How small changes to your customer touchpoints can drive measurable revenue growth

Haydn Woods-Williams • 00:09

Welcome to the Marketers of the Universe podcast. I'm Hayden Woods-Williams, digital marketing team lead here at Brew Digital. And I'm Tom Innes, content marketing manager at Brew. Now we're still treating the customer journey like this neat linear map when in reality buyers are bouncing all over the place. It's been said a million times, but the traditional funnel is broken. Prospects switch channels instantly. They demand personalization. They drop off at a moment of friction. And to make things harder, we can't even properly measure through because of privacy rules across Europe and the rest of the world. So as a marketer, where does that leave us in 2026? we keep pushing through those paths or is there a smarter way to actually optimize the journey in real time? To discuss this with me I've got our head of digital marketing services Rich Harper here with me. Rich is our expert at dismantling, dismantling? Dismantling friction points and building high-performing digital strategies that are actually human, which is why I've invited him. Let's get on with the podcast. Firstly, Rich, welcome back to the podcast. Now, just to set the baseline for the visitors, what is your working definition of customer journey optimization? And how does that differ from, you know, traditional CRO?

Rich Harper • 02:04

Okay, so firstly, CRO stands for conversion rate optimization, for those listeners that don't know. And CDO, customer journey optimization and CRO are two fundamentally different things. CRO sits within the customer journey optimization. So they're not two separate things. It forms part of that optimization. In terms of a definition, customer journey optimization is the end-to-end management of every interaction a customer has with a brand. Uh, so that's across channels. It's over time. And the whole point of, um, running CGAO is about improving the experience for the customer, but also the business outcomes, uh, that are tied to it.

Haydn Woods-Williams • 02:59

Cool.

Rich Harper • 03:00

The, the biggest thing to take away there, sorry, just to finish is the, the continuous end to end management. This isn't a, I think you touched on in your introduction there about, you know, the customer journey is not a linear, Hey, it's awareness. I then consider you and then I buy. Um, and it's not a customer journey map or it, which forms part of CDO, um, activity isn't a case of. Pretty much like any other stuff, you know, all strategy docs. It's not a case of I draw the map. It's now done. I put it in the strategy. I never look at it again, it gathers dust. It's about continuous refinement and continuous improvement.

Haydn Woods-Williams • 03:42

I guess, you know, we, we spoke about it being a, well in the introduction about it being linear. Does it work more like a circle? I guess it was continuous.

Rich Harper • 03:52

Yeah. Um, it's about mapping out what happens between those touch points. It's about also broader than marketing. It's about those handoffs. It's you get a lead from the website. It's the handoff to sales that is part of the customer journey. What does that look like? Map that out. Is there friction in that handoff? Um, it's about if a customer channel switches, do they start on Google and then discover you on LinkedIn and then this, uh, the marketers of the universe podcast, and then go on a YouTube channel, there's multiple touch points that a customer is going to have a view it's not, they saw an ad. They clicked on it. They went to your website. They filled in a form. then they become a sales lead. There's multiple things to take into consideration when you're mapping out the journey and optimizing that journey for the benefit of you as the business.

Haydn Woods-Williams • 04:47

Will Barron That's really interesting. So from my experience of working with clients, like understanding all those touch points is this kind of like golden goose dream world that we should or could all be living in. Does CJO work if you don't have attribution at every single touchpoint?

Rich Harper • 05:14

ALICE: Depends how you clarify what attribution is happening at those touchpoints. And I think is, we talked about this previously, I think in, um, other podcasts about. The downfalls of last click attribution and the fact that credit was always going to go to that last touch point. I think the reality in B2B, and I think that maybe a podcast that we've recorded and has not come out yet, but we talk about the messy middle. Um, and we talk about things like, you know, dark social where actually your brand is being talked about and you are not present. People are maybe recommending you to friends, um, saying that they've seen something and they've worked with you and they're making that recommendation. You are not in control of that and you can't necessarily provide attribution to that type of activity. I think you just need to be aware that you need to think about all of those different touch points that are happening and try to optimize for as many of those, Um, touch points with a customer as you can and be truthful to yourself. Think about, like I say, those handoffs, think about the moments that matter, um, within the customer journey. So it's kind of a key point to, to customer journey optimization is identifying those moments that matter. And you don't, not every single moment needs to be something that needs to be optimized. If it's a fairly low friction interaction review, identify it, put it into your customer journey plan, move on. And, but if you identify an area that is a moment that matters, for example, it might be the handoff between the lead form field and the sales team to follow up on, that could be a very important stage of the customer journey that if it's wrong and becomes a friction point. Could stop that inquiry from leading to anywhere. That could obviously lend lead to, to wasted spend. Um, so then focus there. What is that? What does that look like? You know, for us as a, as an agency, we potentially identified the contract phase. What does that look like? How can we make the contract phase easier? So a client they've made the choice. They want to work with you. How can they sign and you can get started with them straight away? What, you know, do they have to wait four weeks? Is that a friction point? Is that something that can be improved? So it's looking at that full end to end journey and, and working out areas that can be made better to enhance the customer experience?

Haydn Woods-Williams • 07:49

Yeah, that's, um, it all sounds amazing, right? Being pedantic, being pickety, you know, I work with a lot of marketers who, you know, they, they have an imperfect view of everything. They have a pushy finance team or CEO kind of asking for everything to be proven. And what that can often lead to is focusing on areas that you can prove work. You were talking about dark social there and a few other things within that customer journey optimization that you can't necessarily measure. Do you think you need to communicate around you that those things are important, even if you can't measure them? Or do we stick with just things you can measure?

Rich Harper • 08:44

Um, measurement is obviously always going to be fundamental to what we do in, in, in marketing. Um, I think sometimes we get the measurement metrics wrong, or we talk about things that we try to, that, that try to suggest that we are performing and doing a better job. Um, you know, vanity metrics and things like that. Ultimately, I think it comes down to, in order for marketing to have a seat at the, the board table is to start speaking the language of the boardroom to start speaking the language of the CFO, the CEO, does the CFO care how many impressions you had got if he sees the pipeline is as stale as it's always been. Um, because at your next budget meeting, regardless of if your ads, frontline metrics are looking very good, he's pulling that revenue, he's going to pull that budget if, if it's not leading to pipeline, uh, so you've got to, I think as marketers, we've got to pull ourselves out of this, uh, box. The, I think we've probably put ourselves into, we tried to prove our worth with things that aren't the same, um, as the rest of the business are talking about. Um, I think we get, we challenge other things, you know, we look at sales and we potentially challenge the sales team rather than working alongside them, which, you know, rather than being, um, and I think we'll come on to this. I think later the companies that are successful, the other ones that aren't putting those frictions in place, they are working together holistically. They're working cross departmental, um, even cross channel, you know, they haven't got independent channels running independent activity. They're talking to each other. They're running a coherent messaging, coherent positioning.

Haydn Woods-Williams • 10:33

Yeah.

Rich Harper • 10:33

if I'm answering your question or if I'm going off on a bit of a tangent,

Haydn Woods-Williams • 10:36

but... No, no, no, it's good. And it kind of leads me to some stats that I was reading from CGS Nexus, particularly around those kind of customer expectations. Now, I think it was saying that in a 2026 customer experience survey, 76% of customers expect personalization and 74% become frustrated when they have to repeat information to a brand. Now, it would be interesting to see those numbers broken down by kind of consumer and B2B. But looking at this from a marketer's point of view, surely that means when we're thinking about something like CJO, we're starting to have to think about like growing a tech stack and investing in loads of tooling. Is that the case or is there a way that you can do this without having to make a big kind of investment and over complication of your tech stack?

Rich Harper • 11:33

Yeah, I think there's plenty of things that are available to you in your existing stack and lots of those things potentially don't cost money. If we're thinking from a digital perspective, we could look at, you know, GA4, we could look at Google Search Console, we can utilize free tools like say Microsoft Clarity where we can look at heat maps, we can look at scroll maps, we can see what behaviors are happening on someone's site. And that's where that CRO bit comes in to CGO that you asked in the first question. It's ultimately about, as I say, looking at the moments that matter, not every single touch point. And within those moments that matter, where is the friction? that first friction point, look to improve that. Don't try to do everything all at once. Don't try to over complicate things. Don't try to over personalize every single touch point because it comes a bit creepy, you know, ultimately look at the two or three big things that are going to have the biggest commercial impact. Fix those first and then work your way through that, that journey. There's always going to be friction points. There's always going to be handoffs. There's always going to be moments in that journey that don't go as smooth as possible, but you do your best to map that out so that you, I guess, get rid of the unexpected as much as you can. And customers, sorry, not customers, businesses that we talk a lot about, and we've talked a lot about this in the podcast, customer centricity and being a customer first organization. How can you say if you are a proper customer first organization, if you are not doing this type of activity, if you are not putting yourself in the customer's shoes, thinking like the customer, not like a marketer, how they are interacting with your brand and test your hypotheses. When you're mapping this stuff out, test it, ask focus groups to run through those points. Don't make assumptions. Um, based the, the, the, the decisions that you make at each of those touch points on evidence, um, and then make decisions based on that. And I think any board going back to your question before CFO, if you explain the rationale behind you doing this, because it's going to improve this, which is going to improve the bottom line or the pipeline, they're going to tell you to invest the time in that all day long. If you say I'm doing this because we're fluffy marketers and we like to just make, you know, make stuff up, but it's not steeped with any evidence data. And I don't know what it's going to drive. Of which, you know, let's, let's face it. There's, there's, there's a lot of marketing teams out there that are doing stuff like that.

Haydn Woods-Williams • 14:30

Yeah, completely. I mean, we are all blessed with the, uh, the fluffy ship marketer title Because of the fact that like so many people in this kind of profession are, are unable to do it. They're fluffy shit marketers. I didn't want to say it. I didn't want to say it. Hey, I probably been a fluffy shit marketer myself at some point.

Rich Harper • 15:01

We've probably all fallen foul of it at some point in time. I don't think any of us are, are perfect. I'm not even claiming to say that I'm not going to do some of that fluffy shit in the future. But I think as a marketing profession, we have to start taking ourselves seriously. What, why are we the only kind of profession where it's okay to become a marketer without really any formal training? Why is it okay for everyone across the business to have an opinion about what, what is good marketing or what's bad marketing? I can't walk into an account's office and say your account's bad because I'm not a trained accountant. I don't know what they do. Well, I do kind of know what they do, but I wouldn't be able to do it myself. And Tom makes a funny face there because I am one of those marketers that has been in marketing for 20 years and didn't go into it trained. So I have built my evidence on the job. However, having in more recent years done some more formal training, I would say. you become a better marketer if you know the, you know, the theory behind it. Not to say that, yeah, it's wrong to go in untrained, but I think marketers that train in marketing become better marketers.

Haydn Woods-Williams • 16:14

Completely. And if you're sat here listening to this podcast, then you are someone who is clearly trying to improve your knowledge in marketing that was, so, you know, you're doing the right thing. Um, but yeah, I completely agree. Getting that training is, is, is massive in, in understanding, um, how everything kind of connect and work together.

Tom Inniss • 16:32

This is an audio podcast, nobody would have known I'd pulled a face, Rich. I know, but it likes to bring some personality to it. Owning your lack of previous experience. I think it's a very good point that you've had 20 years now of experience, so you have seen what works, what hasn't worked, and you do the testing, you do that development, building upon what you've seen previously, rather than just going, "Well, it didn't work, try it again, different."

Rich Harper • 16:59

Yeah, and I think it's okay and I'm hopefully humble enough to look back and go, you know, I've made multiple mistakes in my career that I've had to learn from. Would I have made as many mistakes if I'd trained earlier? Who knows? Would I have had the same experience? I don't know. But ultimately I think the experience and the training has made me better at my profession. And the grip. I think it's okay to admit where you've had failures.

Haydn Woods-Williams • 17:34

It's good. It's good. And even after doing training, we're turning this into a training podcast. Even after doing that, you're going to make those mistakes as well. I'm going to stop that conversation there because I do want to bring us back to C to the J to the O. Going back to the practicalities of CJO, two kind of conjoined questions. If again, and I'm talking from this perspective of someone who doesn't have that sophisticated a setup of marketing, right? If you are in that position, what two or three things that you should start with when looking at CJO and mapping out that customer journey optimization? And secondly, should it be two or three things or should it be nine or ten things?

Rich Harper • 18:25

Like I said, don't overcomplicate it. Look for two to three moments.

Haydn Woods-Williams • 18:32

I want specifics. I want specifics.

Rich Harper • 18:34

You want specifics. So for me, build the evidence base. So start with diagnosis, establish where the friction is in the journey, why that may be and what impact it is having on the business. So think about auditing that customer journey. So this is not just about drawing a linear map and putting it aside. This is about properly going into depth, auditing the journey, finding the friction, potentially speaking to customers, getting their feedback as to why that friction point exists. Use analytics to build a picture of it. Like I say, build the evidence, think like a customer, not a marketer, and then move that into action. So from your diagnosis, you then create an action plan. What am I going to do to reduce the friction here? How am I going to fix it? And then map that to metrics that matter in the business. How does fixing this problem drive pipeline? How does fixing this problem improve our lead flow? Whatever it may be, those kind of the three stages for me started from scratch, build the evidence, put the fix in place. What does it drive in terms of an outcome?

Haydn Woods-Williams • 19:52

And if I'm, if I'm looking at that and going, cool, that all sounds amazing. But what's on my journey? I don't even know where to start. What are three things that I can look at and say, that's probably on my journey. That's probably on my journey. That's probably on my journey.

Rich Harper • 20:07

I think you can use your, use your initiative in this. You, you run a business where you're a marketing manager for a business. Hopefully you have designed, you have touch points that, you know, you know, your website is a touch point. You know, that your bricks and mortar store is a touch point. You know, that people are going to pick the phone up and they're going to inquire, that's a touch point. You may have an AI wizard on your website that is providing instant help. You know, these touch points exists already. So when people say, I don't know where to start, you know, there is some sort of customer journey happening. You know, you're running a social media profile. You know, that you're running Google ads. You know, that you've got an ad in a newspaper, you know, at some point someone's going to inquire, hopefully. And at some point that inquiry is going to lead somewhere. Is it you that deals with it? If you're a small business, do you have to hand it to the owner? Do you have to hand it to a sales team? Do you have a customer service team that are going to take it over? You know, these touch points exist. Start with one of the most obvious ones. There's going to be multiple journeys a customer takes. Map it out linear to start with, and then start to think, okay, if the linear journey is ad, website inquiry. Okay. That's one journey. There could be social media. How does that then link into the journey? Then start to almost diagram that out. Then start to look back across that journey and go, okay, where is the biggest problem, where is the biggest fallout? Is it from my analytics that I'm getting no traffic to my website? So it's irrelevant. My traffic's shit hot. It's brilliant, but no one's ever seen it. So no one's going to inquire. So there's no conversion issue. There's a prior point in the journey. That's the friction point. Once you've kind of got this mapped out and you understand where the issue lies, then go away, analyze that point, provide the fix, and then link it to what's important to the business. And like you said, at the start, there's going to be lots and lots of journeys. I probably just read out a bunch of touch points all in one go. Don't start with all of them. Pick one, pick one area that you know is weak. Um, fix that, but prioritize. If there's multiple weaknesses in that customer journey, then prioritize them. You've done your evaluation, you've done your diagnosis and you've identified. The priority is one, two, three, four, five. Start with one. Fix that. see what implements that, what changes that makes, then move on to the next friction point. Don't try to do everything all at once. Don't try to overcomplicate things. And I think ultimately, like I said, back it up with evidence. Don't make assumptions that this is wrong if you don't have the data to back it up.

Tom Inniss • 22:59

How do you make the decision between fixing a touch point and killing off a touch point. If you've got all of these different touch points they must come with either there's got to be an opportunity cost to managing them either financial or time. So is there a point at which you go I'm going to kill this? How much time do you spend investing trying to fix it first? How does that work?

Rich Harper • 23:23

I think ultimately when you're putting together that diagnosis you have to answer those questions. Is the value of fixing that touch point greater than or less than the effort that's going to take to fix it. Um, if the effort, the value is greater than the effort, it would make sense to go, this is a touch point that has a large value attached to it, i.e. this can increase pipeline, or we're going to get more leads or whatever it may be. If we fix this touch point and the effort to put into this is outweighed by the value that we get back, then my recommendation is that you put the effort in to fix that friction point. If the effort to fix that touch point and the value that you're going to get from the other end of that is lower. And it's not going to drive real business change. Then in terms of your priority list, do you leave it as because that friction isn't driving anything through the backend, or is it just get pushed down your priority list to focus on later? when you fix the more priority touch points.

Tom Inniss • 24:34

Does that make sense? Ish, I kind of feel like what you've just described there is the decision matrix, but that's the decision that every business is going to have to make, is investing in this gonna outweigh the cost? Whereas, I suppose what I was digging at more was how do you make those evaluations? Obviously it needs to outweigh, but how do you assess that? What metrics are you looking for specifically if it's not working?

Rich Harper • 25:01

It could be a long answer there because it depends on what touch point we're referring to. If it's example, we're spending money on paid ads and we aren't getting any leads or traffic from those ads, there's going to be a certain set of metrics that we're going to analyze and try to diagnose what the problem is. for example, the biggest friction point we find is in customer service, then we're going to be diagnosing a different set of metrics as to ascertain what that problem may be. An example I was going to touch on was the AI chatbot. I go onto someone's website, we work a lot with B2B tech SaaS companies, something's wrong with my platform, I'm going to jump on live chat, this is not really live and there, lovely AI bots going to come back to me, isn't going to answer my question. It's going to send me to a bunch of help pages that don't give me the answer I want.

Haydn Woods-Williams • 26:00

Then you already found on Google earlier.

Rich Harper • 26:02

Which I've already found. Yeah. In AI overview or AI mode on Google. Then I'm going to say, put me through to a, um, agent and he's going to say, yeah, no worries, then I'm going to wait 10 minutes for an agent to come on. And then the agent is going to go, hello, what can I help you with today? You're like, can you not read the AI chat that we've just had? Nope. You're going to tell me all over again. No, you know, that is a, that is a friction point that exists in B2B SaaS companies and arguably pretty big SaaS friction point in my opinion. And that may be an existing customer, which case you've now given them a bad customer experience. Might be a new customer that wants to buy from you and you've just given them a bad customer experience. So this is where, you know, what I'm saying is evaluate that touch point. Doesn't always have to drive revenue or something like that, but that could be a big friction point that is costing you business in the long run.

Haydn Woods-Williams • 26:59

I love that you're talking about touch points here, by the way, because it's something that I don't think enough people in marketing talk about, like we, we talk about marketing channels and marketing assets and campaigns, but actually like if you consider everything you do in marketing as a touch point, Whether that's Steve from sales, like bumping into someone at a conference or whether that's, you know, a chatbot or whether that's, you know, if you're a high street shop walking past the shop, like all of those things are marketing touch points. And I love that you're talking about that. I think you've, you've, you've actually given, despite mine and Tom's kind of niggling, you've given a really nice summary and also kind of almost quite action oriented thing. I feel like someone could listen to this and go away and actually start doing this, even in a really, really basic form without investing in tools, without investing in anything. I think that's really, really powerful. Just to wrap us up, what I'd really like to know or hear about is, do you have any customer stories from here or from elsewhere, or examples of companies who've done this really, really well and seen big growth?

Rich Harper • 28:13

I always love this question when you drop it in.

Haydn Woods-Williams • 28:18

Well, this one, this one requires preparation.

Rich Harper • 28:22

Yeah. It's always one that you have to think about. And when you put me on the spot and I obviously do lots of prep for these calls, always leads me a little bit tongue tied. I'm not a customer of mine, but I love, I love how, you know, streaming services, Disney Plus, Netflix are kind of managing that customer journey at the moment. That's where that kind of personalization in the algorithm works in terms of keep you tied in, you know, they hopefully are servicing programs, films that meet what you want to see. They think about those moments that matter like physically and digitally, you know, they identify the friction points, you know, payments, I guess, how you potentially can, maybe they introduce friction points sometimes as well, you know, operating on multiple devices, can I watch this on my phone or my TV, smart TV on my X-Box. So I do quite like the way that, yeah, you know, the likes of Netflix and stuff keep you pretty occupied within the platform. Terms of our own customers, we're actually doing this currently with a client of ours who work in the affiliate marketing space, we are working with them on a particular journey from paid media to sign up, but we are looking at those touch points throughout that journey. So not just being an agency that are being asked to execute the Google spend. We are optimizing that front end Google spend. We have then recommended landing pages and landing page experiences, and we are A/B testing those landing page experiences. But then we've also worked with them on their user flow in terms of signup. So they had a six stage signup process before. How can we simplify that? Does it need to be six stages? Now, sometimes, you know, especially in the, in the example I'm giving of this customer, they do need those stages. It maps to their signup process. Unfortunately, we would normally recommend reducing the amount of stages down in a signup form. Sometimes there are valid reasons why there needs to be these steps and they have those valid reasons. But how do we make sure that during those six steps, it's as frictionless as possible to move between one and the next. If they say something is you're going to get a free 30 day trial, don't then ask them for their credit card at the end, in the last step. Be transparent. We are going to ask for your credit card because we're going to move you after the 30 day trial period ends, you're going to move into a pay plan, which is, I think, fine. If you're transparent and upfront, you get it on...

Haydn Woods-Williams • 31:17

People don't have surprises.

Rich Harper • 31:18

Yeah. You buy a new iPhone, Apple say, "Hey, here's three months of Apple TV for free. the way, it will roll into an active subscription at the end of those three months if you don't cancel and you sign up with your card. Okay. You've told me upfront we're okay with that. So I think it's like with this customer, it's trying to go, that is a potential friction point. You're going to get someone five stages through and then ask for their bank details when you've never told them once during this journey, that is a likely drop off point in your customer journey. So let's fix that. If it has to be in there, great, but let's be upfront about it. So those examples.

Haydn Woods-Williams • 31:57

Yeah. I remember you talking to me as well about some work we did with the Marketing Society. We were working with SignUpFlow as a kind of similar thing.

Rich Harper • 32:05

Yeah. With the Marketing Society, it was about, obviously they have a membership platform. They have a three-tiered membership platform, not uncommon. get a basic tier and you get this middle tier, which is the one that everyone puts, you know, the highlighted box around saying most people go for this and then maybe it's like the higher one. Um, what the market and society were getting wrong was that they weren't clearly demonstrating the value of each different tier. Um, they were listing out like a lot of people do. This is what you get in this one, this one, and this one. And then they were just almost masking out, graying out the bits that you weren't getting in the cheaper tier, the middle tier, et cetera. But from a, from a customer's perspective, if you read down it, it was, I'm really not entirely sure why I would pay you more money, uh, because it looks exactly the same throughout. So what they found was most people would sign up to, uh, the cheaper option. And then in terms of the full end to end customer journey is once someone was signed up, they weren't seeing the value during the period that they were signed up in their contract, their membership after 12 months, then ceases. And they have a high term rate of people, not because they don't provide value, but because they're not demonstrating what they're saying up front in the signup process with them, what they're delivering throughout the experience for members. Um, so it's about just, this is what I'm saying. The customer touch point is a continuous cycle and it's not, Oh, they've become a customer now it ends. You know, there's then a customer journey that exists beyond them signing a contract. What does it look like in terms of delivery? Uh, if you're a SAS product, what does it look like in terms of, you know, platform access, um, when issues arise, whether you need to speak to someone, renew at renewal time, what does that look like? Do you not speak to an account manager for 12 months? And then they reach out to you at the end of the year and go, Hey, you're going to renew it. It's going to cost you 15% more than it did last year. You know, these are all touch points in a customer journey that could potentially provide friction that should be addressed and looked at if you are truly a customer centric organization.

Haydn Woods-Williams • 34:15

Yeah. And we'll wrap up now, but I'm going to finish on, do you know what the increase in new members was?

Rich Harper • 34:22

Uh, I think if there's a great case study about it on our website, it was something like tenfold.

Haydn Woods-Williams • 34:32

It was 300%. 300. this all this optimization work drove a 300% increase in new members. Yeah, mic drop. It works. That is all we have time for today. A huge thank you to Rich for joining us and chatting through CJO, CRO, and a little bit of training as well thrown in for good luck. If you've taken even one tiny thing from today's conversation. And if you're listening, I think that's a pretty big thing to take away and go and do from this conversation, then we've done our job. Please go and do something with it. If you've enjoyed the show, the best thing you can do for us is to go and recommend it to at least one person that you do think would get something out of it. It goes a massive way to helping us get more people listening to the pod. Make sure you're subscribed wherever you listen and go and check out our back catalogue if today was your first time with us there is loads more like this. Thank you to the Brew Digital team for their research, Tom for having to edit my chaos, I've been Hayden, that's Tom and these guys are the Marketers of the Universe. Tom! What is that? I have no idea what that is. Blooey.