific regional dialects, is important.”

Because Interface.ai is designed for FIs and employs a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture with task-specific models, the chatbot’s performance in handling specialized financial/banking tasks is specifically improved.

3. Consider partnering with managed service providers.

“Choosing a vendor that provides managed service for chatbots eliminates the training needed for you, and training becomes the responsibility of the vendor.” Doing this, as Njay recommends, alleviates the burden of not just training but subsequent maintenance, allowing your team to focus on core business activities.

Building an AI Bot

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s to start small and iterate. You don’t need to train your chatbot to do everything right away. Focus on a few key tasks that will make the biggest difference to your customers and team, test them out, and build from there. It’s like teaching a kid to ride a bike — you start with training wheels, and once they’re steady, you can take them off and watch them go!

Thankfully, tools like HubSpot’s free AI Chatbot Builder make the entire process seamless. Whether you’re new to chatbots or just looking to upgrade your current setup, this tool integrates with your CRM and helps you create a chatbot that’s smart, responsive, and totally on-brand. Plus, it’s free — so why not give it a shot?

Help desk software was my daily command center when I worked at HubSpot Support. Our customer service ticketing system was the brain of daily operations for the support team and me as a whole. It was central to my workflow and experience as a support rep, and I can’t understate its impact on my ability to solve for the customer.

Without a proper ticketing system or help desk solution, scaling and maintaining a customer service team is nearly impossible. In my opinion, choosing the right help desk solution is just as critical as hiring the right people.

Are you looking for the right help desk software for your team? I’ve got you covered. In this article, I’ve compiled 12 of my favorite help desk solutions to help you make the right choice. But before we get there, let’s talk about what a help desk is, how to choose one, and why you should use one.

Table of Contents

• Help Desk Software Features
• The Top Free Help Desk Software
• What is a help desk?
• Benefits of Free IT Ticketing Systems
• How to Choose the Right Support Ticketing Tool
• How I Chose the Best Help Desk Software
• Find the Right Help Desk Software for Your Team

What is a help desk?

A help desk distributes incoming service requests to support team members and helps them manage follow-up communication on long-term cases.

Help desks come with several valuable features, such as:

Knowledge Base

A knowledge base is a self-serve library of information that helps customers find answers to troubleshoot problems without contacting a customer service rep. 79% of businesses offer a knowledge base to help customers independently solve their issues.

We have a perfect one here at HubSpot, and several of my colleagues contributed to it. We also had an “internal knowledge base” private to HubSpot support reps, which was invaluable in answering employee questions.

Whether internal or external, most knowledge bases include the following:

• Directions and tips for using your products and services.
• Answers to FAQs.
• Content you’ve created that can provide in-depth solutions.
• Video demonstrations.
• Company information.
• Info on different business departments.

Ticket Management

Ticket management streamlines customer support requests. This feature lets you receive and assign tickets, track their progress, and escalate issues when necessary. You can also organize tickets based on priority, status, and severity, shortening your response time for time-sensitive matters.

At HubSpot, our ticket management system prioritized tickets that had been in the queue the longest. These tickets were assigned to reps first unless there was a critical situation where we needed to act on other cases immediately.

Ticket Automation

A customer support rep handles an average of 21 tickets per day. Ticket automation allows you to set up triggers and rules that automatically assign tickets, send notifications, and perform other actions based on specific conditions.

This allows you to streamline your workflow and focus on higher-value tasks, and it can also provide customers with a better frontline experience.

Ticket Escalation

Ticket escalation is the process of moving a customer support ticket from an initial representative who isn’t able to resolve the issue to a higher-level rep or manager. Help desk software can help with this process by ensuring high-priority problems get the attention they deserve.

For instance, you can set up automations that prioritize high-severity tickets and route technical issues to more senior representatives. At HubSpot, we would route questions related to payment services to our billing department since they were more equipped to handle these issues.

Ticket Distribution

56% of customers say they have to repeat themselves when they’re handed off to a more experienced rep. Ticket distribution helps get a ticket to the most appropriate service rep the first time. In my opinion, ticket distribution is the foundation of any help desk.

This feature automatically routes tickets to the appropriate rep based on their skill set, availability, and/or workload. Managers can also use ticketing software to monitor ticket distribution, reallocate tickets when necessary, and maintain a balanced workload across their teams.

Multiple Contact Options

Help desk software gives customers options when contacting your business. These options range from traditional phone and email support to live chat and conversational bots.

Reps don’t have to specialize in one channel, either. When I worked in support, I received tickets from social media, live chat, and email, all in one inbox. The outgoing messages appeared to be coming from the same channel the customer contacted.

Having multiple communication channels available to your customers will help you effectively meet their needs and increase their overall satisfaction.

Customer Support Analytics

Customer support analytics provide valuable insights into your customer service efforts — they also let you know as a rep whether or not you’re having a good day.

These features track performance metrics, such as knowledge base usage, ticket volumes, response times, customer feedback, etc. This information can be used to improve support processes and identify areas where additional service resources are needed.

If these features aren‘t enough, let’s discuss some valuable returns from adopting this software.

Benefits of Free IT Ticketing Systems

1. They efficiently manage support requests.

75% of CRM leaders say they’re receiving more support requests than ever, which makes a support ticketing system necessary.

With ticketing systems, your team can manage support requests much more efficiently than you would if you did everything manually. It allows you to receive, track, and assign tickets to individual contributors or groups in one centralized place, ensuring that each request is addressed promptly.

Help desk software automates tedious processes like ticket routing, escalation, task creation, and customer marketing emails. In my experience, this reduces time spent handling routine tasks and gives you more time to focus on deeper, more complex problems.

2. They increase the bandwidth of your support team.

92% of CRM leaders say AI has improved their customer service response time. Since these systems simplify the organization and management of support requests, your team will have more bandwidth to serve a higher volume of customers in less time.

Additionally, because they allow you to automate many routine tasks, there’s more room to work on new strategies and projects.

A good example? Yours truly. I used my free time to write about customer service. Not only did I parlay that into a career, I generated free marketing content for HubSpot while working in customer support.

3. They improve customer satisfaction.

A free IT ticketing system can help improve customer satisfaction by streamlining your company’s support process and handling customer issues promptly. Because of the multiple contact options, such as chatbots and live chats, customers have more tools to communicate with support staff about their needs.

78% of customer support leaders say their customers prefer to solve issues independently. Self-service options, like knowledge bases, help customers find solutions to problems independently, reducing the need to contact support staff.

4. They save your company money.

The average customer support professional uses four separate tools to support their role. A subscription to each of these tools adds up quickly. Support ticketing systems often combine the tools into one platform.

While free IT ticketing systems may not have all the bells and whistles of a premium version, they will get the job done in a pinch and save you money while you figure out which system is best for your company.

Premium and enterprise-level help desks have additional features to improve your customer experience, although these systems can be pricey. A paid version may not be possible or advantageous for businesses working within a tight budget.

Before you even begin shopping for a customer support tool, you need a plan. Check out this free customer support strategy template to get started.

Ready to start shopping for your ticketing system? Let’s take a look at some of the top help desk software and ticketing systems your team can start using for free.

1. HubSpot Help Desk

Start using HubSpot’s Free Help Desk and Ticketing software.

HubSpot’s Free Help Desk and Ticketing Software is a unified help desk dashboard where all customer requests are stored so your entire team can easily track, prioritize, and manage them.

Staying organized becomes more challenging as you scale your business, making it more challenging to give each customer issue the attention it deserves. HubSpot allows you to monitor each issue and efficiently resolve it.

Key Features

• AI-powered efficiency: Built-in AI powers automatic recommendations, and AI assistant features encourage rep efficiency at every click.
• Personalized support: HubSpot Help Desk integrates with your marketing and sales data to provide personalized support with unified customer insights built into every interaction.
• Ticket automation and routing: Tickets are automatically assigned to the appropriate rep using skill-based assignment and intelligent routing.
• Unified analytics: Gain full visibility into customer metrics to understand recurring issues and keep a pulse on customer health.

Pros

• Seamless integration with HubSpot CRM: Directly connects with HubSpot CRM to eliminate data silos and bring clarity across your organization.
• Automation features: Not always available in free products, but we’ve got them!
• Scalability: HubSpot is equipped to handle your business needs across all departments as you grow, unifying Sales, Service, Marketing, Operations, and more.

Cons

• Limited seats: You’ll need to upgrade or purchase additional seats.
• Limited email templates: Limited to five email templates at the free level.

Best for: Businesses of all sizes looking to unify information across all internal teams, especially those already using HubSpot CRM.

What I like: I love HubSpot because it unifies all of your customer data so that you can provide a 360-degree customer experience. When I use HubSpot, I have complete visibility into a customer’s history, past tickets, and which representative they have worked with before. Armed with a full customer timeline, I can provide personalized, empathetic support and fully understand the customer’s needs and challenges.

HubSpot’s Help Desk and Ticketing software are just pieces of the puzzle. You can also use its all-in-one customer service software to streamline all your service efforts from the same place. For example, you can gauge your team’s performance by monitoring metrics like average response times and close times. You can also deploy and manage feedback surveys and more.

Pro tip: Use HubSpot’s Help Desk software to track all customer requests, manage tickets, and prioritize and distribute work among reps.

Pricing: You can get started with HubSpot’s Help Desk for free. For more functionality, consider upgrading to the Service Hub Professional tier for $90 a month per seat.

2. Zoho Desk

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Zoho Desk is a multi-channel help desk ticketing system designed to help businesses manage customer service operations efficiently. It handles incoming service cases via phone, web, email, chat, and social media, making for an omnichannel experience.

Key Features

• Ticket management: Manage, organize, and track incoming support tickets.
• Multi-channel support: Centralized email, social media, and web forms.
• Knowledge base: Maintain a self-service hub so customers can answer questions independently.
• Mobile app: Stay on top of tickets on the go with the Zoho Desk mobile app.
• Contextual AI: Zoho’s Zia quickly answers customer queries, identifies and tags support tickets, and detects anomalies and unusual ticket activity.
• Automation: Automate ticket assignments, escalations, and workflows.
• Integration: Connect Zoho Desk with other software or embed applications and widgets.

Pros

• Search functionality: Simple, attractive, and intuitive to use.
• AI tools: Generates responses, monitors data, and detects unusual activity.
• Multi-channel support: Handle tickets from email, social media, and web forms.

Cons

• Steep learning curve
• AI tools: Requires your own ChatGPT API.
• Reporting and analytics: Reports can be a bit complex.

Best for: Small businesses, startups, or freelancers seeking a cost-effective help desk system chocked full of features to manage customer queries and tickets on a small scale.

What I like: Zoho Desk offers a widget tool that you can embed on your website. When loaded in a browser, the widget turns into a support form that customers can fill out to request assistance. They can describe their problem in detail and request a preferred communication channel.

This makes it simple for customers to access your support team. It also allows reps to analyze and find solutions for incoming requests easily, significantly improving first-call resolution rates and customer satisfaction.

I also like their time-tracking feature, which records how much time you spend doing different things on each ticket. This gives you more insight into the hurdles a rep has to overcome to solve a specific issue.

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Pricing: You can sign up for a free 15-day trial of Zoho Desk. After your trial, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan. Paid plans start at $7 a month for the Express tier and increase to $40 a month for enterprise-level users.

3. Groove

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Of all the options I tested, Groove is one of the simplest and most cost-effective cloud-based help desk software solutions for small businesses. It helps companies personalize their communication with their customers via email, live chat, social media, and phone calls.

Over 10,000 users trust Groove as a simple yet powerful Zendesk and Freshdesk alternative. According to them, Groove’s help desk is easier to use, quicker to set up, and provides a much better customer experience.

Key Features

• Shared inbox: Organize your messaging channels, including email and Slack, to streamline and align ticketing support.
• Self-service knowledge base: Create a branded knowledge base paired with analytics to help track performance metrics.
• Live chat: Chat with your customers across your app or website, or enable automation to collect customer information in the off hours.
• Reporting and analytics: Understand your customer satisfaction rates, conversions, and conversations.

Pros

• User-friendly interface: Simple, attractive, and intuitive to use.
• Collaboration tools: Enable support teams to work together effectively.
• Multi-channel support: Handle tickets from email, social media, and web forms.

Cons

• Limited shared inboxes: Only two shared inboxes are allowed at the lowest tier.
• No AI features at lowest tier: Must upgrade to Plus or Pro for AI features.
• Basic reporting: Limited reporting capabilities at the lowest tier.

Best for: Small and growing businesses looking to personalize their support ticketing and customer interactions.

What I like: Groove felt like a more cost-effective and feature-rich alternative to companies like Zendesk and Freshdesk. During my 7-day free trial, I liked using the “instant replies” feature, which produced canned responses to recurring problems. Even more impressive, you could trigger follow-up actions within the help desk after sending the canned response.

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Groove’s help desk software allows companies to accept, track, and respond to support requests in an organized fashion with ticketing, live chat, knowledge base, self-service portals, SLO management, multiple mailboxes, task management, and reporting.

Pricing: You can try Groove free for 90 days. After your trial, you’ll need a subscription. Subscriptions start at $24 a month for the Standard tier, which allows for up to 25 users and two shared inboxes.

4. Spiceworks

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Spiceworks is a ticketing system that helps businesses manage both internal and customer-facing tasks. The software is all online in a cloud, so there’s no hassle in getting it set up and maintaining it. Once I signed up, I was immediately redirected to my inbox, where I could start answering mock tickets.

Best of all, Spiceworks is free without limits on tickets, devices, or agent access. So, it’s not a bad option if you just want to explore the basic features of a help desk.

Key Features

• Ticket management: Manage tickets from a shared inbox.
• IT asset management: Keep track of internal IT resources like company laptops.
• Customizable self-service portal: Unified portal for users to submit tickets and view resources.
• Advanced reporting: Create filters to quickly access open or pending tickets.

Pros

• Completely free with no upcharge.
• No user limits.
• Free mobile app.

Cons

• Basic interface: Less attractive than other paid options.
• Banner ads: It’s gotta be free somehow!
• Limited support options: Community support is your only option if you need help with the software.

Best for: IT departments and small businesses who do not mind a scaled-down system if it saves them money.

What I like: Because Spiceworks is a cloud-based help desk, I could log in from any web browser and get to work. It also offers a help desk mobile app that keeps you updated on all your tickets. It is not that anyone wants to work outside of office hours, but it does give you the option to respond to customers in a pinch if needed.

Spiceworks also offers an inventory management integration that can help your team oversee product orders that are in progress. It uses an IP scanner to locate orders and notify you of their progress. As a rep, I can then proactively relay that information to the customer so they know of any delays with their delivery.

Pricing: Free.

5. Keeping

Of all the options I tested, Keeping is one of the simplest and most cost-effective Gmail-based help desk solutions for small businesses. It transforms your Gmail inbox into a shared help desk, allowing companies to manage customer support directly from their familiar email interface.

Many users trust Keeping as a simple yet powerful alternative to traditional help desk software like Zendesk and Freshdesk. According to them, Keeping’s help desk is easier to use, quicker to set up, and provides a much better customer experience by eliminating the need to switch between platforms.

Key Features

• Gmail collaboration: Team members can access support tickets from a designated tab in their Gmail account. Keeping prevents duplicate work by locking tickets when an agent is working on it.
• Streamlined integration: Set up your Keeping account in less than ten minutes, including connecting your team members to the shared inbox.
• Shared notes: Maintain a ticketing record system to keep your team on the same page.
• Automation and canned responses: Keeping’s AI detects support messages, like a thank you from a customer, that do not require a response.
• Round-robin assignment: evenly distribute support tickets across your team.
• Analytics and metrics: Identify areas of performance improvements and analyze key metrics, like email volume, response time, and resolution time.

Pros

• User-friendly interface: Familiar Gmail environment reduces the learning curve.
• Easy setup: Very quick and easy to set up and try with their free trial.
• Affordable pricing: Cost-effective solution for small teams.

Cons

• Limited to Gmail users: Only works with Gmail and Google Workspace.
• No multi-channel support: Does not support channels like social media or live chat.
• Advanced features require higher tiers: Some features are only available in premium plans.

Best for: All departments who use Gmail, including HR, IT, and Finance. It also integrates with Shopify, making e-commerce support in Gmail easier.

What I like: Keeping felt like a more cost-effective and user-friendly alternative to companies like Zendesk and Freshdesk, especially for teams already using Gmail. During my free trial, I appreciated the seamless integration and the ability to manage support tickets without leaving my inbox. The automation features, like canned responses, significantly improved response times.

Pricing:

Keeping offers a 14-day free trial. Small teams who need just two workflows can subscribe to Keeping for $12 a month per user. Larger organizations with more than 10 users can subscribe to Keeping for $49 per month per user.

6. Help Scout

Source

Help Scout is a ticketing system that puts the customer first. With a simple interface, the software is easy for reps and customers alike to navigate while offering excellent features such as a shared inbox, omnichannel support, live chat, automation, and a mobile app.

Although Help Scout does not offer a 100% free plan, it does offer a 15-day free trial to test the software. No credit card is required; just click it to get started.

Key Features

• Multi-channel inbox: Combine your email, social, live chat, and voice mailboxes into one streamlined interface.
• AI tools: For improving replies and summarizing conversations.
• Analytics and reporting: Access and analyze data like customer satisfaction rates, wait and response times, chat duration, and social media support metrics.
• Integration options: Such as Jira, Salesforce, Slack, Trello, and HubSpot.
• Self-service portal: Customizable to the look and feel of your brand.

Pros

• User-friendly: This is one of the more attractive and intuitive interfaces I’ve encountered.
• Collaboration tools: It’s simple to loop in other agents directly on a ticket.
• Multi-channel support: Including email and live chat in a unified interface.

Cons

• Limited AI features: If you’re starting with the lowest tier.
• Storage limitations: Limited storage for attachments and data at the lowest tier.
• Basic reporting capabilities: Must upgrade to higher tiers for advanced reporting.

Best for: Startups, small businesses, or any company looking for a user-friendly interface.

What I like: Creating a chatbot on Help Scout was straightforward. In fact, it was one of the first things I did in the setup guide. I like chatbots because they are a reliable communication channel that customers can access around the clock.

Help Scout also has cloud-based features that small companies love, such as a shared inbox and knowledge center capabilities. In addition, every pricing level comes with the ability to embed help widgets on your website that you can set to fire on specific pages. In the world of many alternatives, Help Scout stands out for its simplicity and ease of use.

Pricing: If you have a small client base of 50 customers or less, you can use Help Scout for free. Or, if you have 100 or more contacts, you can try a free trial of Help Scout’s Standard subscription. Once your trial ends, you’ll pay $50 a month for your subscription.

7. Hesk

Hesk is a minimal but effective helpdesk ticketing system that is completely free. I played around with the demo version for a while, and I was impressed with it, considering its non-existent price tag. The interface reminded me a little bit of the backend of a WordPress website, which was welcoming and familiar, albeit not incredibly sleek. The system was intuitive, and there were plenty of mock contacts for which you could create tickets.

Key Features

• Ticket management: Track and manage all your support tickets in one place.
• Knowledge base: Create self-service resources for customers to answer common questions independently.
• Email piping: Converts incoming email to Hesk tickets.
• Reporting tools: Essential customer service reports and analytics.
• Customer-facing interface: A single location for customers to find knowledge articles, submit a ticket, or review their ticket status.

Pros

• Unlimited users: Most competition limits the number of users per tier.
• Simple install and configuration: Get up and running quickly.
• Essential feature set: Basic yet functional capabilities for organizations with limited needs.
• Robust knowledge base: Hesk offers a large knowledge base to help its users navigate and troubleshoot common issues.

Cons

• No personalization: Canned responses don’t auto-populate with the customer’s name or other information.
• Limited integration options
• No AI features
• Learning curve

Best for: Small customer service teams and businesses looking for a support ticketing system without extra bells and whistles.

What I like: Hesk offers a reliable ticketing system that takes minutes to download and set up. You can create custom ticket fields and modify the display to align with your team’s workflow. It even offers a ticket submission form where customers can open web-based tickets that are managed within the app. I like Hesk for basic customer support situations that only necessitate tracking email correspondence.

8. Freshdesk by Freshworks

Freshdesk includes all the basic features you need to meet customers’ needs, including shared inbox, social media support, automated ticket assignment, public knowledge base, and more. It allows you to collaborate with your team on high-severity issues in real time and has reporting tools that provide valuable insights that can help your team improve performance.

Freshdesk’s forever-free plan provides a simple customer service solution for small businesses, startups, and teams of 10 reps or fewer. Freshworks also offers premium customer service management software through Freshservice, with plans starting at $15 per user a month.

Key Features

• Knowledge base: Create self-service resources for customers or employees.
• Ticket management: Manage and track incoming support tickets from multiple channels.
• Collaboration features: Easily loop in teammates for assistance on tickets.
• Automation: Automate admin tasks, like assigning agents support tickets.
• SLA management: Monitor, track, and assess agent performance.
• Reporting and analytics: Generate custom reports, like ticket response time and timesheets.
• Helpdesk AI: Recognizes customer sentiment and summarizes support situations to help agents quickly solve issues.

Pros

• Up to 10 users: This is a high number of seats for a free plan.
• Extensive integration options: Compatible with HubSpot, Slack, Salesforce, and more.
• Clean, attractive interface
• Quick customer support

Cons

• Limited feature set: Compared to paid options.
• Limited reporting capabilities: Advanced reporting is available at higher paid tiers.
• Limited automation: Automation features are limited to paid tiers only.
• Limited AI: AI features are limited to the pro and enterprise tiers.
• Limited customer portal: The Customer Portal feature is limited to paid tiers.

Best for: Growing companies who want to scale their support ticketing system as their client base grows.

What I like: The first thing I noticed with this help desk was how clean the user interface was. It was easy to find tickets assigned to me and different contacts and companies associated with my account. One feature I enjoyed during my demo was the To-do widget integrated into the main dashboard.

I definitely would have used a feature like this during my time as a support rep. It’s nothing crazy, but it’s a little detail that makes life as a support rep a little more streamlined compared to keeping a to-do list manually or with a separate app.

Pricing: Small teams of two agents can use Freshdesk for free with limited capabilities. For teams of three or more, you’ll need a subscription. The Growth tier starts at $15 a month per agent. The Pro tier, which includes AI capabilities, is $49 a month per agent.

9. UVdesk

UVdesk is an open-source help desk software designed with ecommerce businesses in mind. Although it is aimed at online stores, I found that UVdesk is fully featured and versatile enough to benefit customer support operations across many types of companies.

I signed up for a free UVdesk account, and I’ve got to warn you that the signup process was a little wonky. The name and business name fields didn’t accept dashes (my last name and the name of my business both contain a dash symbol). When I generated a long, secure password with lots of special characters, it was marked as invalid, forcing me to use that one simple password I’ve used for a few too many websites (we all have one; don’t deny it!).

All that being said, there is a lot to love about UVdesk.

Key Features

• Ticket management: Manage and organize support tickets with customizable workflows, including ticket assignment.
• Multi-channel support: Manage email, social media, live chat, and web form inquiries as tickets in a unified interface.
• Knowledge base: Create and maintain a self-service knowledge base so customers (or your employees) can find answers to common queries.
• SLAs and escalations: Define SLAs and create escalation rules to ensure timely responses. This feature is typically not available in free help desks.
• Form builder: Create and embed customizable contact forms.
• Customer follow-up: Prompt customers to follow up with their ticketing requests by sending automatic follow-up emails.
• Helpdesk migration: Transfer your files and support tickets from your existing helpdesk to UVdesk.

Pros

• Open source: Highly customizable to fit specific business needs.
• No user limits: As many reps as your heart desires!
• Comprehensive feature set: Offers features typically only found in paid help desk ticketing systems.

Cons

• Technical setup required: The initial setup can be complex because of the product’s open-source nature, likely requiring development experience.
• Basic interface: Functional but basic compared to other solutions.
• Limited support: Community support (forums) is your only resource if you need assistance with the product.

Best for: Service teams who want full control over customization of their knowledge base and support contact forms. Also great for teams who want to scale their customer support across multiple channels.

What I like: UVdesk’s superpower is its open-source nature. Why is that important? Since UVdesk is open source, the entire software code is accessible for modification, integration with other systems, custom features, and even altering the product’s UI.

Now, I don’t know the first thing about modifying open-source software. However, if someone in your business can handle such a task, UVdesk is a highly customizable and cost-effective help desk solution. In addition, I like the increased security factor since all users can inspect and maintain the source code to eliminate vulnerabilities, hidden backdoors, or malicious code.

Overall, UVdesk is an astonishingly fully featured and functional free product. However, these things come at a price, and this time, it isn’t money. Instead, it comes in the form of a steep learning curve and technical know-how, but once you get everything up and running, it will seriously be worth the time and effort.

Pricing: You can use UVdesk for free. If you want access to pro features, like multi-channel integration or service agent performance data, you’ll need the Pro plan. The Pro plan costs $22 a month for a minimum of two agents.

10. Front

I’ll admit it. I have a weakness for modern cloud-based software with single-noun names. Front is one of those. Front is a help desk software for omnichannel customer support with streamlined communication and a focus on collaboration.

I started a free trial of Front and was impressed by the speed of the application and the intuitive UI. Front came loaded with the competitive features I expected to see, such as a shared inbox, SLAs, chatbots, and more.

One feature I enjoyed during my trial was the knowledge base. Creating and publishing articles to a sleek, blog-style interface was easy and intuitive.

Key Features

• Shared inbox: Organizes communications from multiple channels into a unified inbox for your team.
• Email management: Features like email templates, reminders, and snooze let you manage customer email communication swiftly.
• Team collaboration: Slack-style collaboration features are intuitive and encourage teamwork.
• Integrations: Integrates with many popular apps like Slack, Salesforce, and HubSpot CRM.
• Omni-channel interface: Organize your apps and channels all within the Front interface.
• Reporting and analytics: Track performance, assess workloads, and measure customer satisfaction rates.
• Front’s AI: Detects simple inquiries and provides real-time AI editing assistance in customer messages.

Pros

• Attractive interface: My favorite UI of all the products on this list.
• Workflow automation features: Not always available for free tier products.
• Intuitive knowledge base: Publishing self-service content is simple and intuitive.
• Collaboration: Allows for sidebar chats and saves them in chronological order.
• Customizable settings
• Mobile app

Cons

• Limited AI functionality: Only available with paid tiers.
• Limited storage: Storage limitations for emails and attachments at lower tiers.
• Basic reporting: Advanced reporting is only available at paid tiers.

Best for: Collaborative teams who offer customer support across various platforms, including social media and email.

What I like: If your team uses Slack for communication and collaboration, you’ll feel at home with Front. Front features an internal messaging system that lets you collaborate with other reps, comment on tickets, and tag users with the familiar @username format to loop them in where attention is needed.

I like Front because it feels modern, sleek, and intuitive. Front’s interface sparks a little bit of joy in me, which is important if you’re going to be staring at it day in and day out.

Pricing: You can try Front for free. However, once your trial ends, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid tier. The Starter Plan is $19 a month per agent.

11. Hiver

Hiver is a clever app that transforms your Gmail inbox into a fully-featured customer service ticketing system. Using Hiver, you can manage incoming customer inquiries, collaborate with teammates, set up approval workflows, and more from your Gmail inbox.

I started a free trial of Hiver and installed their Chrome extension. The added UI elements to my Gmail inbox were unobtrusive, and I could create a shared inbox in a matter of seconds. Additionally, Hiver caused no conflict with the HubSpot Sales extension I already had installed to track and log emails to HubSpot, which is a plus.

Key Features:

• Gmail integration: Transforms your Gmail inbox into a help desk.
• Shared inboxes: Reps can manage all support tickets from a single inbox, all within their Gmail interface.
• Collision detection: Prevents multiple reps from responding to the same customer email request.
• Tasks: Convert emails into tasks and manage them directly in Gmail.
• Live chat: Reps can chat with customers within their inbox, set away hours, and connect knowledge base articles to responses.
• Self-serve portal: Customer-facing interface for customers to submit tickets, check the status of their queries, or search for answers in the knowledge base.
• Workflow automations: Free up agent time by filtering urgent requests.
• Hiver’s AI: Summarize emails, auto-close conversations, and generate email templates.

Pros

• Familiarity: Your team members are likely familiar with Gmail, so starting Hiver won’t be a big learning curve at all.
• Outlook compatibility: They didn’t forget about you Windows users!
• User-friendly UI: The interface is functional and leverages the familiarity of the Gmail UI without getting in the way.

Cons

• Limited advanced features: Only available at paid tiers.
• User limit: Limited to three users at the free tier.
• Limited to Gmail and Outlook: I’m not even sure what other email clients there are, but if you use something other than the big two, you’re out of luck.
• Mobile app: The mobile app is sometimes laggy.

Best for: Teams looking to incorporate AI into their help desks and support ticketing systems.

What I like: I like Hiver because of its simplicity and ease of use. If you’re familiar with Gmail (which is likely), then Hiver reduces the help desk learning curve and integrates smoothly into your existing workflow. Hiver is a valuable solution for small businesses and startups beginning their customer support journey.

As your business grows, you may want to upgrade to a standalone help desk solution. Still, don’t underestimate Hiver’s potential to transform your Gmail into a customer service HQ.

Pricing: You can use Hiver for free. However, to access premium features, like round-robin auto assignment or analytics, you’ll need a subscription. The LITE plan starts at $19 per month per user.

12. HelpDesk

HelpDesk is an advanced ticketing system designed to enhance customer support operations for businesses of all sizes. With its intuitive interface and powerful features, HelpDesk enables support teams to efficiently manage customer inquiries across multiple channels, including email, chat, and social media.

Key Features

• Ticket management: Logs, tracks, and prioritizes customer cases. Each customer inquiry or problem is assigned a unique ticket.
• Issue resolution: Facilitates the resolution of customer issues by providing a platform for support agents to communicate with customers, troubleshoot issues, and offer solutions.
• Asynchronous communication: Communication between support agents and customers via various channels, including email, chat, contact form, and social media.
• Effortless automation: Automation and AI-based features help streamline repetitive tasks, route tickets to the appropriate departments, and provide quick responses to common queries, improving the efficiency of support operations.
• Feedback collection: Gathering customer feedback is essential for understanding their needs and improving products and services.
• Analytics and reporting: Create visual reports to better understand agent performance and customer satisfaction rates.
• Knowledge base: Create an optimized library of troubleshooting articles.
• Personalization: Brand your communications with a custom domain and address.

Pros

• User-friendly interface: Intuitive and easy-to-navigate interface, making it accessible even for non-technical users.
• Automation features: It offers robust automation capabilities such as automated workflows, ticket assignments, and canned responses.
• Customizable ticketing system: The platform allows users to customize their ticketing workflows to fit their support process. You can set rules for prioritizing tickets, create tags, and categorize tickets for better organization.
• Integration with other tools: Integrates well with other tools, such as Webflow, WordPress, LiveChat, and email providers.
• Analytics and reporting: The platform offers insightful reports on ticket resolution times, team performance, and customer satisfaction, providing teams with the data they need to improve support quality.

Cons

• Limited free tier: Offers a free version of HelpDesk for 14 days. Long-term free options are unavailable; however, you can choose between three plans designed to best suit your team.
• Asynchronous communication only: HelpDesk is ideal for handling tickets and asynchronous communication, but it doesn’t support synchronous chat features (only by integration, such as LiveChat).

Best for: Small and medium-sized businesses looking for a branded solution to connect all their customer communication in one simple dashboard.

What I like: I really like HelpDesk because it is simple to use for handling customer support tasks. The user-friendly interface makes it easy for anyone to manage tickets without a steep learning curve. The automation features include setting up workflows and automating repetitive tasks, streamlining support processes, saving time, and improving team productivity.

Another strength of HelpDesk is how it centralizes communication. This allows businesses to manage all their customer inquiries in one place, whether they come from emails or contact forms. In addition, its integration capabilities with tools like LiveChat allow businesses to build a more cohesive support ecosystem.

Pricing: You can sign up for a 14-day free trial. Paid subscriptions start at $29 a month per team member.

How to Choose the Right Support Ticketing Tool

Your support ticketing tool significantly impacts your team’s ability to do their jobs efficiently and solve for the customer. Accordingly, selecting your help desk warrants some serious consideration. But how do you know you’re choosing the right one?

I think it comes down to finding a tool that strikes the right balance between features and budget.

Assess your needs.

When choosing your support ticketing system, the first step is to evaluate your needs. There are many factors to consider.

• How large is your team?
• What’s your expected volume of incoming tickets?
• What channels will customers be contacting you from?
• Do you have any unique requirements or needs for special features like automation or AI?

Your answers to these questions will be the baseline criteria for selecting your help desk. For example, if you run a small support team that only handles limited email inquiries, you’ll only need a lightweight system. In comparison, a large enterprise team may require a robust solution with customization options and the ability to handle hundreds of team members.

Identify key features.

I touched on this above, but assessing your needs will help inform the key features your team requires. Some examples of make-or-break features may include:

• Ticket automation and follow-up.
• Reporting capabilities.
• Integration options.
• Omnichannel ticketing.
• SLA (service level agreement) management.

And much more. Based on your team’s needs, I suggest making a list of required features and “nice to have” features. Then, search for help desk software that checks off as many boxes as possible within your budget, which brings me to the next step.

Set a budget.

It all comes down to money, of course. Setting a budget for your customer service ticket system will help narrow your options. You want to maximize value, meaning you get the most high-quality features for your money.

I think help desk software isn’t the place to cut corners. If ever there was a place to stretch that budget a little, it’s here. Why? Because it’s an essential tool for your team’s ability to satisfy customers. It’s not worth cheaping out on your help desk software if it means missing out on critical features and creating a bottleneck in your ability to help customers.

That being said, it all depends on your needs, and if your needs are basic, you can take advantage of many free help desk solutions.

Consider scalability.

I think it’s critical to choose a customer ticketing software that can grow with your team. Many solutions offer a free tier, which is excellent for smaller teams just starting out. However, it’s essential to consider your team’s growth trajectory when selecting the right option.

After all, you don’t want to choose help desk software that you’ll need to replace after only a year or two, which will result in lots of lost time in retraining and integrating a new system into your workflow.

Service desk software like HubSpot is fantastic because it offers a free option to get you started. There are then increasing paid tiers that expand upon feature sets to align with your growing business needs.

Test multiple tools.

I’ve been writing about and researching customer service software for a while now, and I’ve found that the market is relatively competitive. What I mean is, generally, there is parity regarding features and capabilities amongst the foremost service desk options.

So, how do you choose between solutions that offer the same features at similar price points? That’s where the fun comes in. Testing!

Well, maybe it’s only fun if you’re a software nerd like me. Regardless, it’s essential to audition a few tools to figure out which fits your workflow best.

How I Chose the Best Help Desk Software

After testing many free help desk ticketing systems, there can only be one winner. Well, actually, there are two. My favorite free helpdesk solutions are UVdesk and HubSpot.

I considered two factors when forming my opinion on my favorite help desk ticketing systems: first impression and value.

First impressions are everything, and when it comes to evaluating software, that equates to my initial experience with the UI and how intuitive it feels to navigate around the product and locate the features and functionality I’m looking for. UVdesk and HubSpot both pass this test. UVdesk’s interface is more basic than HubSpot, but what it lacks in looks, it makes up for in value.

Value is a big one. In my mind, value is the idea of how much you’re getting for what you pay. Of course, you want the most bang for your buck. Now, both of these options are free, so what you pay isn’t always money. UVdesk and HubSpot both offer a competitive feature set that keeps up with the competition.

UVDesk

When it comes to free software solutions, there’s usually some kind of trade-off. Typically, you get fewer features compared to paid versions, or you have to put up with banner ads in the header and sidebar. However, the only trade-off with UVdesk is effort. It’s not for everyone due to its open-source, self-hosted nature and technical implementation, but the amount of premium features and customization available within UVdesk blew me away.

If you have the technical experience or development resources to deploy and maintain UVdesk, you have an enterprise-level ticketing system for free. The time and effort required to deploy and maintain such a system are a cost to consider, but if UVdesk is the right fit for your team, then I think the value is astronomical.

HubSpot

I’ll admit it: I have a SoftSpot for HubSpot (see what I did there). All jokes aside, HubSpot strikes the perfect balance between value and usability. The HubSpot interface is remarkably intuitive and attractive, and I would be happy to look at it daily.

Regarding features, the free version of HubSpot Help Desk won’t give you access to all the enterprise-level features you’re getting with UVdesk for free. However, I believe that 99% of small organizations are better suited for a solution like HubSpot. At the free tier, HubSpot offers all the help desk features you’ll need to run a basic customer service operation, and it is effortless to get up and running.

What sets HubSpot apart from similar help desk ticketing systems is its potential for scalability. HubSpot can grow with your business and become the complete operational hub for your entire organization. Native integration with HubSpot’s free CRM alone is a remarkable value that brings elevated visibility into customer interactions compared to other options on this list.

Find the Right Help Desk Software for Your Team

As your company grows and takes on new clients, your customer service team will also work to keep up with increased demand for customer support requests. Help desk software will allow reps to effectively and efficiently organize those requests, manage ticket volume, and provide support.

After testing all these different help desk solutions, I’ve found that my favorite ones are those with the sleekest, most minimal UI. For the most part, all of the help desk solutions on the market offer similar capabilities and features, so your choice should come down to usability and workflow within your budget.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in March 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

In marketing, where I’ve spent my career, my mission is to nudge customers to buy. But sometimes marketers focus so much on the funnel that they forget about making a great experience. When retail customer experience (CX) is poor, customers may walk away.

But when you create a memorable experience, you’ll earn a brand advocate and repeat business. 81% of customers say a positive customer service experience increases the chance they’ll make another purchase, so CX impacts your bottom line.

I spoke with three CX leaders to find out what makes a great customer experience, how to take an omnichannel approach to bring technology and in-store spaces together, and retail CX examples to inspire you.

Table of Contents

• What is retail customer experience?
• Why a Good Retail Customer Experience is Important
• How to Improve Your Retail Customer Experience
• Retail Customer Experience Examples
• How to Measure the Success of Your Retail CX
• How to Create a Customer-Focused Company

What is retail customer experience?

Retail CX is how a customer perceives your brand, influenced by every customer interaction before, during, and after a purchase. Both digital, phone, and in-store experiences contribute to your CX. Retail CX can be positive or negative — a value-add or a detractor — so it’s important to get it right.

Why a Good Retail Customer Experience is Important

CX is about much more than giving customers the warm touchy-feelies. Here’s what CX can do for your retail business.

1. Differentiate your brand from customers.

Your customer can find the exact same product at many stores, so how do you differentiate yourself to gain their business? When I shop, I weigh price, convenience, and shipping options, but I also weigh customer experience. How easy will my shopping process be, and what kind of support will I have if there’s an issue?

2. Drive customer loyalty and repeat purchases.

When customers have a good experience, they’re more likely to return and buy again. Inversely, just one bad experience will prompt one in three customers to walk away from a brand they love.

“Ultimately, if you are not elevating your customer experience strategy to be the strategic part of your business, you won’t have staying power. You will see a significantly large percentage of what I call lapsed customers— who buy from you one time, and then they never repeat the purchase,” says Zack Hamilton.

Hamilton is a senior vice president and head of growth strategy and enablement at parcelLab. Hamilton has advised companies from Apple to Dick’s Sporting Goods on retail CX.

Simply put, good experiences create customer loyalty, repeat purchases, and customer advocacy. It’s simple for retail customers to walk away, so bad experiences create customer churn.

3. Reduce customer acquisition costs.

Your customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the total cost of sales and marketing to gain a new customer. When your CX is poor, like a disorganized store or a bad online checkout experience, you’re less likely to convert them to make a purchase. That means you need to spend more money bringing more customers to your store or website before making a sale. Bringing back an existing customer costs much less than acquiring a new one, keeping your costs lower.

4. Grow revenue.

I don’t have to spell it out for you. Happy returning customers plus lower costs equal more revenue and lower costs. Good CX contributes to a healthy, growing business. Companies with poor CX will always struggle to thrive.

“If you don’t elevate your customer experience, you won’t have engaged customers that drive loyalty,” cautions Hamilton. “So your customer acquisition cost will always be very high, and you won’t be able to compete with your profitability margins. Ultimately, you will go out of business because you’re not making the margins that you need to make.”

How to Improve Your Retail Customer Experience

The last decade has brought fundamental change to retail. Self-checkouts, mobile apps, membership programs, ecommerce, and curbside pickup have reinvented how people shop. But is all of it beneficial? Here’s how to improve your retail CX and create a stellar shopping experience.

In-Store Customer Experience

Four out of five purchases still take place in a store, so brick-and-mortar is still king. Here’s how to create a welcoming, efficient store experience that drives sales.

1. Design around what your customers want.

First, recognize that there is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to retail experiences. When I walk into a small boutique, I’m looking for a different experience than I get at Target. I’m likely looking for specialist recommendations and advice, rather than shopping an entire aisle of choices and picking up some groceries with my makeup.

I have a mission, and your job is to design an experience that helps me accomplish it. Resist the impulse to be swayed by every new trend or imitate what big box stores are doing — it may not be what your customers want.

2. Empower your frontline staff.

Staff members are responsible for delivering your brand experience, and they can make or break it.

“My interaction with your employee is my brand experience. A great store experience has to be wrapped up in an incredible experience with the frontline team,” advises Hamilton. “If you‘re a luxury boutique like a Neiman Marcus, your goal is for a customer to feel bold and empowered coming out of the boutique. If your employees don’t feel bold and empowered, they can’t help the customer feel bold and empowered.”

To empower your frontline staff, consider the employee experience as well as the customer experience. Keep appropriate staffing levels, train and treat your staff well, and empower them to make decisions that will turn a negative customer experience around.

3. Enhance your store layout and design.

Create an inviting atmosphere in your store with wide aisles, clear signage, and visual merchandising. You can use lighting, furniture, music, wall color, and even scents to create your ideal atmosphere. Strategic product placement encourages customers to explore the store more and find relevant products.

You can also consider immersive experiences like dining at Restoration Hardware’s showroom in a real-life historical estate.

4. Integrate technology.

Technology can play a huge role in improving a customer’s experience. For instance, it can help them navigate the store to find what they need faster.

The Home Depot pioneered an app feature to help customers locate an item by aisle and bin number. Now, Target and many others have adopted this feature. Digital signage, interactive displays, and price-check kiosks also help customers to find relevant products and check out faster.

Alex Campbell, co-founder and chief innovation officer at Vibes, believes that mobile technology can improve the customer experience and help customers achieve their mission. 75% of people say that text messages routinely drive them to purchase from brands, but these texts need to be on-brand, personalized, and useful.

For example, a shopper can add an offer to their phone’s mobile wallet at home. Then, when they walk in the store, geofencing reminds them with a prompt to use the coupon and save money.

“It‘s interesting to take a step back and look at what a customer’s mission is when they get to your store. How do we use mobile to make it easier?” says Campbell.

Online Customer Experience

With ecommerce, it’s harder to keep shoppers’ attention and easier for them to comparison shop. It would take you all afternoon to drive to five stores, but you can shop at five ecommerce sites in a tidy half hour.

Here’s how to catch and keep your customers’ attention online and create a great experience.

1. Nail your online store design, navigation, and checkout.

Three-quarters of ecommerce sites have mediocre to poor performance when it comes to homepage and category navigation, according to Baymard Institute. Simply put, customers can’t find what they need. The categories may be too confusing, or the filtering options don’t work well.

Checkout is another sticking point for customers, with a 70% cart abandonment rate in 2024. Customers give up when the checkout process is too long, the shipping and return policies aren’t clear upfront, or when unexpected fees show up during checkout.

Create a user-friendly website, offer a guest checkout option to let customers checkout without creating an account, and offer multiple payment options for a great customer experience.

2. Meet your customers where they are.

When customers have a product question or need support, they’ll reach for whichever communication channel is most familiar and convenient. In many cases, that’s text and social media.

While I managed social media for a consumer brand, I saw people reaching out on Facebook Messenger or X for just about anything, from product requests to complaints.

With social commerce, customers are completing their entire shopping experience through platforms like TikTok or Instagram — they may never come to your website. More and more, we as consumers want to reach brands on whichever channel is most convenient, whether that’s messaging or social media.

“People don’t want to make 1-800 calls anymore. We’re seeing the trend that calling is massively going down, and traffic on your websites and apps is massively up,” shares Gaurav Passi, founder and CEO at Zingly.ai. “It’s super critical for brands to engage where their customers are, and right now, that is websites, messaging, digital properties, texting, and WhatsApp.”

Most of the time, customers only engage with a brand when something is wrong, which means your interaction isn’t starting in a positive place. Find the balance of proactive communicating with customers without annoying them — and that’s where personalization comes in.

3. Personalize, personalize, personalize.

With millions of website pages and products at their fingertips, people need a way to cut through the clutter. HubSpot’s research shows that 78% of customers expect more personalized interactions than ever before.

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“It is not about you. It’s about the consumer who’s coming in, what their likes are, where their dislikes are, and what they’ve bought with you in the past,” explains Passi. “Understanding your consumer in-depth and applying that knowledge in real time, I think, is the most important thing right now.”

With personalization, you can show customers more relevant products to buy. You can speed up customer service interactions by pulling up a customer’s conversation and purchase history in real-time and seamlessly switching between channels.

“I personally hate it when I get messages that aren‘t personalized to me, because I know you can do it, or you should be able to do it,” offers Campbell. “We do a customer concern survey every year where we ask people how many text messages are too many messages. Around a third of people say it doesn’t matter how many messages they get as long as they’re personal,” he shares.

Just 35% of CRM leaders say their customer data is fully integrated with their service tools. “There’s been a huge push over the past five or ten years of collecting data. Now we’re at this point of figuring out how to use it,” Campbell says.

4. Bring in AI the smart way.

One way to leverage all of your customer data is to integrate AI into your customer interactions. The catch, though, is figuring out how AI can be additive instead of subtracting value. A bad AI interaction is still a bad experience. However, AI can bring scale customer service and recommendations to help customers day or night, on any channel.

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“When brands have all their data together, we’re already starting to see how AI can sift through millions of pieces of data in real time and offer up those personalized recommendations online drive the personalization strategy,” says Hamilton.

“I think AI can be an incredibly powerful tool for customer experience, but it can’t fix a broken process. If you already have really bad processes in place, AI is only going to make those processes worse,” says Hamilton.

The key is to find when to make the switch from an AI interaction to a human one.

“We are automating 60 to 70% on the buying and services sides, but the other 30% of the time, automation isn’t always good,” shares Passi. “You might be over-automating; the customer is not happy, and their sentiment is off. We’ve been designing a technology which understands based on customers’ records, emotions, and real-time sentiment, when and how to bring a human in the loop.”

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When you get it right, you can scale personalized recommendations and customer service for a stellar customer experience.

The Omnichannel Approach to Retail CX

Above all, I’ve learned that the brands who get CX right treat online and in-store CX as separate strategies. They design one cohesive experience because that’s how the customer perceives it — as a single experience from one brand. They expect the same voice, service, and excellence across all channels, whether in your store, on your website, or on mobile.

Use a CRM and an integrated messaging inbox to ensure consistency across all touchpoints for your customers. SMS and AI-powered interactions can be powerful tools, but they need to be personalized and consistent in your brand voice. 75% of people say that text messages routinely drive them to purchase from brands. Chipotle is a great example of sending personalized text campaigns in its distinct brand voice.

Apple is another brand that does an incredible job of creating an omnichannel retail experience, integrating digital and physical spaces. If you’ve visited an Apple store, you know that it’s easy to make an appointment in advance to avoid a wait. In the store, a team member comes to you while you test out their products and can complete your purchase from their iPad — no need to head to a checkout line. If there’s a problem later, you can get the support you need by chat or email.

Retail Customer Experience Examples

I’m always blown away by a good customer experience, like when an employee goes above and beyond or an app helps me find what I need or save money. Here are three brands getting it right — and what makes them stand out.

Walmart

Love it or hate it, you have to admit that Walmart is convenient. 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart, and you can find almost anything you need there. Over the past few years, they’ve transformed their CX with mobile technology and omnichannel experiences that integrate digital and physical spaces.

While all shoppers can take advantage of same-day curbside pickup, Walmart+ members have access to same-day grocery delivery and other perks. The brand redesigned hundreds of stores with a modern, more aesthetic look to encourage browsing and engaging with products.

They’ve also built their own proprietary large language model (LLM) called Wallaby, trained on decades of Walmart purchase data. This technology is enabling omnichannel customer experiences like text and voice shopping and allowing customers to get support like processing returns through messaging. By the end of 2025, they even expect to create personalized homepages for each shopper.

Dick’s Sporting Goods

If you walk into a Dick’s Sporting Goods, you might be surprised to find more than racks of products. Climbing walls, immersive virtual golfing centers, and multi-sport HitTrax cages in select stores are engaging customers in a new way and giving them a reason to stick around and shop.

That’s just one way Dick’s has revamped their CX. They’ve added free shipping for most items, one-hour in-store pickup, and a price match guarantee. More than six million people use their GameChanger app to manage team sports and stream games to friends and family.

The brand now uses targeted surveys to collect feedback and act on it in real-time. That’s led to significantly lower bounce and exit rates, and significantly higher conversion rates on in-cart exercise equipment.

Carvana

As someone who bought a car this year, I know how painful the car-buying experience can be. Time-consumer dealer visits and haggling over pricing isn’t very convenient or comfortable. Enter Carvana, a disruptor in the automotive space. Carvana’s main focus is a frictionless buying experience for customers.

“Ordering a car from Carvana was the easiest thing ever,” shared customer Rebecca Garner. “The online experience was so easy we barely had to think about it. We got access to the warranty information, car registration, and anything else we could need in the app. Any information we weren’t able to find ourselves, we could find through the chat. They delivered the car right to our door in the city, and our interactions with the person that delivered it were fantastic.”

How to Measure the Success of Your Retail CX

Because it deals with human emotion, CX can be tricky to measure. Here are a few of the top metrics to gauge how good of an experience you’re creating.

Engagement Rate

One way to measure CX is to look at how much customers engage with you and in what way. How often are they reading your emails, for instance? Are they reacting to your social posts or SMS messages? Are they clicking through to your website or unsubscribing?

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

CSAT is a metric that describes the percentage of customers who are satisfied with their purchase. This helps you track CX performance over time and segment your audience to send personalized messaging to satisfied or less-than-satisfied customers.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS is a popular measure of customer sentiment and advocacy. The measurement simply asks customers on a one of 10 how likely they are to recommend the brand to a family or friend. It’s more of a result of good CX than anything else — a high NPS usually reflects a positive customer experience.

Customer Retention Rate (CRR)

CRR measures what percentage of customers you retain over a set period. The opposite of this is customer churn, which is how many customers you lose over a set period.

One caution I heard from the CX leaders I interviewed is to avoid the fallacy of vanity metrics. Rather than boasting about a CSAT score of 80, dig into the remaining 20% to understand why they weren’t satisfied — and take action.

How to Create a Customer-Focused Company

So, how do you create a CX focus at your company? One half is technology, which I’ve already covered. Your tech stack and how you implement it every day can make or break your CX. The other half comes down to people and culture. How do you design a customer-centric culture and embrace change to meet customer priorities?

1. Create an org structure and culture for success.

One problem working against CX is internal siloes. Marketing, sales, and customer services are all working separately instead of as one team. I’ve seen teams set up competing for resources, so they aren’t incentivized to work together toward a common goal.

One way to solve this is through establishing a CX leader who can advocate for the customer and bring all these siloes together.

“The best CX leaders are influencers, right? They don’t own the entire customer journey. They have to influence the cross-functional stakeholders to do that. I look at them as problem solvers. They should have a bias for action and report directly to the CEO,” recommends Hamilton.

Beyond your org chart, it’s also a question of culture. Can you create a culture of customer focus that permeates from your frontline staff to website designers to executive leadership?

“​​The customer experience should be owned by everybody at that company. It’s everyone’s problem, everyone’s responsibility,” says Campbell. “That’s the whole reason why you’re there, making sure that your customers have an experience with your brand that matches what you stand for.”

2. Incorporate customer feedback and embrace disruption.

One big mistake companies make in CX is listening and collecting customer feedback — then never acting on it.

“There’s a difference between listening to your customers and doing customer experience,” shares Hamilton. “CX leaders are not connecting the dots between what our customers are telling us, the impact on the business, and why we should do something about it.”

Look at your metrics and change your communication tactics if your opt-out rates are too high. Listen to customers and prioritize redesigning your processes and technology according to your voice of customer research.

That may mean reinvention — radically changing your tech or diverging from others in your industry. But often, that disruption can mean survival in this noisy world competing for attention.

Earn Customer Love with Personalized, Frictionless Experiences

One of the common threads I gleaned from speaking to top CX thought leaders is that while retail CX is complex, your focus should be simple. Design experiences that make your customers feel valued and known.

Align your data to create personalized, omnichannel experiences that make it easy to buy and get support if needed.

“We need to focus on using our data to the customer’s benefit. When you think about the customer, it should be so simple. How can you use data to make the experience better and easier right now?” asks Campbell.

Above all, retail CX impacts the bottom line. As you build a program, don’t forget to measure your success and consider the whole picture of how CX impacts your business.

“I think one of the reasons why customer experience has experienced budget cuts the last few years is the lack of connecting the dots between customer experience and business impact,” explains Hamilton. “If you think about CX of the future, it‘s less about your MPs and your vanity metrics, and it’s more about driving profit and loss. That’s the CX practitioner of the future, those who understand that and can connect the dots.”

As an entrepreneur, I’m always looking for tools and strategies to run my business more efficiently and boost my revenue. Given that I‘m a one-woman team, I’m constantly exploring artificial intelligence (AI) tools that can help me run my business better.

One use case I’ve found particularly interesting is how I can use AI to improve my customer journey— which essentially ensures that I’m delivering value to potential customers at various points of their buying journey. To learn more about the areas of opportunity, I spoke with some experts in this space and also demoed a few innovative tools.

In this article, I‘ll walk you through everything I’ve learned about AI and customer journey mapping. You‘ll see how you can use machine learning to process large amounts of customer data, uncover hidden patterns, and predict future behaviors with uncanny accuracy. Whether you’re a solopreneur like me or leading a fast-growing tech startup, you’ll find learnings and tips you can apply to your business.

Note: You’ll see references to both Claude and ChatGPT throughout the article. I tested both throughout the writing process — and you can apply the prompts to whichever tool you prefer.

Table of Contents

• What is AI-powered customer journey mapping?
• How to Create a Customer Journey Map With AI
• ChatGPT Prompts for Customer Journey Mapping
• Testing It Out: How I Created a Customer Journey Map With AI
• Helpful AI Tools for Customer Journey Mapping

What is AI-powered customer journey mapping?

AI is transforming the way businesses understand and map their customers’ journeys. By leveraging machine learning algorithms and big data analytics, AI can process vast amounts of customer data to identify patterns, anticipate customer behaviors, and uncover insights that might be missed by human analysis alone.

For example, a traditional customer journey map visualizes how customers move from awareness to acquisition and, ideally, to becoming loyal customers. AI enhances this process by:

• Processing large volumes of data from multiple touchpoints.
• Identifying hidden patterns and correlations.
• Predicting future customer behaviors.
• Personalizing the journey in real-time.
• Providing actionable insights for optimization.

How can AI improve the customer journey mapping process?

To understand how valuable AI can be, you should be familiar with the pain points (pun intended!) of the journey mapping process. Two of the biggest ones are:

1. The time it takes to build out, and
2. The vast amount of data needed to process.

Think about all the customer touchpoints you might have as an ecommerce startup, for example.

According to a Nielsen Norman Group survey, completing a traditional customer journey map could take days or even weeks. That’s not including the time it takes to collect and synthesize customer feedback.

The process is time-consuming thanks to four main factors:

1. Quantitative data — website analytics, social media, customer service logs, sales data, etc.
2. Qualitative data — insights from different departments, customer interviews, survey feedback, etc.
3. Data analysis — identifying patterns and insights is often a manual, time-intensive task.
4. Visualization — it takes significant effort and skill to create a visually appealing and easy-to-understand map.

Here are some other use cases for AI in the customer journey mapping process, according to the experts I spoke with:

• Designing marketing/sales/CS processes for engagement along the customer journey.
• Architecting workflows/automation for data management and outreach campaigns.
• Analyzing customer sentiment across multiple touchpoints.
• Personalizing customer experiences in real-time.
• Predicting future customer behavior and needs.
• Defining and outlining the customer journey.

Statistic: 50% of surveyed sales professionals believed that AI would enable scalability in ways that would otherwise be impossible.

What are the limitations of using AI to create a customer journey map?

It‘s easy to get crazed over the potential of AI in business, but it’s worth remembering that it‘s still relatively new. Keeping this in mind, I always recommend trying any new AI tool with a healthy dose of skepticism. (After all, I’m a journalist at heart!)

Erik Karofsky, CEO of VectorHX, has used AI to develop journey maps and feels it’s not quite ready for prime time yet.

A big challenge with creating a journey map using AI is that “it doesn’t serve any user well,” he says. “AI can produce overly complex maps cluttered with unnecessary information or may generate overly simplistic, generic maps that fail to provide valuable insights. These journey maps frequently require extensive revision, and during this process, gaps in the journey become apparent.”

However, where AI can be useful (with some caveats) is in providing insights that contribute to a better journey or influence the journey itself (though a UX professional is still essential to the creation process), he explains.

Here are some real-life examples he shared with me to illustrate:

• Summarizing qualitative insights to highlight key steps and pain points can be helpful, but the data must be rich and well-curated.
• Segmenting audiences based on specific criteria and analyzing their behavior has improved, but it still largely remains within the realm of analytics rather than journey mapping.
• Offering personalization suggestions is valuable, yet it’s merely one component of a broader journey.
• Engagement across touchpoints can influence outcomes within a journey, but it doesn’t define the journey itself.

That being said, let’s explore how you can create a customer journey map with AI — with a focus on using it as a partner in the process instead of an overall replacement.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map With AI

This is where the fun begins (though, be warned: there is a learning curve). My biggest pro tip when incorporating AI into any aspect of your business is to take the time just to experiment without putting pressure on the outcome. New tools are being released every day (or at least it feels that way): try different tools and prompts to see what’s possible.

See the example below of how one tool, Journey AI, helps synthesize customer data to create a personalized journey in a matter of seconds.

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This is a sneak peek of what‘s possible — we’ll dive deeper into the tools shortly. But before we get there, let’s cover the basics. Here are the first steps you should take to create a customer journey map with the help of AI.

Step 1: Define your objectives.

Start by clearly outlining what you want to achieve with your customer journey map. For example, you could focus on any of the following:

• Identifying and addressing customer pain points.
• Enhancing overall customer satisfaction.
• Identifying new upsell opportunities.
• Boosting customer retention.
• Increase conversions.

According to a study by Gartner, companies that prioritize and effectively manage customer journeys are twice as likely to significantly outperform their competitors in revenue growth. This underscores the importance of setting clear objectives for your journey mapping process.

As I walked through these steps for my own business, I really wanted to find opportunities to increase conversions among my potential customers. This helped me keep a narrow focus as I built out a customer journey map.

If you’re at a larger organization, John Suarez, director of client services at SmartBug Media, first recommends interviewing marketing/sales/customer service to understand their customer and ideal journey. From there, you can be laser-focused on gathering the specific data you need.

How to implement AI at this stage: Test out different ChatGPT prompts to uncover your objectives and find ways to narrow down your customer journey map. Here’s an example prompt below I tried with Claude.

Step 2: Gather customer data.

Gather all relevant customer data from various touchpoints. This will depend on your specific business, of course, but it can include:

• Customer service data — help tickets, chat logs, knowledge base usage, etc.
• Purchase history — purchased orders, abandoned carts, returned items, etc.
• Email marketing data — emails opened, links clicked, unsubscribe rates, etc.
• Social media interactions — direct messages, mentions, engagement, etc.
• Direct feedback — surveys, customer satisfaction, product reviews, etc.
• Website analytics — page views, heat maps, session duration, etc.
• Referral data — organic search, paid ads, direct referrals, etc.

Warning: AI tools are only as useful as the data you feed them. Using poor or dated data sources can be very destructive in this process. AI is like baking — a quality cake comes from quality ingredients. The data you’re pulling needs to be as recent and thorough as possible.

For my business, my main touchpoints are my business website and my social media profile. From there, I’m able to pull reports using tools like Google Analytics to learn more about my website visitors. I can learn more about what links they click on, how often they return to my website, and where they drop off in the user journey.

If you’re a startup or small organization, gathering customer data is crucial but can be challenging due to limited resources and a potentially small initial customer base. A lean approach might involve leveraging a combination of free and low-cost tools to collect data across various touchpoints, like your CRM.

How to implement AI at this stage: Once you‘ve gathered all of the data you’ll need, you can dump it into Claude or ChatGPT and try something like the prompt below. By asking specific questions in your prompt, you can tailor the responses and data analysis to your needs.

Use AI-powered tools to integrate this data into a cohesive dataset.

In the era of big data, consolidating information from various sources into a unified, actionable dataset is a major challenge for businesses of all sizes. But this is an important step creating accurate and comprehensive customer journey maps — so you’ll want to get it right.

A survey by Forrester found that 80% of companies struggle with data silos, which can lead to incomplete or inaccurate customer journey maps. Thankfully, AI-powered data integration tools can help overcome this challenge by automatically consolidating data from multiple sources.

Step 3: Analyze the data with machine learning.

Apply machine learning algorithms to your integrated dataset. These algorithms can identify patterns, segment customers, and highlight key touchpoints in the customer journey.

Here is an example prompt you can try. Just make sure to tweak your own data points.

There are also more advanced tools you can use — especially if you’re a developed business with a massive quantity of data to analyze.

Step 4: Use NLP to analyze customer feedback.

Next in your process, you can use natural language processing (NLP) to analyze customer feedback and communications. This helps in understanding customer emotions and sentiments at different stages of their journey.

For example, you can use AI to analyze the sentiment of customer feedback, categorize feedback into themes, discern customer intentions, and predict future customer behaviors. All of these tasks can give you invaluable learnings about the customer journey.

Step 5: Visualize the data with AI tools.

Use AI visualization tools to create a dynamic, data-driven representation of the customer journey. This visual map should highlight key touchpoints, pain points, and opportunities.

Suarez recommends using a tool like Whimsical Diagrams’ Custom GPT for Flow Mapping at this stage. I was fascinated with how quickly this tool created a simple customer journey map flow chart.

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Step 6: Validate with human insight.

As with any AI tool, you’ll want to approach it with a hefty amount of skepticism and validate your findings with human expertise. Even in this process, I sometimes had ChatGPT recommend studies that simply didn’t exist.

While that‘s especially not ideal for writing an article — it can be harmful if you’re relying on this to build your business and boost your bottom line. By combining the AI-driven insight with feedback from your customer-facing teams and actual customers, you’ll get the highest quality output possible.

Pro tip: If you want help getting started with your own customer journey map, check out our templates here.

Don’t forget that the customer journey continues post-purchase. Check out our Post-Sale Playbook for more insights and strategies.

ChatGPT Prompts for Customer Journey Mapping

To see how I could use AI to learn about customer journey mapping, I first turned to ChatGPT to brainstorm some helpful prompts. I think of this step of the process as tapping into a research assistant where I’m simply experimenting with ways to improve the customer journey process.

You can see an example prompt and ChatGPT response here:

Here are some top prompts I’ve discovered that will save you a ton of time:

1. Identify the key stages in a typical customer journey for [your industry].
2. What are common pain points customers face when interacting with [your product/service]?
3. What objections do my customers have before buying?
4. List potential touchpoints between a customer and [your brand] throughout their journey.
5. How can we measure customer satisfaction at each stage of the journey?
6. What metrics should we track to evaluate the effectiveness of our customer journey?
7. Suggest ways to personalize the customer experience at different touchpoints.
8. How can we use customer feedback to improve our journey map?
9. What are potential obstacles that might cause a customer to abandon their journey?
10. Identify opportunities for upselling or cross-selling in the customer journey.
11. How can we streamline the onboarding process for new customers?
12. Suggest ways to personalize my post-purchase onboarding and support.
13. What post-purchase customer interactions can we implement to increase customer loyalty?
14. How might customer needs and customer expectations change throughout their journey?
15. What are effective ways to gather customer feedback at different stages?
16. How can we use AI to predict potential customer churn points?
17. What are the key differences in the journey between new and returning customers?
18. How can we create a more emotionally engaging experience throughout the journey?
19. How can we drive customer loyalty? List points for improvement in our process.
20. What are potential triggers that move a customer from one stage to the next?
21. How can we better align our marketing efforts with the customer journey?
22. What role does customer support play in the overall journey, and how can it be improved?
23. How can we use AI to create more accurate customer personas for our journey map?
24. What external factors, such as economic fluctuation and seasonality, will influence my customers’ buying decisions?
25. What are the most common drop-off points in our [email nurture sequence, website, etc.], and how can we address them?
26. Where is automation least effective in my customer journey — where do our customers need the most one-on-one contact?
27. What data should we start collecting now to get actionable and accurate predictive analytics on our customers later?
28. What trends are going to influence our customers’ needs and buying decisions?
29. Which of our customer segments are underserved, and what are suggestions for filling the holes?
30. What data should we be collecting now to accurately analyze our customer journey 6 months from now?

Pro tip: When using AI, remember your outputs will only be as good as your inputs. The more details you can give about your business, your objectives, your data points, etc., the more tailored your responses will be.

You can save time in this process by creating a custom GPT with a ChatGPT plus membership. This personalized chat will be trained on your business data and act as a tailored AI knowledge base for your business.

Testing It Out: How I Created a Customer Journey Map With AI

To learn how to build a customer journey map with AI, I wanted to try it out myself.

Here’s a simple prompt that I tested out. Keep in mind that I added some background information about what services I offer, who my customers are, etc., so that I would get a more tailored response.

The response? I was able to turn the initial results into a simple chart with the help of Claude. You‘ll see that it covers touchpoints, client actions, opportunities, and metrics at each stage of my buyer’s journey. Not a bad start if you ask me!

To take it one step further, I took this data and added it to a Whimsical Diagrams GPT to create a visual chart. There were still some kinks to work out with the prompting, but I eventually got to a basic version that I’m pleased with.

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Going through this process, I discovered that I had two problems (read: areas of improvement) on my hands. The first is that I lacked a lot of customer data that I needed to input into the AI — so this was a good nudge for me to find better ways to monitor my customers’ journey. The metrics column here offers a great starting point for KPIs I can track — and ideally improve.

I also found that there was a pretty big gap for buyers at the consideration stage. I don’t always make it clear why they should hire me instead of my competitors. Luckily, this chart is actionable for me. I’m able to focus on creating more diverse writing samples and client success stories — and will be tracking this through my site metrics.

Pro tip: Once AI has helped you identify the holes in your customer journey, use it to help you make a plan to fix it. Try customizing this prompt:

I’m making a customer journey map for my [freelance writing] business, and I have gaps in the [consideration stage]. What are ways for me to fill this stage of my customer journey map?

ChatGPT had great suggestions for me, like strengthening my portfolio, gathering more social proof, and developing low-commitment offers for new clients.

Helpful AI Tools for Customer Journey Mapping

Of course, there are so many incredible AI tools on the market that go beyond ChatGPT. If you’re serious about incorporating more AI into your process, I highly recommend checking these out. Again, I tested each of these out for my own business to see first-hand what the experience is like as a user.

1. Taskade

You might already be familiar with the AI tool Taskade. It offers a ton of helpful work management features, like managing tasks and team collaboration. But I found their User Journey Map Generator (powered by AI) to be a really helpful tool in both brainstorming and visualizing the customer journey map.

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Key features:

• Integration with other project management tools.
• Real-time collaboration capabilities.
• AI-driven journey map creation.
• Customizable templates.

Pro tip: Taskade’s AI can help generate journey maps based on your input, making it an excellent starting point for beginners new to journey mapping (aka me!). What I really liked is that you can use their AI agent at various points of the process, which will help you research specific bullet points, develop an outline, and even spell-check.

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2. Twilio Segment

Twilio Segment is a powerful customer data platform that can help make your journey mapping a breeze. While not exclusively a journey mapping tool, it has strong capabilities for data collection and analysis that can help you create a more detailed customer journey.

For example, you can visualize the journey a specific customer might take who hasn’t purchased from you in three months but has visited your site in the past month. Without using AI, think how much time you could spend trying to track, identify, and tell a story from these data points.

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Key features:

• Integration with over 300 tools and platforms.
• AI-powered customer segmentation.
• Unified customer data collection.
• Real-time data analysis.

Pro tip: This also helps CX teams increase their personalization — which is a top priority according to our State of Customer Service report.

3. Journey AI

Although last on this list of tools, Journey AI is one of the most fascinating tools I discovered during my research process. Created by TheyDo, Journey AI instantly converts customer research into journey maps packed with actionable insights — and saves you hours worth of manual work.

For example, you can input your text-based research (think everything from sticky notes to surveys) to create a customer journey map tailored to customer feedback.

Source

Key features:

• Standardize and scale customer journey mapping and management.
• Creates customer journey maps in a matter of minutes.
• Intuitive, easy-to-use editor.

Personalize Your Customer Journey With AI

As I was researching and reviewing these AI tools, what I found most fascinating is all the ways you could personalize and improve customer journey maps with the click of a few buttons (plus some trial and error). Through this process, I was able to tweak my prompts and inputs throughout to tailor it for my specific business and needs. If you can apply the same lessons, the outcome is powerful.

AI can help transform a task that is arduous, time-consuming, and complex into one that is streamlined, driven by data, and easy to understand. This empowers me on my business journey to focus more on what I do best — while also ensuring that I keep a steady stream of happy customers. (A win-win!)

Of course, this is a great place to remind you that AI is not a magic solution. It‘s a powerful tool that works best when combined with human insight and expertise. As I continue to test new tools, I’m excited to see how AI will further help me improve my customer journey and build my business.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in October 2024 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Customer Journey Maps: How to Create Really Good Ones [Examples + Template]

Did you know 70% of online shoppers abandoned their carts in 2024? We’ve all done it — I can’t tell you how often I add items to the cart, get distracted, and forget to check out.

But why does it happen? The answer lies in understanding customer behavior. That’s where customer journey mapping comes in.

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While I can’t promise you’ll predict every step perfectly, customer journey mapping is a great way to track the critical milestones every customer reaches. In this post, I’ll walk you through everything you need to know about customer journey mapping — what it is, how to create one, and best practices to help you get it right.

What You’ll Learn in this Post

• What is the Customer Journey?
• What is a customer journey map?
• The Customer Journey Mapping Process
• Steps for Creating a Customer Journey Map
• What’s Included in a Customer Journey Map?
• Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices
• What is a customer journey map?
• What data is necessary for customer journey mapping?
• Types of Customer Journey Maps and Examples
• Customer Journey Mapping Examples and Templates
• Free Customer Journey Map Templates
• Customer Journey Map Design
• Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

I’ve noticed a lot of businesses get confused when it comes to understanding the difference between the customer journey and the buyer journey.

Here’s the deal:

• The buyer’s journey covers the entire process from the moment someone becomes aware of your product to the point they purchase it (and even beyond). Buyers don’t just wake up and decide to buy — they go through stages of awareness, consideration, and, finally, decision-making.
• The customer’s journey, on the other hand, is all about how your brand fits into that process. It’s the specific customer touchpoints where you interact with your customers during their buying journey. By mapping out your customer journey, you’re making sure every interaction is intentional and impactful, rather than just hoping for the best.

At HubSpot, for example, we break our customer journey into three main stages: pre-purchase, onboarding, and ongoing use/renewal.

At each stage, we have key touchpoints — like educational blog posts or onboarding tools — that guide our customers along the way.

Your brand’s customer journey stages might look different, and that’s okay. What matters is starting with a clear plan. Let’s discuss how you can create a customer journey map.

What is a customer journey map?

By mapping your customer journey, you can use the information to improve the customer experience, increase conversions, and boost customer retention.

Keep in mind: The customer journey map is not to be confused with a UX journey map — here’s the difference:

What is UX journey mapping?

A UX journey map represents how a customer experiences their journey toward a specific goal or completing a particular action.

For example, I can use the term “UX journey mapping” interchangeably with the term “customer journey mapping” if the goal being tracked is the user’s journey toward purchasing a product or service.

However, UX journey mapping can also be used to map the journey (i.e., actions taken) towards other goals, such as using a specific product feature.

Why is customer journey mapping important?

I’ve learned that the customer journey isn’t as simple as it looks. It’s easy to think: offer a product → customer buys. But honestly, it’s way more intricate.

Before a customer even knows about your product, they need to know they have a problem and know that it needs solving. Sometimes you need additional education to get them to that point.

Throughout their journey, they’ll hit different touchpoints. Maybe they’ll see a competitor’s ad, read a review, hop on a sales call, or try out a demo. Each of those interactions shapes how they feel about your brand.

Here’s something I find interesting: 80% of customers value their experience with a company just as much as the product itself.

By mapping out the customer journey, I’ve seen how it gives marketing, sales, and service teams a clear understanding of each stage. It reduces friction and leads to happier customers. And when we meet customer needs quickly? We see higher brand loyalty.

That’s huge — so don’t miss out on the power of customers.

What data is necessary for customer journey mapping?

When I’m mapping the customer journey, I focus on real data, not assumptions. It takes the form of both solicited data — when I ask customers for their input — and unsolicited data that gives insights into their actual behaviors.

As email strategist and customer journey strategist Lindsay Hope explains, “You don’t want just any data. You need to dig deep to get to the actionable insights that show you exactly how your audience thinks, feels, and behaves at each stage of their journey. Unfortunately, most businesses get stuck because they think they know what their customers want. But assumptions ≠ reality. You have to collect the right data, so you’re working with facts, not guesses.”

Customer Surveys and Interviews

I find that asking customers directly through surveys or interviews reveals valuable insights into their experiences, pain points, and how they use the product. This is solicited data because I ask for it specifically.

Tools like Net Promoter Scores (NPS) surveys, customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores, and social media polls give me important insights into how customers actually feel about their experiences with us.

Specific actions you can take might include:

• Using post-purchase surveys to understand what they loved or struggled with during their buying journey.
• Talking with customers 1:1 to understand deeper motivations behind their decisions.
• Talking with people who didn’t buy to understand why.

While I love this type of customer information, it does have limitations. It relies on customers sharing their real opinions — in interviews, it might skew to the positive even if there were things that could have gone better. And, it typically only reflects a specific touchpoint and may not reflect their entire experience.

Expert tip: Hope shares, ”When collecting solicited data, ask questions to highlight feelings and friction. (Not just what your customer did but why they made that choice.) For example: Instead of ‘What features did you like?’ ask ‘What made you confident this was the right solution?’”

Unsolicited Data

As I mentioned, unsolicited data is more quantitative, based on specific numbers.

By this, I’m referring to data from customers they don’t actively provide upon request. The data I find beneficial includes:

• Website behavior — the pages they view, the order of pages they click, bounce rates, and abandoned cart information
• Email behavior — open rates, click rates, calls from the email, and other types of engagement.
• Social media mentions and reviews — public comments can help us identify things that could be improved as well as areas that delighted them.
• Operational data — this is internal data like delivery delays or support ticket response times that help us improve the way we serve our customers.

If we find that customers are abandoning their carts at the payment stage, we may identify long load times or our payment options as the causes of friction.

The Importance of Both Data Types

While unsolicited data often lacks the context that solicited feedback provides, we typically get more of it because we’re not relying on customer motivation to respond.

When you use the two types of data together, you’ll gain a more comprehensive view of your customer journey as well as any gaps.

My favorite part of combining solicited interviews with unsolicited reviews is the absolute goldmine of voice of customer data — or the language they use that will resonate with them.

Ivan Venberg, Head of Content at Yango Ads, agrees, and offered this recommendation “Pay attention to the language people use. I recommend Sarah Winters’ book Content Design, where she discusses how she struggled to attract users to the UK government site due to her use of the term ‘fracturing.’ By simply talking to users, she discovered that “fracking” was the term they used, which dramatically improved conversions.”

For example, you might get positive feedback from potential customers, but they don’t go through with purchasing and you may learn this happens after they get shipping costs (and deem them too high).

Or, your support transcripts may indicate that people are waiting for a long time and are quite frustrated with the process even though they rate your support team highly for their ability to help.

The bottom line? Both types of data are invaluable in your customer journey map.

Expert tip: Hope shares some valuable advice here. “Treat this as an ongoing process. Your audience’s needs evolve — and so should your map,” she said.

This process provides insights that help you understand how customers experience their journeys and identify potential bottlenecks.

Note that most customer journeys aren’t linear. Instead, buyers often experience a back-and-forth, cyclical, multi-channel journey with multiple touchpoints.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

I want to make sure we’re on the same page about what a touchpoint really means in the context of a customer journey map. Touchpoints refer to every instance your business comes in direct contact with a potential or existing customer. It could be online, in-person, through your messaging, website, or app and any number of other circumstances. What you need to know is every time your customer interacts with you, they form an opinion of your business.

1. Use customer journey map templates.

Why make a customer journey map from scratch when you can use a template? I saved so much time by downloading HubSpot’s free customer journey map templates. They cover everything from a buyer’s journey to a day in your customer’s life and lead nurturing.

These templates helped my team in sales, marketing, and customer support understand our buyer personas better. And honestly, that led to a noticeable improvement in our product and customer experience.

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

Before you dive into your customer journey map, ask yourself why you’re creating one in the first place.

• What goals are you directing this map towards?
• Who is it for?
• What experience is it based upon?

If you don’t have a buyer persona yet, trust me, it’s worth creating one. It’s a fictional profile that reflects all the demographics and psychographics of your typical customer. For me, it really helped keep the journey map focused on the right audience.

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

At this point, I’d focus on deep research. This is where having customer journey analytics ready is super helpful. If you’re like me and don’t have that set up yet, don’t worry — HubSpot’s Customer Journey Analytics tool is a great starting point.

Personally, I find questionnaires and user testing to be invaluable for gathering customer feedback. But I always make sure I’m reaching out to actual customers or prospects — people who have interacted with the business or plan to. Getting feedback from the right people is key.

Here are some questions I’d ask:

• How did you hear about our company?
• What first attracted you to our website?
• What are the goals you want to achieve with our company? In other words, what problems are you trying to solve?
• How long have you/do you typically spend on our website?
• Have you ever made a purchase with us? If so, what was your deciding factor?
• Have you ever interacted with our website to make a purchase but decided not to? If so, what led you to this decision?
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how easily can you navigate our website?
• Did you ever require customer support? If so, how helpful was it, on a scale of 1 to 10?
• Can we further support you to make your process easier?

💡Top tip: Use this buyer persona tool to fill in the details you procure from customer feedback.

The B2B Angle

As CEO and Founder of Keystone Click, Lori Highby works primarily with B2B companies and has developed a framework to ask the same five questions at every stage of the buyer journey:

• What is the prospect thinking and feeling?
• What actions are the prospects taking?
• What are their touchpoints with the business?
• Where is there hesitation or friction?
• What are opportunities to add value?

Highby and her team focus on moving prospects through five stages of the buyer journey: awareness, consideration, action, experience, and advocacy.

She says that asking the same questions is important “because it opens up the opportunity to get a holistic view of the customer experience while identifying trends and opportunities to maximize the overall experience you are providing.”

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

After getting all that information, I’d narrow my focus to one or two key customer personas.

It’s important to remember that a customer journey map follows the path of a specific customer. If you lump too many personas together, the map won’t capture their unique experiences.

When creating your first map, it’s best to pick your most common customer persona. Also, consider the route they would typically take when engaging with your business for the first time.

I’d also use a marketing dashboard to compare different personas and pick the one that fits best. And no pressure — any personas you leave out can always be mapped later.

5. List out all touchpoints.

I always start by listing the touchpoints where customers interact with the brand.

These moments, no matter how small, are when customers form an opinion, whether it’s great or not-so-great. Think of it this way: If I saw a display ad for your business or ran into a 404 error page, those would be touchpoints that matter.

It’s easy to forget that your brand isn’t just the website. It extends beyond that — into social media, email campaigns, paid ads, and even customer service interactions. What I’ve found is that mapping out these touchpoints helps spot areas for improvement in the customer journey.

Once you’ve got your list, you’ll start to see patterns. Are customers using fewer touchpoints than expected? That might mean they’re leaving your site too early. Are they interacting more than expected? Maybe your website requires too many steps to get anything done.

Either way, it’s a signal that tells you how smooth or bumpy the journey is.

When I do this, I don’t just stop at the website. I take a broad view — Google searches, third-party reviews, and mentions on social media. A quick Google search of your brand can show you all the places customers might be finding you.

Then, I back it up with data from Google Analytics to see where the traffic is actually coming from. From there, I narrow down the most important touchpoints, the ones that are really driving action.

At HubSpot, we took this process seriously. We ran workshops where employees from different teams pointed out moments when our product or brand left an impression on customers.

The proof is in the pudding: You can see us literally mapping these touch points out with sticky notes in the image below. Seeing it all laid out helped us notice inconsistencies in how we communicated with customers.

When creating a customer journey map, here are some key touchpoints I always consider:

Customer Actions

I track every single action customers take with the brand, whether it’s typing in a search keyword, clicking an email, or scrolling through a product page. You’ll probably end up with a long list, and that’s fine.

I’ve learned that recognizing where customers have to take too many steps is crucial. Reducing the number of steps a customer takes in their journey might feel risky, but in my experience, it almost always leads to higher conversions.

Customer Emotions & Motivations

All marketing is a result of cause and effect. Likewise, every action your customers take is motivated by emotion. And your customers’ emotions will change depending on which part of their journey they’re at.

From what I’ve seen, a pain point or a problem is usually the emotional driver of your customers’ actions. Knowing this will help you provide the right content at the right time to smooth each customer’s emotional journey through your brand.

Customer Obstacles & Pain Points

I always dig into what’s blocking customers from moving forward.

Take shipping costs, for example. If I love your product but find out at the last minute that the shipping fee is too high, I’ll probably abandon my cart.

Sometimes, the obstacles are harder to spot. Dedicated sales software is a good idea here. It lets you examine your sales pipelines and pinpoint what might cause prospects to turn away. Identifying these roadblocks lets you address them head-on. One simple fix I’ve used is adding an FAQ page to tackle common concerns, like unexpected shipping fees.

6. Determine the resources you have and the ones you’ll need.

As I work through the customer journey map, I get a clear picture of what we have and what we’re missing. For example, I might notice that our team doesn’t have the tools to follow up effectively with customers. That’s when I’d suggest we invest in some solid customer service tools to handle the demand.

Or maybe I spot some customer touchpoints we’ve been underusing, like I mentioned earlier. In that case, I’d recommend looking into a unified marketing software solution that helps us track and make the most of those touchpoints.

Including these tools in the map helps me predict their potential impact, making it easier to convince leadership to support the idea.

7. Take the customer journey yourself.

For me, mapping the customer journey isn’t finished until I’ve walked in the customer’s shoes. By experiencing the journey firsthand, I’ve found that you can uncover subtle pain points or areas of friction that might not be evident in the data.

I like to follow the path for each person — scrolling through their social media, reading their emails, doing a search — to really understand where they might get stuck or drop off.

For example, I might:

• Search for my product or service using.
• Search for a competitor’s product or service.
• Sign up for my own email list.
• Navigate my website or app with fresh eyes.
• Reach out to support.

Each of these items can provide insights that offer additional context to your data. For example, while analytics might show a high bounce rate on a page, manually going through the customer journey might help you realize the page loads slowly or has unclear navigation.

8. Analyze your results.

It’s important to understand the customer journey map is just the start. The real value comes from analyzing the results for actionable insights.

I’ll ask questions like:

• Are people visiting our site but not converting?
• Are we meeting their needs at each step?
• What are the top-performing touchpoints (and the lowest)?
• What friction are people experiencing?

This process helps me see where we can improve. Analyzing the results will help me pinpoint where customer needs aren’t fully met and make sure we’re delivering a valuable experience.

Keep in mind that you can use the process to test certain assumptions and validate gut feelings. However, it’s important to keep an open mind because it’s almost guaranteed you’ll find something unexpected.

9. Update your map over time.

As I dig into my data, I always get a clearer idea of where I want my website to go. From there, I make adjustments, whether it’s adding more specific calls to action or beefing up product descriptions to ensure they’re crystal clear.

Big or small, these changes matter because they directly address my customers’ pain points. With my customer journey map as a guide, I can always make sure I’m tackling those needs.

How often should you update your customer journey map?

My map — as should yours — is a constant work in progress.

I make a point to review it monthly or quarterly to spot gaps or new opportunities to make the journey smoother. By leveraging data analytics and customer feedback, I can catch any roadblocks early. I also use tools like Google Sheets to keep everyone on the same page, which is super helpful for collaborating with stakeholders.

I’ve found that holding regular meetings to discuss how new products or features are shifting the customer journey is key to staying on top of things.

Featured Resource: Customer Journey Map Template

HubSpot’s free customer journey map template was a game-changer for me. It saved me time and made it so much easier to organize and outline the experience, showing exactly how my website impacts users.

Plus, it’s a fantastic tool for identifying areas in your product, marketing, or support that need some fine-tuning.

Download a free, editable customer journey map template.

1. The Buying Process

When mapping out a customer’s buying process, I gather data from various sources — prospecting tools, CMS, behavior analytics, etc. — to really understand how they move from their first contact to the final purchase.

You don’t have to get bogged down in the details, though. You can categorize it into broad stages: awareness, consideration, and decision.

Some data points I always check include:

• Website visits.
• Social media engagement.
• Customer service interactions.
• Purchase history.
• Survey feedback.

These insights paint a clearer picture of how customers engage with your brand.

2. Emotions

No matter the goal, your customers are on a journey to solve a problem, and with that comes emotion. Maybe they feel excitement, relief, or even a bit of worry. Capturing those emotions in your journey map helps identify where things go wrong and how to fix them.

We use emojis on HubSpot’s journey map to represent potential emotions at different customer journey stages.

It might seem strange to ascertain customer emotions with data analysis, but it’s common. Customer sentiment can be measured using data from:

• NPS surveys.
• Online reviews.
• Social media monitoring.
• Customer interviews and focus groups.
• Customer support data.

3. User Actions

Understanding what customers do at each stage is key. Maybe they download an ebook or sign up for a webinar during the awareness phase.

I consider the following data points for customer journey mapping:

• Page views.
• CTA clicks.
• Email opens.
• Email list signups.
• Ebook downloads.

The idea is to explore how your customers move through and behave at each stage of their journey.

4. User Research

Like the last section, this element describes what or where the buyer researches before taking action.

In the awareness stage, they’re likely Googling potential solutions. Pay attention to this — it’s your chance to step in and answer their questions before anyone else does. So you’ll want to analyze things like:

• Search engine queries.
• Chatbot queries on your site.
• Competitor analysis.
• Social media interactions.
• Review sites.

The idea here is to make sure you’re reaching your target audience when they’re actively considering you.

5. Solutions

Finally, my team and I brainstorm solutions to make the journey smoother.

The goal here is simple: fewer pain points, more satisfied customers. What can you tweak in the buying process to make it easier for them to achieve their goal? That’s the real question.

Specific tools you might use include:

• Customer feedback software.
• Behavior analytics tools.
• AI-powered chatbots and support “teams.”

Types of Customer Journey Maps and Examples

There are four types of customer journey maps, each with unique benefits.

To move your business from point A (deciding to focus on customer journeys) to point B (having a journey map), a key step is choosing which customer mindset to focus on.

This choice will guide you in selecting the right template. Pick the one that makes the most sense for your company.

1. Current State Customer Journey Map

These customer journey maps are the most widely used type. They visualize the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers currently experience while interacting with your company. They’re best used for continually improving the customer journey.

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2. Day in the Life Customer Journey Map

These customer journey maps visualize the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers currently experience in their daily activities, whether or not that includes your company.

This type gives a broader lens into your customers’ lives and what their pain points are in real life.

Day-in-the-life maps are best used for addressing unmet customer needs before customers even know they exist. Your company may use this type of customer journey map when exploring new market development strategies.

Source

3. Future State Customer Journey Map

These customer journey maps visualize what actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers will experience in future interactions with your company. Based on their current interactions, you’ll have a clear picture of where your business fits in later down the road.

These maps are best for illustrating your vision and setting clear, strategic goals.

Source

4. Service Blueprint Customer Journey Map

These customer journey maps begin with a simplified version of one of the above map styles. Then, they layer on the factors responsible for delivering that experience, including people, policies, technologies, and processes.

Service blueprints are best used to identify the root causes of current customer journeys or the steps needed to attain desired future customer journeys.

Source

If you want a look at an actual customer journey map that HubSpot has recently used, check out this interview we conducted with Sarah Flint, Director of System Operations at HubSpot. We asked her how her team put together their map (below) and what advice she would give to businesses starting from scratch.

Click to enlarge image

Customer Journey Mapping Examples and Templates

Here are some examples I’ve drawn inspiration from when building a customer journey map:

1. HubSpot’s Customer Journey Map Templates

HubSpot’s free Customer Journey Map Templates provide an outline for companies to understand their customers’ experiences.

The offer includes the following:

• Buyer’s Journey Template
• Current State Template
• Lead Nurturing Mapping Template
• Future State Template
• A Day in the Customer’s Life Template
• Customer Churn Mapping Template
• Customer Support Blueprint Template

Each of these templates helps organizations gain new insights into their customer base and help make improvements to product, marketing, and customer support processes.

Download them today to start working on your customer journey map.

2. B2B Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map clearly outlines the five steps Dapper Apps believes customers go through when interacting with them.

As you can see, it goes beyond the actual purchasing phase by incorporating initial research and post-purchase needs.

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This map is effective because it helps employees get into the customers’ minds by understanding the typical questions they have and the emotions they’re feeling.

There are incremental action steps that Dapper Apps can take in response to these questions and feelings that will help it solve customers’ current problems.

3. Ecommerce Customer Journey Map Example

This fictitious customer journey map is a clear example of a day-in-the-life map.

Rather than just focusing on the actions and emotions involved in the customer’s interaction with the company, this map outlines all the actions and emotions the customer experiences on a typical day.

Source

This map is helpful because it measures a customer’s state of mind based on the level of freedom they get from certain stimuli.

This is helpful for a company that wants to understand what its target customers are stressed about and what problems may need solving.

4. Future B2C Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map, designed for Carnegie Mellon University, exemplifies the usefulness of a future state customer journey map. It outlines the thoughts, feelings, and actions the university wants its students to have.

Source

Based on these goals, CMU chose specific proposed changes for each phase and even wrote out example scenarios for each phase.

This clear diagram can visualize the company vision and help any department understand where they will fit into building a better user experience.

5. Retail Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map shows an in-depth customer journey map of a customer interacting with a fictitious restaurant.

This map style is clearly more comprehensive than the others. It includes the customer’s front-of-stage (direct) and back-of-stage (non-direct or invisible) interactions with the company, as well as the support processes.

Source

This map lays out every action involved in the customer experience, including those of the customer, employees directly serving diners, and employees working behind the scenes.

By analyzing how each of these factors influences the customer journey, a company can find the root cause of mishaps and problem-solve this for the future.

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

1. Free Current State Template

If you’re using this template for a B2B product, the phases may reflect the search, awareness, consideration of options, purchasing decision, and post-purchase support processes.

For instance, our Dapper Apps example’s phases were research, comparison, workshop, quote, and sign-off.

2. Day in the Life Template

Since this template reflects all the thoughts, feelings, actions, needs, and pain points a customer has in their entire daily routine — whether or not that includes your company — you’ll want to map out this template in a chronological structure.

This way, you can highlight the times of day you can offer the best support.

Get an interactive day in the life template.

3. Future State Template

Like the current state template, these phases may reflect the predicted or desired search, awareness, consideration of options, purchasing decisions, and post-purchase support processes.

Since this will take place in the future, you can tailor these phases based on what you’d like the customer journey to look like rather than what it currently does.

Get an interactive future state template.

4. Service Blueprint Template

Since this template is more in-depth, it doesn’t follow certain phases in the customer journey.

Instead, it’s based on physical evidence — the tangible factors that can create impressions about the quality and prices of the service — that often come in sets of multiple people, places, or objects at a time.

For instance, with my fictitious restaurant example above, the physical evidence includes all the staff, tables, decorations, cutlery, menus, food, and anything else a customer comes into contact with.

You would then list the appropriate customer actions and employee interactions to correspond with each physical evidence.

For example, when the physical evidence is plates, cutlery, napkins, and pans, the customer gives their order, the front-of-stage employee (waiter) takes the order, the back-of-stage employee (receptionist) processes the order, and the support processes (chefs) prepare the food.

Get an interactive service blueprint template.

5. Buyer’s Journey Customer Journey Map Template

You can also use the classic buyer’s journey — awareness, consideration, and decision — to design your customer journey map.

Get an interactive buyer’s journey template.

1. Set a goal for the journey map.

Determine whether you aim to improve the buying experience or launch a new product. Knowing what the journey map needs to tell you can prevent scope creep on a large project like this.

2. Survey customers to understand their buying journey.

I’ve learned that what I think I know about my customers and what they’re actually going through can be totally different. So, speak to your customers directly to get an accurate snapshot of their journey.

3. Ask customer service reps about the questions they receive most frequently.

Sometimes, customers need to be made aware of their specific pain points, and that’s where your customer service reps come in.

They can help fill in the gaps and translate customer pain points into business terms you and your team can understand and act on.

4. Consider customer journey mapping for each buyer persona.

One thing I’ve come to understand is that no two customers are the same.

Demographics, psychographics, and even how long someone has been a customer can determine how a person interacts with your business and makes purchasing decisions.

That’s why I create journey maps tailored to each key persona.

5. Review and update each journey map after every major product release.

The customer’s buying process changes every time your product or service changes. Even slight tweaks, like adding an extra field to a form, can become a significant roadblock.

So, review the customer journey map before and after implementing changes.

6. Make the customer journey map accessible to cross-functional teams.

One thing I always do is make the journey map accessible to everyone, not just my team. Having it out there helps other teams give feedback and keeps everyone aligned with the customer’s experience.

If you want to get a head start on your map and analysis, try HubSpot’s tools and create a journey report.

Customer Journey Map Design

Now that you know what goes into making a customer journey map, let’s take a little time to dive into design. How you lay out your journey map — from spacing to the colors you use — makes all of the difference.

I highly recommend the following best practices:

Create a clear layout and hierarchy.

Your layout should flow logically, with a clear visual hierarchy that makes it easy to follow. Use bold headings to break up the sections and keep things readable.

Bullet points? Always a good idea. They make your map easier to digest and keep the info clear and to the point.

Make the most of icons and symbols.

Let’s be real — everyone skims. If your map is a wall of text, most of it will be missed. Icons and symbols are a great way to break things up and highlight key actions, touchpoints, and outcomes. Plus, they can add emotion to your map without needing extra words.

Leverage color coding.

Color is a powerful design element that can help you group similar ideas. You can assign different hues to the stages of your customer journey or to certain touchpoints. This helps you organize information visually and draw attention to the most important parts of your map.

Avoid clutter to create balance.

Too much of anything is just … too much. Like I said, everyone skims. If your page is packed with icons, text, and colors, it’ll get overwhelming. Use whitespace to keep things balanced and organized.

Maintain consistency.

Your customer journey map should be consistent throughout. Pick a font family, color palette, and font sizes. Then, make sure you follow these guidelines throughout your journey map. Bonus points if your elements align with your company branding.

Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping is something that every growing business should be doing, whether you’re a team of one or have hundreds of employees.

As Alexis Trammel, Chief Growth Officer at Stratabeat, says, “Marketers who are trying to perfectly document their customers’ journeys may be setting themselves up for failure. Especially in B2B when cycles are longer, the stakes are higher, and research is KEY.”

In addition to better targeting and serving your audience, you get the following benefits from using customer journey mapping:

1. You can refocus your company with an inbound perspective.

Instead of chasing customers with outbound tactics, let them come to you with inbound marketing. Outbound marketing feels like yelling into the void — costly, interruptive, and let’s face it, annoying. No one likes being interrupted.

Inbound marketing flips the script. You create content that customers are already searching for, grabbing their attention before you even think about selling. A customer journey map helps you see what’s catching their eye and what’s making them turn away. This is where all that data I mentioned earlier really shines.

Trammel shares, “For Stratabeat’s clients, we perform a gap analysis with this content marketing funnel in mind. If we notice something is missing, we add it to our content calendar. And we prioritize content that leans lower down the funnel, knowing AI may be answering many of those TOFU questions for the Unaware or Problem-Aware audiences.”

To nail your customer journey map, use real evidence from customer surveys and marketing analytics software. This will give you a crystal-clear picture of how your audience behaves and what they’re interested in.

2. You can create a new target customer base.

Understanding the customer journey means knowing your customers inside out. Broad targeting wastes time and money, so why bother?

Instead, I recommend deep diving into their needs and pain points. This way, you’ll uncover exactly who’s trying to solve problems with your product or service. With this info, you can fine-tune your marketing to speak directly to that group, making your efforts way more effective.

3. You can implement proactive customer service.

A customer journey map is like a cheat sheet for understanding when customers are happy and when they’re frustrated. You can then jump in with proactive customer service right when they need it. I think of it as being one step ahead.

For example, my friend who works in customer support mentioned how they used to anticipate a holiday rush and send out messages about their adjusted hours and alternative support options.

Customers were prepared, and no one was stuck on hold in surprise. Offering them a chatbot, knowledge base, or live chat gives them more control over how they get help, which leads to happier customers overall.

And to handle all those inquiries? Customer service software with omnichannel messaging and AI support is your friend here. Trust me — it saves so much time.

4. You can improve your customer retention rate.

With a complete view of the customer journey, spotting areas for improvement becomes a whole lot easier. Fewer pain points mean fewer customers jumping ship to a competitor.

Here’s the kicker: Even when people love a company or product, 59% will walk away after several bad experiences, 17% after just one bad experience.

Customer journey maps help you catch people on the verge of leaving. By tracking common behaviors, you can address issues before they become deal-breakers. Even if you don’t save everyone, boosting retention by just 5% can increase profits by 25%-95%. Definitely worth it.

5. You can create a customer-focused mentality throughout the company.

As your business scales, keeping every department as customer-focused as your support teams can get tricky.

Different departments have different goals; some teams care more about leads, others about signups. A shared customer journey map breaks through these silos by laying out every step of the journey, from the first interaction to post-purchase support. It helps everyone, from marketing to sales to service, align with the customer at the heart of their efforts.

6. You can rely on data instead of speculation.

In marketing and business, I find that lots of decisions — far too many, really — are made based on intuition. While, in my experience, there’s a lot to those gut feelings, which are based on years of experience.

However, if you’re wrong, there’s a lot at stake. In today’s world with all the data we have at our fingertips, there’s simply no longer a reason not to involve data in the decision making process and either validate those gut feelings or prove them wrong.

Email engagement and CRO specialist Alice Brown expands on this further, “Being able to triangulate your interview insights with survey responses and other sources of data means you‘re no longer relying on speculation or ICPs dreamed up in a boardroom to base your decisions on. Instead, touchpoints can be confidently built on data. This is how you create touchpoints that don’t just connect emotionally with your customers, but they also drive clicks and conversions.”

Charter the Path to Customer Success

Once you fully understand your customers’ experience with your business, you can delight them at every stage of their buying journey. Remember, many factors can affect this journey, including customer pain points, emotions, and your company’s touchpoints and processes.

I find customer journey maps most effective for visualizing this information, whether optimizing the customer experience or exploring a new business opportunity to serve a customer’s unrecognized needs.

Use the free templates I’ve shared in this article to start mapping the future of customer success at your business.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in August 2018 and has since been updated for comprehensiveness.

Throughout my career, I’ve led customer support teams across a wide range of industries, from fast-growing SaaS companies and innovative Web3 platforms to eCommerce brands and popular video game studios. Through these experiences, I’ve learned firsthand the importance of customer service in driving business success.

But what does it take to deliver exceptional customer service in 2025? It goes beyond reactive service. It’s about creating personalized experiences that resonate with each customer. It’s about empowering support teams to be proactive and anticipate customer needs before they even arise. And it’s about staying ahead of the curve by leveraging the latest customer service research and technology.

In this article, I’ll share insights from my professional journey and the latest HubSpot data to explore why prioritizing customer service is vital in 2025. We’ll uncover how exceptional service boosts your bottom line, strengthens marketing, enhances brand image, and builds lasting customer relationships.

Table of Contents

• Why is customer service important?
• Financial Benefits of Excellent Customer Service
• How Customer Service Supports Marketing Success
• Customer Service’s Impact on Brand Image
• The Power of Well-Equipped Employees
• What Businesses Need to Improve Customer Service
• Invest in Your Customer Service Team Today

This direct connection not only helps retain customers but also turns them into advocates for your brand.

I’ve found that by investing in proactive support and personalized experiences, we can turn satisfied customers into loyal promoters who actively contribute to the growth of the business. It’s the essence of what we call the ‘flywheel’ — a continuous loop where happy customers fuel further growth through referrals, testimonials, and repeat business.

Financial Benefits of Excellent Customer Service

A company that prioritizes excellent customer service isn’t just responding to queries or resolving issues. It’s actively driving revenue and boosting profitability. In fact, improving customer experience can increase sales revenue by 2-7% and profitability by 1-2%.

Let’s delve deeper into the financial benefits of a top-notch customer service team:

1. Customer retention is cheaper than customer acquisition.

Acquiring a new customer is significantly more expensive than retaining an existing one. According to our research, companies that fail to invest even a small percentage of their budget in customer service face higher customer acquisition costs (CAC).

Investing in customer service doesn’t just reduce churn —it directly lowers CAC by decreasing the need to constantly replace lost customers.

Every successful startup I’ve worked with over the past decade has prioritized customer service and customer success teams with this goal in mind.

Why is customer retention so important?

• Repeat customers are more profitable: Studies show that 20% of your current customers generate 80% of your profits. Retaining and nurturing this group is essential for long-term growth.
• Positive experiences drive loyalty: When customers have a great first experience, they’re far more likely to return. Satisfied customers not only stick around but also spend more over time. I’ve seen this personally while working on the Insider loyalty program at Skybound Entertainment as it drove repeat purchases and long-term advocacy.

Pro tip: Focus on crafting exceptional customer experiences to boost retention. Start with a stellar onboarding process and personalized offers. According to McKinsey, companies with experience-led growth strategies enjoy 5-10% higher wallet share and 20-30% higher customer satisfaction and engagement –– a win-win for both customers and your bottom line.

2. Customers will pay more to companies with better customer service.

Another thing I’ve learned over the years is that great service pays off, literally. An extraordinary number of customers are willing to pay a premium for businesses that prioritize exceptional service. Over 80% of customers report that receiving value during a service experience makes them more likely to repurchase, even when given the option to switch to a competitor.

Why does customer service make such a difference?

• Service builds loyalty: A single positive experience can solidify a customer’s commitment to your brand, while one negative interaction can send them straight to your competitor.
• Customers value respect: People notice when your team treats them with care and empathy, and they reward that effort with repeat business.

I’ve definitely witnessed this firsthand at Skybound with the Insider loyalty program and aspects of community management. When you solve for the customer, whether it’s through quick resolutions or thoughtful conversations, they stick around and support you more. Creating communities is a great way to foster this type of relationship.

Pro tip: To deliver the kind of customer service that drives loyalty and revenue, focus on these essentials.

• Resolve issues promptly and accurately.
• Listen actively and show you genuinely care about the customer’s concerns.
• Meet customers where they are, no matter the channel.
• Take customer insights seriously and refine your processes to keep their needs front and center.

I know you might be thinking this seems like a lot, but it becomes manageable and scalable with an all-in-one customer service solution. In my experience, investing in the right tools can really take your capabilities to new heights.

3. Customer service grows customer lifetime value.

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a really important metric for any business. It measures the total revenue a single customer generates over the entire duration of their relationship with your company.

From my experience, increasing CLV requires a strategic and intentional focus on exceptional customer service. At Dapper Labs, for example, we achieved a significant CLV increase by implementing conversational AI chatbots. These chatbots managed 70% of incoming support requests (later more), which allowed our human agents to focus on solving complex customer issues and fostering deeper, more meaningful connections.

How does exceptional customer service boost CLV?

• Increased customer satisfaction: Positive support experiences encourage loyalty and drive repeat business.
• Enhanced brand loyalty: When customers feel valued and supported, they stick around longer.
• Effective upselling and cross-selling: Trust built through exceptional service makes customers more receptive to product recommendations, driving higher sales through cross-selling.

Pro Tip: Use customer service research and machine learning to predict CLV and inform your marketing strategies. Predictive CLV models, powered by AI, use historical customer behavior patterns to forecast how much value a customer will bring over their journey with your brand. These insights can help identify high-value customers, optimize your acquisition costs, and tailor personalized marketing efforts to retain them more effectively.

4. Customer service can lead to more revenue.

Business leaders know that profitability isn’t just about budgeting wisely, but it’s also about how customer experience can directly drive revenue. Research shows that companies focusing on CX see twice the revenue growth compared to their peers, and this trend has held steady for the past decade.

At Skybound, we leaned into this idea during the holiday shopping season on our online store. We set up our customer service team for success by giving them the tools and insights they needed to handle questions and concerns without delay. We made sure they had real-time inventory access and communication strategies to address common issues like order timing and shipping delays.

On top of that, agents took a proactive approach by offering tailored product suggestions that aligned with ongoing promotions –– helping customers unlock discounts, bundle deals, or free shipping, making the shopping journey seamless and rewarding.

CX is an investment that improves experiences and financial performance.

Pro tip: Empower your team with the right tools and proactive strategies during busy periods. Offering personalized promotions and quick, empathetic responses can turn inquiries into lasting customer relationships and sales opportunities.

How Customer Service Supports Marketing Success

Customer service team members are on the frontlines, communicating daily with current and potential customers. As a result of this proximity, customer service can offer valuable insight that can help improve marketing outcomes.

1. Customer service employees can offer important insights about customer experiences.

Often, how you see your brand privately is different from how your customers see it.

For example, an athletic wear business might market itself as health and fitness-focused, but people might buy from them more for comfort or style. To tailor your message and product strategy, you need to understand these subtleties.

One of the best ways to get this information is to talk to your customer service team. Every day, they talk to customers and find out what works and what doesn’t, as well as why people keep coming back. You can turn these exchanges into useful data by giving them the right tools and training.

We used this approach a lot during important campaigns at Skybound. By letting agents record common themes from their interactions, we learned surprising things about why customers purchased, which helped us improve our products and send more targeted marketing messages.

Businesses get more than just happy customers when they put money into knowing and improving the customer journey. In fact, 73% of businesses that give their customers an above-average experience do better financially than their competitors.

There is a clear link between putting customer happiness first and long-term growth and profit. It’s not just the right thing to do; it works.

2. Proactive customer service creates marketing opportunities.

People often think of customer service as an action-based job that deals with issues as they come up. But taking a more proactive method has big advantages.

Businesses that get in touch with customers before problems happen show that they want to make their experience better. This not only makes people happier, but it also makes business possible.

Proactive service empowers you to instantly provide customers with the latest goods, features, or solutions they need. Your team can reach out to someone who had a problem in the past to let them know about a new feature that will fix that particular issue. This makes the contact feel personal and up-to-date.

60% of customers say that “representatives responding quickly and bringing quick solutions” is the top factor that encourages them to make repeat purchases. Proactive service helps mitigate this by engaging customers early, preventing dissatisfaction, and even turning service interactions into sales opportunities.

3. Personalized customer service can improve your online conversion rate.

Your online conversion rate can improve by 8% when you include personalized consumer experiences. A higher conversion rate should lead to more sales and more revenue. Customer service keeps your flywheel moving, like marketing and sales.

However, service that isn’t personalized and makes customers feel like no more than a ticket number in the system harms customer retention. Of customers, 62% think businesses can do more in terms of personalization because they’d prefer to feel like an experience is all about them.

Data supports that great customer service is an expectation, not a frivilous bonus. You’ll attract new customers, prevent customer churn, and build your brand reputation and image with excellent customer service.

Customer Service’s Impact on Brand Image

Every company is known for its customer service to some degree. Of course, you always want a positive brand image, and customer service can be a significant determining factor.

1. Customer service affects your brand image and loyalty potential.

Your customer service team is often the first point of direct contact between your brand and potential buyers. While marketing campaigns and content build awareness, it’s the customer service experience that truly shapes how customers view your brand and whether they remain loyal.

It also plays a huge role in converting first-time buyers into repeat customers. Research shows that 89% of customers are more likely to return after a positive customer service interaction.

In fact, for 66% of customers, a brand’s reputation for customer service is a key factor when making a purchasing decision. On the flip side, poor service can cause customers to cut ties with a brand.

It’s proven that investing in a customer service team that aligns with your brand’s values is crucial for long-term success and customer retention.

2. Excellent customer service will protect relationships with customers who experience a mistake down the road.

Poor customer service can cause significant damage to your business, especially as more customers are vocal about their negative experiences. 51% of B2B companies will stop doing business with a vendor after a bad customer service experience.

Customers are also quick to leave companies that don’t meet their expectations. Roughly 86% of customers would leave a brand after even just two poor experiences.

However, the story isn’t all negative. If your company provides excellent customer service, 78% of customers are willing to give you a second chance after a mistake.

Studies have shown over and over that customers are more loyal to companies that fix problems quickly and correctly than to companies that have never had a problem in the first place. This is called the “service recovery paradox,” and it shows how important it is to not only avoid mistakes as much as possible, but also make sure systems are ready for when they do happen.

From what I’ve seen, companies that can turn a bad situation around are the ones that give their employees the tools they need to handle issues with care and speed.

3. A positive customer service reputation makes people more likely to do business with you.

It’s obvious now that outstanding customer service is a significant differentiator. Even in highly competitive markets with equal products and pricing, businesses that focus on customer experience can gain an advantage.

Consider this: if two organizations offer essentially the same product, but one gives great service, which one will you likely choose?

According to research, positive interactions increase customer loyalty even in the face of rival offers. Customers will stick with a brand that they trust and feel appreciated by.

In today’s digital age, where word-of-mouth spreads quickly online via reviews, social media, and forums, a great reputation for customer service is essential. It’s become a major driver of new customer acquisition and overall business success.

The Power of Well-Equipped Employees

If a company doesn’t appreciate and properly resource its customer service team, it will show in the quality of service that customers receive. But when companies provide the proper training and work environment, customer service employees become a powerful force to turn satisfied customers into loyal advocates who fuel your business.

1. Happy customer service employees will create happy customers.

It’s simple: happy customer service employees create happy customers — and the numbers prove it.

Our annual State of Service report found that when companies invest in their service teams by providing proper training, tools, and support, it leads to better outcomes for both employees and customers.

Motivated, well-equipped reps deliver quicker, more personalized service, which boosts customer satisfaction. In fact, happy employees can lead to a 13% increase in productivity. That kind of boost makes a huge difference in meeting customer expectations, keeping them satisfied, and driving more loyalty. This is true for both B2B and B2C environments.

It’s surprising that so many companies miss this link. In my experience, too many leaders still treat customer service as a cost center instead of recognizing it as a key growth driver.

However, the companies that priortize their teams see real results. Engaged employees are better able to meet the rising demand for fast and efficient service. By investing in your people and the right tools, you’re not only creating a positive work environment but also ensuring happier customers –– leading to long-term success.

2. Happy customers will refer others.

When people have a memorable experience — good or bad — it’s natural to want to shout about it from the rooftops. But, of course, today’s rooftops are review websites and social media, with 55% of consumers sharing their purchases socially on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social sites.

For better or worse, your most impacted customers will do word-of-mouth advertising for you. In fact, 66% of salespeople say that the highest quality leads come from existing customers. Since great customer service translates to happy customers, your customer service team can be a major catalyst for cheap promotion through positive word-of-mouth and referrals.

Much like your most loyal customers, referred customers are a business treasure. Referred customers:

• Refer 30-57% more new customers than others
• Help businesses generate 3-5 times higher conversions
• Are 4x more likely to buy when referred by a friend

Customers who feel genuinely valued are not only more likely to return, but they’ll also actively become your best advocates. A referred customer from a happy one is a trust bridge built on positive experiences, and it’s the kind of growth that’s both organic and sustainable.

3. Good customer service encourages customers to remain loyal.

As we’ve covered, it‘s much cheaper to retain an old customer than to acquire a new one. So, in this sense, the higher a customer’s lifetime value — the total revenue a company can expect a single customer to generate throughout their relationship with that company — the higher the profit for your company.

Compared to hundreds of possible competitors with similar products and services, your company has to do more than relish the exciting features of your products. You can differentiate from your competitors by providing stellar customer service. This is especially true when it’s time to launch a new product or service.

Your existing customers are 50% more likely to try a new product and spend 31% more money on it than new customers. In fact, new customers are only 5-20% likely to buy a product.

For those existing customers to stay long enough to consider a new product, it takes effort via customer service to keep them satisfied. Of customers, 71% cited poor customer service as the reason they ended a relationship with a company.

Conversely, when your company’s customer service is excellent, you’re more likely to see your customers stick around and eventually try more of your offerings.

Loyalty is rooted in trust, and customers can trust real-life humans more than the ideas and values of a brand. So, by interacting with your customer service team, those customers can hopefully build life-long relationships with your business.

What Businesses Need to Improve Customer Service

Beyond understanding how essential it is to put considerable effort into building a solid customer service team, companies need to provide employees with all the tools they need to deliver the type of consistent, proactive customer service required today.

Here are a few areas to keep in mind when improving your customer service team:

1. Customers expect high-quality service.

Your team needs to be world-class and ready to meet customer demands at a moment’s notice.

Research shows that 76% of consumers expect connected interactions across all channels, but a majority, 54%, feel their experiences are often fragmented across sales, marketing, and service teams. On top of this, 58% of customers say their service expectations have increased since the pandemic. Consumers demand service that is personalized and consistent.

This is where businesses can capitalize on their CX strategy. The gap in customer expectations and actual delivery leaves room for improvement. With competition at an all-time high and customers having endless options, it’s clear that meeting these expectations is no longer a luxury.

2. Businesses need omnichannel solutions.

In the past decade, businesses gradually explored new, digital ways to engage and support customers. But, over the past few years, this timeline accelerated significantly. As we pointed out, consumers expect service across all channels.

As we shared in our State of Service report, only 50% of companies have enabled their service teams with the most basic service features a CRM can provide: a help desk, knowledge base, and shared email capabilities.

As a result, many businesses have much catching up to do to provide their customer service teams with the tools they need to serve customers well across every channel.

Considering this is also one of the highest ROI strategies for CS teams, count omnichannel solutions as a major growth area in the future.

The image below explains how omnichannel experiences work:

Source

Rather than having each channel operate independently, the channels link together so they can share messages and information freely. That way, customers don’t have to navigate away from what they’re doing to get help from your business.

Instead, any time they need help, they can reach out on any channel of their choice and will get an immediate, reliable response.

3. Excellent customer service is a competitive advantage.

Excellent customer service has always been a major differentiator, and it’s only becoming more crucial. According to a Zendesk report, when businesses offer quick, effective, and personalized support, they not only keep their existing customers but also attract new customers from competitors.

Personalization is key. Our own research found that 78% of customers expect it, and 44% are more likely to return after a personalized experience. Customer loyalty is tightly connected to how much personalized attention they get. A solid customer service experience can increase revenue, as businesses that understand and meet customer needs build deeper, longer-lasting relationships.

By delivering fast, personalized service and addressing issues quickly, your company can stand out, grow, and gain a competitive edge.

As Jeff Bezos famously said, “We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”

Invest in Your Customer Service Team Today

Writing this has reminded me of the undeniable connection between investing in customer service and driving business success. When businesses prioritize their customer service teams (by recruiting top talent, offering the right training, and equipping them with the best tools), they build a foundation that supports long-term growth.

What I’ve further realized through this process is that customer service is far more than a support function. It’s a core part of your brand and customer experience, capable of shaping perceptions, building loyalty, and driving revenue.

So, now that I’ve seen the impact of these investments, I’m asking you: How will you raise the standard of customer service at your company? How will you invest in your team to create the kind of lasting relationships that keep customers coming back for more?

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in October 2018 and has since been updated for comprehensiveness.

I’ve been in the trenches of customer support for some of Silicon Valley’s fastest-growing startups, and I’ve seen how a poor digital customer experience can lead to frustration and lost customers.

I recall a time at one of my previous employers when we launched a self-service portal that, while functional, left users frustrated. They couldn’t easily find the actual help they needed, and the experience felt disconnected. It became clear that simply offering a support option wasn’t enough — we needed to create an intuitive, engaging support experience that really empowered customers.

A great digital experience should create an environment where users feel understood and valued at every stage of their journey. In the example of customer support, offering a range of support options — like live chat, self-service tools, and AI-powered solutions — ensures that customers can access help whenever they need it.

With customer expectations constantly rising, building a seamless experience in all areas of your business is essential for staying competitive. Now, let’s dive into what digital customer experience is and why a strong strategy is important for success.

Table of Contents

• What is digital customer experience?
• Digital Customer Experience Best Practices
• Digital Customer Experience Trends
• The Importance of a Great Digital Customer Experience Strategy
• Digital Customer Experience vs. Customer Experience
• Building a Customer-Centric Digital Future: Why It Matters

The Importance of a Great Digital Customer Experience Strategy

Creating a delightful online experience with your product or service has become increasingly important.

Any number of competitors can meet the needs of your target audience, but if they look forward to interacting with you, they won’t look to anyone else.

Digital CX touchpoints, such as chatbots and online forms, are just the beginning of a larger experience structure.

A thorough and thoughtful customer experience strategy gives you more control over how customers perceive your company. It helps you understand what works and what doesn’t, so you can continually improve and keep both existing and new customers happy.

For example, those new leads should be able to easily navigate through the content on your website and understand why they should purchase from you. Returning customers should have access to customer success and support features built into your app’s user interface.

In addition to reaching consumers where they are in their customer journey, a seamless digital experience is crucial when it comes to customer satisfaction.

It lets you anticipate and map out how users move across your different online channels (more on that later!). Plus, great digital CX facilitates a cohesive experience that nurtures customers through every stage of your flywheel.

As part of HubSpot’s “Gain Grow Retain” podcast series, Gainsight Customer Success Evangelist Dan Steinman joined the show to discuss digital customer success. Listen here to Steinman discuss the importance of digital CX for your business.

Digital Customer Experience vs. Customer Experience

Digital customer experience is a key component of customer experience.

We know that customer experience, or CX, is the impression you‘ve left on your customers throughout their entire journey with your brand. It’s a combination of customers’ interactions with your people and your products.

Think of digital CX as the online arm of your company‘s overarching CX strategy. It’s the digital mediums your customers use to interact with those people and products. And, the perception they take away based on their experience.

Let’s review some best practices you can use to optimize digital CX at your company.

1. Know your audience.

Before creating a digital experience that your customers will love, you have to know who your customers are.

Buyer personas are a great way to understand who is buying your product and why. Personas make it easier to tailor your digital CX strategy to meet your target audience’s specific needs and desires.

Collecting online forms from potential leads is the best way to let people interested in your offering introduce themselves and their needs.

Commonalities among answers on initial forms can help you better understand how you are first perceived. They can even indicate what you can provide in the future to meet more of your customers’ needs.

Crafting, tracking, and revising the customer journey from beginning to end is critical for building excellent CX.

Mapping out the customer journey can help you determine which digital touchpoints are most important for your customers so you can optimize those points.

Luckily, there are advanced marketing reporting tools specifically tailored to help you develop your digital customer experience.

2. Create omni-channel customer experiences.

In my experience, a lot of companies confuse multichannel and omnichannel, but the key differences come down to data syncing and CX continuity.

Multichannel vs. Omnichannel

Multichannel just means being present on several platforms, but those platforms often work in isolation, creating a disjointed experience. Customers end up repeating themselves or feel like they’re dealing with different businesses, depending on the channel.

Source

Omnichannel, on the other hand, is all about integration. Picture a customer browsing your website on their mobile app, adding items to their cart, then completing the purchase through a chatbot.

With data syncing in an omnichannel setup, all of these interactions are connected, so the customer’s history and preferences are available across every platform. This makes the experience seamless and personalized.

3. Pay attention to mobile experiences.

Whether you have a detailed website or a handy app, it’s important to focus on the mobile experience. After all, over 90% of the global internet population uses a mobile device to go online.

That’s because smartphones allow customers to compare companies while they shop. They can see how your brand stacks up against your competitors before they make a purchase.

If your website or app doesn‘t seem to fit their needs, chances are your products won’t either.

When designing your digital customer experience, make sure it‘s mobile-responsive. That means when it’s displayed on a tablet or phone, the interface automatically adjusts to the smaller screen.

This dramatically affects the user experience and makes it much easier to navigate through your content.

4. Adopt analytics.

In my web development and social media marketing work, using data-driven insights is critical to shaping an exceptional digital customer experience.

Tools like Google Analytics and social media metrics allow me to understand user behavior on a deeper level. From identifying where visitors drop off during checkout to discovering which social media posts resonate most with audiences, these insights guide every decision I make to optimize the customer journey.

For example, analyzing user flows has helped me streamline navigation for websites I’ve built, reducing friction and improving conversions.

Having the right tools to centralize data and track interactions can make all the difference. Being able to manage campaigns while keeping digital CX front and center has been invaluable in my work. If you’re exploring ways to elevate your strategy, it’s something I’d definitely recommend looking into.

5. Collect customer feedback.

One of my favorite ways to gather information is by asking customers for their feedback. Have them complete a survey after using your website or app and ask if they would recommend it to their peers.

You can use a Net Promoter Score, or NPS, survey to gather both qualitative and quantitative data on your digital customer experience. While there are other metrics you can look into as well, this should give you a good idea of how customers are reacting to your content.

Sample survey questions may include:

• On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our business to a friend or colleague?
• Which product/service features do you value and use the most?
• How can we improve your experience on our app?

6. Conduct user testing.

User testing is another way to determine how much customers enjoy using your digital properties. In this environment, a select group of customers is asked to test your product. Then, they provide feedback on specific aspects of the user experience.

This gives you the chance to tweak your website or app before releasing it to the rest of your customer base. While there are a few different types of user tests, the most popular one is usability testing.

Usability tests assess how easy it is to use and navigate your product. Participants are asked to perform a simple task. Then, they’re evaluated on their ability to complete it. This shows your development team how user-friendly your website or app is.

One easy way to go about this, if you have an active online community, is to ask a segment of that group to participate in a usability test. It benefits both parties in the end to have a quality experience built on real user preferences.

7. Think like a futurist.

This is my favorite part — thinking like a futurist. The digital landscape is advancing faster than ever, and as we approach 2025, staying competitive means rethinking how we use emerging technologies to elevate digital customer experiences.

Consider industries like healthcare, where AI is transforming patient care. Platforms now integrate real-time data from wearable devices, providing physicians with the ability to have continous insights into a patient’s health.

This proactive approach means doctors can anticipate issues and deliver personalized interventions before problems escalate. Patients, in turn, get a more seamless, connected experience – one where their data follows them across devices and systems, creating a sense of continuity (there’s that word again) and care that builds trust.

This isn’t limited to enterprise-level players, either. With the rise of AI marketplaces and no-code solutions, even startups can harness these tools to innovate.

Thinking like a futurist means staying informed about advancements, like how conversational AI is evolving to handle increasingly complex queries, and being bold enough to pilot these technologies in your business.

The key is experimenting, adapting quickly, and creating digital experiences that make customers feel truly understood and valued.

Speaking of trends, let’s review a few digital trends that businesses are following in 2025.

1. Improvements in AI

A great example is how AI is used in email marketing. Businesses can send mass emails that still feel personal and tailored to each recipient.

AI pulls customer data from CRMs and customizes the message, making it appear as though it was written specifically for that person – without burdening employees with the task of doing it manually.

AI is advancing rapidly, and over the next few months, we’ll see new features hit the market. While change can be daunting, leveraging AI now is one of the best ways to stay competitive.

At HubSpot, for example, we’re already rolling out exciting new AI tools to help businesses deliver even more personalized experiences.

2. Increased Number of Chatbots

Chatbots are about to explode in the retail space. In the past, bots were very limited and could only perform a predetermined series of actions. This made for dull customer experiences that often did not provide the needed solutions.

There’s still a lingering stigma that chatbots are just talkative phone trees that lead nowhere until you ask for a human being to speak with. The good news is that chatbots are improving along with AI like a tide raising the ship. Juniper Research forecasts that global retail spend on chatbots will increase by 470% over the next five years.

This spending trend will significantly reduce the pressure on support teams to answer routine questions. These automated systems will be able to handle tasks like opening support tickets and routing them to the right people, making the whole process more efficient.

With the implementation of chatbots, support agents can refocus their time and energy on complex or time-sensitive cases that are more likely to result in customer churn.

But, like your overall digital CX strategy, chatbots can’t simply be set up and left to do the work. They need guidance on improving the customer experience at key points in the journey, helping the chatbot become more useful and ultimately deliver the best experience possible for the customer. Consider setting aside time daily or weekly to fine-tune your bot based on its user interactions.

Also, spend a few minutes with this video that remains at the heart of the chatbot wave and provides guidance on using chatbots for your business.

3. Enhanced Self-Service Capabilities

Customers don‘t want to wait long (or at all) for support if they don’t have to. More companies are focused on finding ways to help customers quickly help themselves.

In addition to chatbots, this may include:

• Knowledge bases. These searchable databases allow customers to find resources about your products and answers to FAQs. This makes the information-seeking process faster for customers. Plus, it releases some of the burden on your customer service team.
• Workflow automation. This involves setting up self-operating processes that run manual tasks, saving time and resources. For example, a customer requests a return on your website. An email is automatically triggered to send them the return label, rather than waiting for a customer service rep.

4. More Focus on Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics determine how customers will react to changes in your business. These reports help business leaders understand customer behavior and the company‘s role in their customers’ lives.

As AI and machine learning continue to improve, we can expect predictive analytics to become a fundamental tool used by companies with a digital presence.

These reports will be built into the internal user interface and updated with the most recent customer data. That way, business leaders will have all the information they need to confidently make decisions for their company.

5. New Augmented Reality Tools

Augmented reality (AR) presents fun, new opportunities to improve digital customer experience. If you‘re unfamiliar with AR, it’s a technology that supplements real images with digital elements, such as graphics or text overlays. While it’s been around a few years now, it’s still picking up steam.

Here’s an example from a school in Berkshire, England, that is leveraging VR and headsets to learn and expand in a variety of interactive lessons within the metaverse.

There’s a lot of potential for the use of AR in customer service, too. For example, some brands have used it to supplement in-person customer experience by displaying product information as customers shop.

When customers are in the store, they might use their smart devices to scan a product and see data such as customer reviews and product details. This reduces friction during the buying process, making it easier for customers to find the product or service that’s right for them.

Another popular AR trend is the “try-as-you-buy” experience. If your company operates mostly online, you can let customers test your products using an AR version on their computer. That way, customers can avoid the hassle of buying your product or asking for a sample only to return it a few weeks later.

6. Personalized Customer Experiences

According to research, 70% of consumers would willingly provide personal data if they knew it was being used to improve their experience.

This means customers are willing to give you information. In return, they ask that you meet them where they are in their customer journey.

One great way to personalize a customer’s shopping experience is to send them an email with product recommendations based on their recent browsing or purchase history. This communicates to your customers that you are using data to help them, making it easier for them to find what they want and need.

As you continue collecting customer data, creating personalized customer experiences will be easier.

Not only will you strengthen your understanding of your customer base, but you‘ll also have the technology needed to distribute content effectively. What’s more, you’ll be able to automate this personalization to maintain a delightful customer experience as your business grows.

7. Emphasis on Data Security and Privacy

With all of this data comes great responsibility.

Yes, customers are willing to share their data with you, but they expect it to be properly protected and used for the right reasons. Roughly 71% of consumers would stop doing business with a company if it mishandled their sensitive data, highlighting the importance of prioritizing data security and privacy.

These types of violations can also severely damage customer trust and drive them away from your brand. Protecting customer data is vital for maintaining a positive reputation and building long-term relationships.

Keep up with the latest privacy laws and regulations that affect your business relationships with customers. Regularly audit your data practices, update privacy notices, and adopt procedures for handling new consumer rights and opt-out requests.

1. Warby Parker’s Virtual Try-On

Source

Warby Parker, known for its affordable and stylish eyewear, was an early adopter of augmented reality in its digital customer experience. Their app allows customers to virtually try on glasses from the comfort of their homes, tapping into the convenience of online shopping and the growing AR shopping trend.

This forward-thinking approach paid off, especially during the pandemic when in-person shopping became challenging. Suddenly, being able to try on glasses or makeup virtually wasn’t just a cool feature. It was a necessity.

But beyond the obvious benefits, their use of AR has broader implications for accessibility and inclusivity, demonstrating their commitment to serving a diverse customer base.

Their early adoption of AR, combined with their focus on a seamless mobile experience, allowed them to stay ahead of the curve and meet their customers where they were — online and on their phones. This highlights the importance of anticipating customer needs and leveraging technology to create engaging and accessible digital experiences.

What I like: Warby Parker’s approach really caught my attention since they went AR beyond the clear advantages. While digitally trying on glasses is entertaining, what really distinguishes this use of technology is how it makes eyewear more accessible to persons with mobility issues or those without simple access to transportation. It’s a perfect illustration of how digital experiences can propel equity and accessibility, transcending basic convenience.

2. Apple’s Omni-Channel Experience

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Apple is a great example of a company that has created a seamless digital customer experience based on the customer’s data.

Through iCloud, customers always have access to their data — like messages, photos, and contacts — and this is true regardless of which Apple device they’re using.

It also extends beyond Apple devices. Users can access their digital storage by simply signing into iCloud from any device with an internet signal.

This has made each iCloud user’s digital life fit more harmoniously with their physical life in ways that affect connectivity and culture.

Consider one service they offer: AirDrop. Once upon a time, you had to store a file on a single, physical device.

Sharing it was a multi-step process that could be tripped up by file size, your recipient not having the right program, and other tedious problems caused by mismatched technology.

So much friction just trying to share a file — all while sitting right there at the same table! Oof.

With two AirDrop-enabled devices, you can just choose a file to send and tap AirDrop. It automatically transfers to the other nearby device, and you can move on with your idea sharing and projects much faster.

Pro tip: Some folks use digital storage far more than others, so Apple’s iCloud storage comes in various sizes and prices. Their goal is to provide what people need to maintain their own continuity of experience.

3. UNICEF’s Chatbot for Societal Change

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I’m inspired by how organizations are using chatbots for more than just customer service. UNICEF, for example, has a chatbot-based polling system called U-Report. It gathers crucial feedback from underserved communities worldwide, often young people in developing countries, on important societal issues.

This gives a voice to those who might not otherwise be heard, and UNICEF uses this information to shape policy recommendations and drive positive global change. It’s a powerful example of how digital tools can be used creatively to make a real-world impact and improve lives.

What I like: I’m seeing both retail companies and non-profits finding incredibly innovative ways to use chatbots. It’s exactly this kind of creative thinking that pushes boundaries and shapes the future of digital customer experience.

Building a Customer-Centric Digital Future: Why It Matters

Having worked in customer experience for years, I’ve always understood the importance of digital customer experience. But, as I explored the topic further, I was reminded of just how critical it is for businesses to refine their digital CX strategies continuously.

The deeper I dug, the more I realized that a truly effective strategy goes beyond engaging customers. These days, it’s really important to prioritize seamless and personalized experiences, while leveraging the latest AI tech.

As I revisited best practices, I realized how essential it is to build trust and reliability in every customer interaction. Whether it’s offering accurate, helpful information, providing just a little more personalized support, or ensuring data security is on point, each touchpoint strengthens the relationship between your brand and your customer.

If you’re ready to take your CX strategy to the next level, take a look at our free CX resources or reach out to our team at HubSpot to see how we can help you build stronger customer relationships and drive real business growth.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in February 2021 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

As a freelance content marketer, I’ve faced my fair share of difficult clients. And if you’ve worked in a customer-facing role, I’m sure you’ve experienced that internal “ugh!” — the little annoying feeling you get when you know the customer isn’t right.

But that doesn’t mean the phrase “the customer is always right” doesn’t hold any merit. In this piece, I’ll discuss how this philosophy should (and shouldn’t) factor into your customer service strategy, along with inputs from customer-centric professionals.

Continue reading or jump ahead:

• Is the customer always right?
• Origin of ‘The Customer Is Always Right’
• 5 Reasons Why the Customer Is Always Right
• What To Do When the Customer Isn’t Right
• How to Maintain a Customer-First Mentality

What does “the customer is always right” mean?

While ‘always right’ usually translates to “never wrong,” this isn’t necessarily the case when it comes to customer service.

Customers aren’t going to be right in every situation, but they are entitled to have support and service teams do everything in their power (within reason) to satisfy their needs.

Here’s an interesting video that offers more perspective on this age-old question.

Who came up with ‘the customer is always right’?

Marshall Field first introduced the concept when he founded Chicago’s first department store, Marshall Field’s, in 1893.

Overseas, Henry Gordon Selfridge followed suit when he opened the first department store in London.

Almost 100 years later, César Ritz introduced the motto to the hospitality industry when he founded The Ritz Carlton Hotels.

His mantra was “Le client n’a jamais tort,” which means the customer is never wrong.

In all cases, these pioneers instructed their employees to give priority to customer satisfaction, no questions asked.

Although it was a novel idea at the time, their strategy worked. Customers were not used to being treated with that level of care, and they flocked to both these businesses in response.

Subscribing to the mindset that the customer is always right means that businesses shouldn’t spend time questioning the legitimacy of customer complaints.

Instead, employees focus their energy on troubleshooting issues and delighting customers with solutions.

In my opinion, when you think of “the customer is always right,” don’t think of it in the context of “customers can do no wrong.”

Here are five reasons why this phrase should hold true.

1. The customer always has the right to have their voice heard.

Customers want to feel like you’re actively listening to their pain points and concerns. That’s why even the angriest of customers deserve to feel seen and heard by a business.

You should always give your customer the platform to share their opinions — both the positive and the negative. Customer feedback surveys are a great way to make this happen.

2. The customer always deserves to have their issues resolved.

Your job is to provide a seamless experience for your customers. If there’s too much friction throughout the customer journey, those customers are more likely to churn.

You should always strive to resolve customer issues quickly and effectively. Customer journey mapping can help you proactively mitigate these issues along the way.

3. The customer always has the privilege to feel empowered.

Empowered customers are happy customers. Happy customers are loyal customers. And loyal customers are most likely to stick around and promote your business to others.

You should always create an environment where customers feel comfortable using your products on their own. Knowledge bases and FAQs are two solid places to start.

4. The customer always deserves to be treated with dignity and professionalism.

Basic values go a long way. A quote by the American poet Maya Angelou comes to my mind, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Customer interactions are no different. It’s important to maintain a professional demeanor throughout, even with tough customers.

5. The customer has the right to expect consistent and timely support.

Imagine you send a complaint via email to two businesses. One responds within an hour and solves your issue, while the other takes over four days to get back to you. Which one would leave you feeling satisfied?

I know which one I’d purchase from again.

82% of customers expect immediate problem resolution from customer service agents.

Customer service software, such as HubSpot’s Service Hub, can help businesses by providing a platform to manage customer support and service interactions smoothly.

What To Do When the Customer Isn’t Right

It’s natural to have situations arise where the customer isn’t right, yet they feel they are. So, how do you handle such scenarios?

I spoke to four customer-centric leaders, and this is the advice they offered.

1. Understand the “why” behind the customer complaint or request.

Sidharth Ramsinghaney, Director of Corporate Strategy and Operations at Twilio, highlights the importance of uncovering the deeper reasons behind a customer’s request. He shares an example of working with a telecommunications client whose preferred solution initially seemed suboptimal. Instead of dismissing their stance, his team discovered that confidential business model changes and regulatory requirements drove the client’s position.

Ramsinghaney explains that by building trust and showing curiosity, they co-created a solution that addressed both immediate technical needs and future constraints.

“Success in these situations comes from reframing the conversation from ‘right versus wrong’ to ‘good versus better,’” he says. “When we truly understand the context behind a customer’s perspective – whether it‘s internal pressures, resource constraints, or undisclosed strategic shifts — we often find they’re not wrong, just operating within a different set of parameters.”

His advice? “The art lies in becoming a trusted thought partner who can navigate these nuanced constraints to find an optimal path forward.”

2. Use the “Acknowledge, Relate, Offer” method.

Lasandra Barksdale, Founder & Principal at Kompass Customer Solutions LLC, says that, in customer-centric roles, “the golden rule to follow when the customer isn‘t right is to lead with clarity, not conflict.” Customers often bring misinformation, unrealistic expectations, or demands that go against your company’s values or policies. Instead of mirroring their frustration, you can guide them toward the right solutions.

Barksdale shares an example: Imagine a hotel guest demanding a refund for rain ruining their vacation. Is it the hotel’s fault? Absolutely not. But a thoughtful response can turn frustration into loyalty.

“I train customer-facing teams on my A.R.O. Method (Acknowledge, Relate, Offer), which is a modern twist on the classic “feel, felt, found” approach,” she says. Here’s how it might sound in action:

• Acknowledge: “I completely understand how disappointing it can be when weather affects your plans.”
• Relate: “Honestly, I had a similar experience myself when visiting Panama City. Imagine being disappointed about rain in a rainforest when rain is practically guaranteed!”
• Offer: “While we can’t control the weather, we’d love to make it right for you. How about a complimentary upgrade?”

“Of course, even this approach may not satisfy every customer, but saying ‘no’ isn’t the opposite of being customer-centric. Sometimes, the best service you can provide is guidance, not compliance,” Barksdale adds. “Customers don’t always want to win, but they do want to feel heard. By respectfully steering the interaction, you can turn moments of frustration into opportunities to strengthen the relationship.”

3. Set better boundaries and prepare your team for these situations.

Mark Levy, Publisher of the DCX Newsletter that provides inspiration, education, and coaching for customer-obsessed leaders, says, “I once had a customer demand we change a policy just for them. They weren’t just asking — they were furious about it. My team was stressed, unsure how to respond without causing a scene.” Sound familiar?

Here’s the deal: not every request is fair, and trying to please everyone is exhausting. It drains your team and sets a bad precedent.

So what do you do? “Start with empathy — acknowledge the issue and let the customer feel heard. But then set boundaries,” Levy recommends. “Teach your team to say something like, ‘I get where you’re coming from, and here’s what we can do.’”

Prep your team for these moments. Run role-plays during meetings — it’s awkward but worth it. And create a cheat sheet for handling tough situations, so they’re never caught off guard.

“Backing your team while handling tricky customers isn’t easy, but it works,” he adds. “Happy employees handle tough calls better, and that benefits everyone. Trust me, your sanity will thank you.”

4. Practice deep listening, then educate and focus on solutions.

Stijn Smet, head of customer success at Whale and the Founder of the Customer Success Hotline, says, “Let’s face it: the customer can be wrong. But how do we handle that? That’s where the magic happens.”

“Start by deeply listening,” he recommends. “Often, the ‘wrong’ stems from misaligned expectations or misunderstanding. Dig into their perspective and validate their concerns: ‘I hear you, and I understand why this feels frustrating.’ This shows respect and diffuses tension.”

Next, educate with confidence. Be clear and bold in explaining why their request isn’t feasible or aligned. “Here’s how this approach benefits you in the long run.” You’re not shutting them down; you’re empowering them with knowledge.

Finally, shift the focus to solutions. Can you offer an alternative? A workaround? By reframing the conversation toward value, you keep the trust intact — even when saying “no.”

“Handling tough moments with bold empathy and a focus on partnership transforms challenges into growth opportunities — for the customer and for you,” Smet says.

How to Maintain a Customer-First Mentality

The “customer is always right” way of thinking is all about the customer-first mentality.

I’ve noted down a few ways you can lead with this mindset at your business.

Set customers up for success.

I believe strongly that customer interactions shouldn’t revolve around who is right and who is wrong.

Instead, reps should center the conversation around guiding customers down the best path to success and showing them allyship.

In practice, this looks like:

• Sympathizing with customer pain points.
• Redirecting the conversation toward more achievable solutions.
• Acknowledging the customer’s frustrations.
• Reaffirming that you’re on their team.
• Offering up something you can solve.

For example: “I understand that you’re not seeing the results you want here — I know that can be really frustrating. However, I really think we should consider X as an alternative solution.”

Realign customer expectations.

Customers can sometimes have unrealistic expectations about how a product works.

These misunderstandings can lead them to become frustrated because they feel like your product isn’t meeting their needs.

I feel that it’s important to make sure the customer has full knowledge about how a product is intended to operate and how they can make it work for them.

In practice, this looks like:

• Zooming out on the goal to ensure everyone’s working together.
• Helping customers understand what they need to change to ensure their expectations are met.

For example: “It looks like you’re having trouble with our analytics tool. Can you clarify what you’re hoping to gain? Then we can figure out where the disconnect may be.”

Build a customer-centric culture.

Even if a customer is technically not correct, maintaining a customer-centric culture is crucial.

There are going to be times when the customer isn’t right, but it’s still important to understand where they are coming from.

In practice, this looks like:

• Aligning with them during customer calls.
• Provide insight and concrete action items you can take together.
• Putting their needs first regardless of right or wrong.

For example: “I understand you’re frustrated about this issue, and it’s not your fault. It’s us against the issue — let’s start with X so we can tackle this together.”

Be as straightforward as possible.

Dissatisfaction can sometimes stem from confusion.

A customer may not understand how to use a product, and their confusion can lead them to believe that it’s malfunctioning.

Situations like this require extreme clarity.

In practice, this looks like:

• Confirming whether or not the customer understands what’s going wrong.
• Taking the time to provide in-depth insights for the customer.
• Sharing helpful information and resources for further education.

For example: “I found this topic confusing at first, too, but this article was really helpful for me. If that doesn’t help, I have a couple of other resources we can try.”

Understand that customer experiences can vary.

Customers have a right to voice their thoughts, ideas, and opinions about whatever is frustrating them.

And in most cases, the customer has one idea based on their individual experience that is very real to them. It’s important to acknowledge that.

In practice, this looks like:

• Recognizing that each customer experience is real and valid.
• Actively listening to the specific issue or situation at hand.
• Not directly comparing one customer’s journey to another.

For example: “I see where you’re coming from, and you’re making some really good points. It sounds like X might make the most sense for you moving forward.”

The Bottom Line

I’ve learned that there likely will always be a never-ending debate over the ‘customer is always right’ strategy. But, in my opinion, it’s a balance between taking time to understand customers’ issues and providing them with solutions that will bring the most success.

What was true for early retail pioneers is still true now: customer retention revolves around solving customer issues, even if they aren’t always right.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in October 2020 and has since been updated for comprehensiveness.