Finding customer journey pain points, on and off your website

Key takeaways

Customer journey pain points are the moments where buyers struggle, wait, doubt or give up, on your website or off it. Find them in four places: customer conversations, your inbox, analytics and recordings. Rank them by how many buyers they affect and what they cost, and fix the ones closest to the decision first. Many of the worst sit just after the website.

• A pain point is where buyers struggle, wait, doubt or give up.
• Find them in interviews, inbox questions, GA4 drop-offs and recordings.
• Rank by buyers affected x value lost.
• Check the steps after the form: slow replies are a common pain point.

What is a customer journey pain point?

A customer journey pain point is any moment where a buyer experiences effort, uncertainty, delay or frustration that makes them more likely to give up or choose someone else. Some are on the website, such as a missing price or a long form. Many are off it, such as an unanswered phone or a vague quote. Pain points are where journeys break.

• How to design a website around your customer journey
• Website friction: the small obstacles that stop enquiries

What are common pain points for small business customers?

Common pain points cluster around four themes: not finding basic answers, not trusting the business enough, too much effort to get in touch, and waiting too long afterwards. The same handful appear across most UK small businesses, whatever the sector.

• No price guidance, so buyers cannot judge if you are in range.
• Unclear service area or availability.
• No proof from customers like them.
• Long or broken forms, or no phone number on mobile.
• No idea what happens after they enquire.
• Slow or vague replies, and quotes that differ from the website.

• Answer buyer objections on your website before they ask
• Contact form best practices for more enquiries

How do you find pain points on your website?

Find website pain points by combining numbers with observation. GA4 funnel and path explorations show where visitors drop. Session recordings show what they were doing when they left: scrolling up and down, tapping things that do not respond, or hesitating at a form field. On-site surveys ask the ones leaving why.

• GA4 funnel exploration: find the step where buyers drop
• How to find where visitors leave your website
• Ask visitors why they did not enquire: on-site surveys

How do you find pain points off the website?

Find pain points off the website by asking customers about the whole journey and by testing it yourself. Call your own number at lunchtime. Submit your own form and time the reply. Read the last ten quotes as a buyer would. Ask customers what was slow or confusing after they got in touch. Many of the worst pain points live here.

• After the enquiry: designing the journey to the first call
• Customer interviews before a website project: what to ask

How do you decide which pain points to fix first?

Rank pain points by how many buyers they affect and how close they sit to the decision. A missing price on your busiest service page affects many buyers at the compare stage; a typo on the careers page affects few. Fix the high-volume, near-decision pain points first, and those that are cheap to fix.

• Volume: how many buyers pass this point each month?
• Proximity: how close is it to the enquiry or purchase?
• Severity: does it cause hesitation or abandonment?
• Cost to fix: hours of work or a rebuild?

• What a broken customer journey costs a UK business

When is a pain point not worth fixing?

A pain point is not worth fixing when it filters out buyers you do not want, such as a minimum order value that deters very small jobs, or when the fix costs more than the buyers it would win. Some effort is deliberate. Make sure it is chosen, explained on the site and not accidental.

What does this look like in practice?

A pattern we see in pain point reviews: the team is sure the problem is the website's design, and the evidence points to two dull issues. The mobile form's postcode field rejects valid postcodes with a space, and the confirmation email goes to spam. Neither shows in a design review.

Fixing both is quick, and buyers who were silently failing start getting through. Across our client work we have seen a 2.4x enquiry rate from conversion changes of this kind. Global Bridge Labs (GBL) tests the journey end to end before judging the design.

• See client work
• Website Design & Development for UK businesses

Pain point checklist

• Ask five customers what was hard, slow or unclear.
• Tally a month of repeated questions.
• Check GA4 funnel and path explorations for drop-offs.
• Watch ten session recordings at the biggest drop.
• Test your own phone, form and reply times.
• Rank by volume, proximity, severity and cost to fix.

• Customer effort score: how hard does your site make buying?

Next step

Pain points are easier to see from outside the business. We will walk your journey as a buyer, on and off the website, and rank what we find.