Use Sales and Support Team's insights

Your Sales and Customer Success teams are on the front lines, directly conversing with potential and existing customers daily. Their firsthand insights provide a wealth of information you can use to refine your customer journey and improve engagement.

Analyze their feedback and identify key areas that impact conversions and retention, including:

• Common objections and barriers – What concerns lead to hesitation in choosing a competitor? Understanding these objections allows you to address them proactively through better messaging, FAQs, or improved onboarding.
• Frequently asked questions – What information do customers seek before making a decision? Identifying these gaps helps you refine your content strategy, ensuring your website, emails, and product pages provide clear, helpful answers.
• Recurring complaints or issues – What frustrations do customers face after purchase? Recognizing complaint patterns can highlight usability issues, missing features, or areas where additional support is needed.

Sales and Support Data to identify real customer needs

Using sales and support insights to refine your customer journey ensures you are directly addressing real customer concerns. By incorporating their feedback, you can:

• Improve communication at key touchpoints – Adjust messaging to answer objections and provide clarity where it’s needed preemptively.
• Enhance the customer experience – Remove friction points preventing conversions or causing churn.
• Strengthen product positioning – Highlight the benefits that resonate most with customers and differentiate you from competitors.

Sales and support data act as a decisive reality check, ensuring your customer journey isn’t based on assumptions but on actual customer needs and behaviors. Regularly reviewing and acting on this data helps create a smoother, more effective path from lead to loyal customer.

Pull together customer feedback across various departments

Direct feedback from customers is one of the most valuable sources of insight when mapping the customer journey. It gives you a firsthand account of how people experience your product or service, what’s working well, and where they’re getting stuck. Unlike analytics – which tell you what users are doing – customer feedback helps you understand why they behave a certain way.

Adding customer voices to your journey map will move beyond internal assumptions and focus on real-world experiences. The customer journey will reflect your audience’s true needs and expectations. Your team will be able to define meaningful touchpoints, create better content, and polish the overall experience.

Here are key types of feedback to gather and how they can help:

• Surveys and Polls – Structured surveys (e.g., Net Promoter Score, onboarding questionnaires, or post-purchase feedback) help gauge customer satisfaction, loyalty, and pain points. You’ll see customer sentiment at different journey stages. Quick polls on specific pages, such as “Was this page helpful?” can also provide insight into the usefulness of your content or interface.
• Product reviews and testimonials – Public reviews and testimonials – on your site or third-party platforms – offer unfiltered opinions that highlight what customers value most or what they feel is missing. Positive reviews can point to successful touchpoints worth replicating across the journey. Negative reviews often reveal areas of friction, dissatisfaction, or unmet needs.
• Support tickets and Live chat transcripts – These sources offer some of the richest qualitative data. They show what customers are struggling with in real-time. Support conversations often expose recurring questions, broken touchpoints, or confusing content. Live chats can highlight where users get stuck in the journey and what information or reassurance they need to continue.

Turn assumptions into insights using real feedback

Without direct input, your customer journey risks being shaped by internal opinions or guesswork. Detailed analytics can only go so far—they show users what they do but not what they think or feel. Using feedback when defining a customer journey allows you to:

• Validate or challenge your assumptions with real-world experiences.
• Prioritize changes based on actual user pain points.
• Improve messaging, design, and content based on expressed needs.
• Uncover opportunities to exceed expectations and increase satisfaction.

Even if the feedback doesn’t appear directly as a required activity for a specific stage of the customer journey, having the data available while defining the journey will help your team see the other above-mentioned data in context and make them more human.

It will remind your team that behind every click, action, or conversion is a real person with goals, frustrations, and needs. Understanding their sentiments while building your customer journeys ensures your strategy stays grounded in empathy and aligned with what matters most to your customers.

Next steps

You’ve reached the end of this series of guides focused on identifying the insights you need to build effective customer journeys. Along the way, you’ve learned how to gather accurate data, validate assumptions, and bring together different perspectives to reveal the true state of your customer experience. These insights are essential for designing journeys that are not only data-driven but also actionable and aligned with real user needs.

To keep learning, explore what’s next in the final guide in this series.