When most businesses talk about improving customer experience, they reach for the big, shiny ideas:
Those projects can be exciting, but they often miss the fastest path to ROI.
The truth? Real ROI in customer experience often hides in the small, high-impact moments of the customer journey, the ones where a tiny improvement can mean millions in retained revenue, reduced operational cost, or increased lifetime value.
Customer journey maps are fantastic tools. They show the complete landscape — every touchpoint, every stage, every emotion.
But many teams make the same mistake: They spread their budget and energy across the whole journey equally.
Lots of minor tweaks that make a journey look cleaner on paper, but little measurable business impact.
If you want ROI, you need to play a different game. You need to identify the conversion-critical moments and double down on them.
From our work improving customer portals, self-service applications, and AI-driven support experiences, we’ve found three moments that consistently yield the biggest gains when optimised.
Think about it:
A new customer has signed up for your portal or self-service app. They’ve shown intent. They’ve said, “I’m willing to invest my time.”
If they encounter confusion, too many steps, jargon-heavy instructions, or a login issue, they leave. Often forever.
Why it matters:
Practical example:
A financial services client we worked with had a 38% drop-off rate during account setup. By introducing a 3-step guided onboarding flow with inline help and progress indicators, we cut that in half, and support calls about “how to get started” fell by 45%.
Quick wins for onboarding:
Every customer journey has points of friction, the moments where people hesitate, get stuck, or second-guess.
In portals and self-service apps, these are often:
Why it matters:
Practical example:
For a retail client’s returns portal, the return rate wasn’t the problem; completion was. 24% of users abandoned the process mid-way.
The culprit? A poorly worded dropdown asking for a reason for return. By rephrasing the options in customer-friendly language and adding an “I’m not sure” choice, completion jumped to 92%.
Quick wins for moments of struggle:
Retention is the quiet powerhouse of ROI. Yet many businesses treat renewals or repeat orders as “business as usual”, assuming customers will simply come back.
The reality:
Practical example:
A SaaS platform we worked with had a 3-step renewal process hidden deep in account settings. By surfacing a one-click “Renew” button on the dashboard and sending a proactive, personalised reminder email, renewal rates increased by 18% worth over £1.2M in annual recurring revenue.
Quick wins for renewals:
The real magic comes when you merge data (to find the problem) with design thinking (to solve it).
Data tells you:
UX design fixes it by:
One client project saw a 5% lift in activation rate just by reducing the steps in a core self-service flow.
That doesn’t sound huge, but across millions of annual transactions, the compounding revenue gain was enormous.
When applied thoughtfully, AI can magnify the impact of journey optimisation:
But the same rules apply: if the underlying journey is flawed, AI just automates the friction.
How to Find Your Hidden ROI Points:
The customer journey is full of potential improvement points, but not all are equal.
If you want to see measurable ROI, identify the moments that make or break the relationship and focus your energy on those areas.
You don’t need a complete rebuild to get results. Sometimes the biggest wins come from the smallest, smartest changes, the kind your customer might not even notice, but your bottom line will.
We help businesses find and fix their highest-impact journey moments, often delivering measurable ROI in weeks.
Book a Customer Journey Impact Audit and uncover where your real returns are hiding.
