Improving digital journeys with feedback 

Many organisations invest heavily in their digital journeys. Websites are optimised, self-service flows expanded, and new digital features introduced to reduce friction and improve performance. Yet despite these efforts, customers still abandon tasks, repeat actions, and turn to support for help. 

The issue is rarely a lack of optimisation. More often, it is a lack of understanding. Digital journeys are frequently improved in isolation, leaving friction hidden between channels and interactions. Teams rely heavily on analytics to understand performance, but while data shows where users drop off, it rarely explains why journeys break down or what customers were trying to achieve at the time. 

This gap between performance data and real customer intent is where many digital initiatives lose momentum. Teams optimise what they can measure, but miss what customers actually experience. 

This has real business consequences. In a digital-first environment, poor experiences increase effort, weaken trust, and accelerate churn. McKinsey’s research shows that organisations that fail to address friction in digital interactions risk increasing customer dissatisfaction and losing market share. In contrast, organisations that focus on improving experience across channels can drive loyalty and long-term value. 

Improving digital experience (DX) requires more than refining individual touchpoints. It requires understanding digital journeys end to end, including the moments where friction occurs. Customer and user feedback plays a critical role in this process. By capturing feedback at key moments across digital journeys, organisations can uncover hidden friction and use those insights to drive continuous improvement. 

Why friction in digital journeys is difficult to identify 

Digital journeys are rarely linear. Customers move between devices, switch channels, pause and resume tasks, and seek help when something does not work as expected. Friction typically appears in short, specific moments rather than across an entire journey. 

Traditional analytics are essential for understanding behaviour. They reveal exit rates, time on page, and conversion paths. However, they do not capture intent, expectations, or emotional responses. A sudden drop-off may indicate a problem, but without context, teams are left guessing whether users were confused, frustrated, missing information, or simply unable to complete their goal. 

As journeys span multiple channels and devices, these blind spots increase. Without direct input from users, organisations risk optimising based on assumptions rather than real experience. This often leads to repeated redesigns, slow decision-making, and digital improvements that fail to address the root cause of customer effort. 

The role of feedback in digital experience 

Feedback adds the missing context that analytics alone cannot provide. It explains why users behave the way they do and how digital interactions are experienced at the moment. 

Rather than being treated as a separate initiative, feedback should be embedded within digital experience efforts. When collected consistently and in context, feedback reveals how customers experience different stages of a journey and where friction accumulates over time. This supports a journey-led view of DX, allowing organisations to move beyond isolated touchpoints and better understand how interactions connect or break down. 

When feedback and behavioural data are connected, teams can move from reactive analysis to proactive improvement, prioritising changes based on real customer impact rather than internal assumptions. 

Using feedback to identify friction across digital journeys 

Feedback is most effective when it is collected at moments that matter. In-the-moment feedback allows organisations to capture insight while the experience is still fresh, making it easier to pinpoint where and why friction occurs. 

When users abandon a page or leave a flow unexpectedly, exit-intent feedback helps teams understand what triggered that decision in the moment. It often highlights issues such as unclear information, missing functionality, technical problems, or uncertainty about what to do next, making it easier to separate casual drop-offs from journeys that were blocked by friction. 

Customer Effort Score (CES) questions help identify where journeys feel unnecessarily demanding. High customer effort scores often signal confusing instructions, redundant steps, or processes that place too much burden on users, pointing teams towards areas that would benefit most from simplification. 

Goal Completion Rate (GCR) questions provide insight into whether users were actually able to achieve what they set out to do. When goals are not completed, accompanying feedback helps reveal where progress stalled or where the journey failed to support user intent. 

Together, these feedback approaches help organisations answer three critical questions that analytics alone cannot: 

• What customers were trying to achieve 

• What prevented them from succeeding 

• Where effort or confusion increased unnecessarily 

When these feedback signals are captured across channels, they help connect individual touchpoints into meaningful journeys. Instead of isolated data points, organisations gain a clearer understanding of where effort increases, expectations are not met, and improvements will have the greatest impact. 

Turning feedback into continuous improvement 

Identifying friction is only the first step. The real value of feedback lies in how it is used to support ongoing optimisation. 

By analysing feedback trends over time, teams can prioritise improvements based on impact rather than intuition. Feedback also helps validate whether changes actually improve the experience, reducing the risk of investing in optimisations that fail to address the real problem. 

When combined with behavioural data, feedback becomes a continuous learning mechanism. It enables organisations to track progress across journeys, align teams around shared priorities, and link experience improvements to measurable business outcomes such as conversion, retention, and reduced support demand. 

From fragmented interactions to connected digital journeys 

When feedback is embedded into digital journeys, it creates a shared understanding of customer experience across teams. Product, UX, digital, and service teams can align around the same insights, reducing silos and improving collaboration. 

Over time, this leads to more connected digital journeys. Interactions build on one another, friction is addressed earlier, and customers experience progress rather than repetition. By using customer and user feedback as a continuous input to digital decision-making, organisations can move beyond reactive fixes and build digital experiences that evolve with customer needs. 

This shift, from optimising pages to understanding journeys, is what allows digital experience to become a driver of long-term value rather than an ongoing cost of iteration.