There are moments in every business where it’s important to take a step back and ask a straightforward question: where are customers quietly giving up on us, and are there opportunities to improve these friction points?
For most UK businesses, friction rarely shows up as one dramatic failure. It’s usually a chain of small, seemingly “normal” issues: a call that rings out, a web chat that’s only staffed occasionally, a handoff that adds two days, an inbox that’s treated as “someone else’s problem”, a booking process that requires three follow ups.
The good news: you don’t need a massive transformation programme to find and fix this. You need a practical map of the journey, a way to spot hidden friction fast, and a short list of improvements that can really move the needle.
A customer journey map is not a poster. It’s a decision tool that helps you identify where customers are being slowed down, confused, or forced to work too hard.
Done well, it helps senior leaders answer questions like:
The goal is to connect customer intent (what they’re trying to do), operational reality (people, processes, systems, coverage), and outcomes (conversion, time to resolution, repeat contact, complaints, churn).
Start with one journey, one segment, one measurable outcome. This prevents the exercise becoming “everything”.
Pick a journey that matters commercially. Examples include new enquiries to first conversation (sales conversion), first month onboarding (early churn reduction), support issue to resolution (cost and retention), and renewals (revenue protection).
Then pick 1 to 3 outcomes. For senior teams, these are usually best:
Use stages that match how customers think. A simple structure works well:
For each stage, capture the customer goal, the touchpoints they use (phone, web, live chat, email, social), what “good” looks like from their perspective, and what you need internally to deliver it (people, tools, routing, scripts, coverage hours).
This is where many businesses spot the first hidden gap: your org chart isn’t the customer experience. Customers don’t care which team owns the inbox.
Here’s a fast scan you can run in minutes. Each stage has two prompts only: what to watch for and what to aim for.
How quickly someone gets a helpful answer across phone, chat, and email.
How often customers are transferred, rerouted, or asked to repeat themselves.
How clear the timeline is, and whether the customer knows what happens now.
If a stage has slow first response, too many handoffs, or unclear next steps, it’s a friction hotspot worth fixing first.
“What do we apologise for most in this stage, and why does it keep happening?”
Use this simple template to capture evidence and turn your map into an action plan. Keep it to one journey at a time and add real examples as you go.
| Stage | Customer goal | Touchpoint | Friction signal | Root cause | Owner | Potential fix | Metric |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Contact | Get a quick answer | Phone | Calls ring out at peak times | Coverage gap | Ops | Add overflow cover | Missed call rate |
| Commit | Book a slot | Phone, email | Multiple follow ups | No instant booking | Sales | Confirm during first interaction | Time to booking |
| Get help | Fix an issue | Email, chat | Customer repeats details | Poor handoff notes | Support | Standardise capture and escalation | Repeat contact rate |
This is the part that turns opinions into action. Build your map using what actually happens, not what you hope happens.
If your phone channel is important (it is for many UK sectors), consider linking marketing to what happens after the call. Call tracking can connect phone enquiries to marketing interactions, making it easier to see which journeys generate valuable calls, and where those calls are being lost.
Pull 20 real customer interactions across phone, email, and live chat, then tag each one with: intent, time to first response, number of handoffs, and whether the customer had to repeat themselves. Patterns usually appear in under an hour.
Once your stages and evidence are in place, audit each touchpoint using four lenses. This keeps diagnosis simple and repeatable.
Ask: can customers reach you when they need you?
Signals: missed calls, long ring times, out of hours gaps, chat that looks “on” but isn’t staffed.
Ask: does the customer know what happens next?
Signals: vague timelines, mixed messages, “someone will be in touch” loops.
Ask: how much work does the customer have to do?
Signals: repeats across channels, multiple handoffs to book something simple.
Ask: how does the experience feel?
Signals: rushed tone, poor handling of sensitive queries, no clear escalation route.
If you see missed calls at key moments (new enquiries, urgent issues), that’s rarely a “phone problem”. It’s lost trust and lost revenue. Depending on what you need, that could include virtual receptionist support or an outsourced switchboard for more complex routing.
For high intent moments, effort kills conversion. If customers are ready to commit, being able to confirm an appointment during the first interaction reduces drop off. An appointment booking service is designed to turn conversations into confirmed diary bookings, instead of “we’ll get back to you”.
This is also where “human plus smart automation” can help. AI can handle routine calls quickly, while people step in for nuance, urgency or emotion. If you’re exploring automation, an AI voice agent approach works best when it’s designed with clear escalation to a real person when the AI can’t help or the conversation needs extra care.
Most teams know what’s broken. The issue is sequencing. Use a simple scoring model (1 to 5) across customer impact, commercial impact (conversion, retention, cost), ease (how hard it is to fix), and risk (reputational or compliance risk), then sort by “high impact, low effort” first, while still addressing high risk items.
If hybrid working is a factor, tightening the contact layer can also reduce friction. For example, handling calls via Microsoft Teams can help route enquiries to the right people and reduce wasted transfers when teams aren’t sat together.
Here are improvements that consistently reduce friction in UK businesses, without requiring a full rebuild.
If a large share of enquiries come by phone or chat, treat it as a core journey, not admin.
Options can include telephone answering, outsourced live chat, and an AI voice agent for routine intent with human handoff.
Count transfers and repeats, then redesign routing and scripts so customers move faster.
For larger organisations, an outsourced switchboard can help handle higher volumes and complex routing rules more consistently.
If customers call ready to book, aim to end the interaction with a confirmed slot.
An appointment booking setup that updates diaries during the call is built for exactly this use case.
This is where many journey projects fail. The map gets made, fixes get discussed, then everyone goes back to the day job.
To keep momentum, name a single owner for the journey (not just a channel), set a monthly cadence to review friction points and fixes shipped, track a small dashboard (first response time, abandonment, first contact resolution, repeat contact), and bring real customer evidence into leadership meetings.
If you want a fast start, use this structure:
Bring teams who own parts of the experience: marketing, sales, ops, customer service, and whoever owns the phones and inboxes.
Use this as a quick scan of your most common weak points:
Protect the moment customers reach out. When calls go unanswered or chats aren’t staffed, everything else gets harder. A mix of telephone answering, live chat, and smart routing through Microsoft Teams can remove a surprising amount of hidden friction, without a big internal rebuild.
Customer journey mapping is the process of documenting how customers discover you, contact you, decide, commit, get help, and stay, then using evidence to identify where friction is slowing them down or pushing them away.
Hidden friction shows up when you combine behavioural data (drop off, abandonment, repeat contact) with real interaction evidence (call recordings, chat logs, complaint themes). The patterns are often strongest around first response, handoffs, and unclear next steps.
For senior leaders, start with time to first response, first contact resolution, drop off rate, repeat contact rate, and time to booking. These connect experience quality to conversion, cost, and retention.
Reduce repeats and delays. Tighten routing, standardise scripts and next steps, and make sure high intent interactions end with an outcome (like a confirmed booking) rather than a follow up loop.
For many UK businesses, phone is still the fastest route to reassurance, urgency, and conversion. If calls go unanswered or take too long to reach the right person, customers often try a competitor instead. This is why organisations invest in stronger contact handling, from virtual receptionist services to AI voice agents, depending on the type of demand they need to cover.
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