Customer Journey Analytics: Understanding and Improving Experiences

Organizations often collect large amounts of customer data, including how customers discovered their website and how quickly they purchased it. Analyzing this data helps them improve their personalization efforts and build robust features. 

But how do you gather all the data in one place? Customer journey analytics helps you resolve this issue by bringing together all the customer data for reporting. 

Customer journey analytics provides accurate customer insights across different channels and devices. Every business, whether in the technology, healthcare, or finance sector, must know how customers engage with its product or service.

These insights can help businesses increase revenue and foster customer loyalty and trust. The global customer journey analytics market was valued at USD 4.16 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach USD 10.08 billion by 2032 (Source: Fortune Business Insights).

This article explores customer journey analytics, its key benefits in improving customer experience, and how it differs from journey mapping. It also provides examples of how customer journey data can be used to optimize customer interactions.

What is Customer Journey Analytics?

Customer journey analytics is primarily designed to thoroughly and rapidly analyze the entire customer experience, regardless of how or where they interact with your company. The foundational step in customer journey analysis is creating a customer journey map, a visual representation of the stages the customer has undertaken. 

Customer journey data includes, but is not limited to, the analysis of customer satisfaction scores, needs, and effort scores. It offers insights into customer performance, enabling companies to identify pain points and understand customer expectations easily.

Customer journey analytics can be implemented using advanced technologies such as machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and similar customer journey data science tools. Companies commonly adopt this approach to leverage real-time customer data to make strategic decisions. 

Tredence provides customer analytics services to organizations in different industries such as healthcare, retail, telecom, travel, and hospitality. Its AI-powered customer journey analytics solution, Sage CX, helps create customer journey maps and derive impactful insights from your customer feedback signals. 

The true power of customer journey analytics lies in its ability to integrate all sources of customer interaction data and analyze them quickly as a unified whole. Working with data and customer journey analytics can be summarized in three foundational steps:

• Connections: Connections enable you to add many datasets into a single data bucket. You can add multiple analytics datasets or any other type of data, such as survey data and call center data.
• Data Views: It allows you to define how to interpret all your collected data. This is where you define your dimensions and metrics for easy reporting.
• Projects: You can use the data view to create visualizations that provide a deeper understanding of the connected data, utilizing the four basic components: dimensions, metrics, filters, and data ranges. You can efficiently build simple or sophisticated analyses to answer various questions you or your stakeholders may have.

Simply put, customer journey analytics reframes and measures the success of your messaging at each key stage of the customer journey. Resolving issues at the initial stage is crucial to preventing customer churn. In essence, retaining existing customers is cost-effective and can increase profits by 25 percent to 95 percent (Source: HubSpot).

To improve business operations, companies must know their customers' journey and where they face issues. Earlier, they could only analyze web behavior, but with the advent of powerful platforms and applications, companies can now easily measure customer journeys. 

But how can you benefit from investing in customer journey analytics? It is important to understand and gain knowledge about the customer journey. You need to be well-versed about your campaign and its awareness among the people. You can then measure your efforts using this framework. 

Companies may struggle and abandon their customer journey campaigns midway if they do not see immediate revenue despite the campaigns functioning effectively. However, understanding the purpose of your customer journey can help you overcome this problem.

The success of a customer journey analytics platform can be measured in several ways, two of which include effectively integrating the customer journey into your operations and evaluating your efforts based on your company’s framework. 

The data needs to be organized to support your objectives, allowing you to assess how effective your content is at moving your customers through the milestones you have created for them. 

Why Do You Need Customer Journey Analytics?

Improving customer experience can make it easier for companies to approach their customers, ultimately leading to a successful purchase. However, it is not easy to make customer communication seamless. 

Companies are leaning toward powerful platforms that allow them to extract meaningful information. Insights from these platforms can help you validate how effective your touchpoints have been. 

Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics provides organizations with tools to identify and visualize their overall customer journey. The platform helps them obtain real-time insights into customer behavior across various channels. It also enables businesses to evaluate the accuracy of their touchpoints to make strategic decisions (Source: Gartner).

Data from mapping can make way for deeper customer journey analysis using current and relevant data. By leveraging the power of mapping and analytics, you can better understand the customer journey and implement a practical strategy.

The data-driven approach gives you customized observations for your target customer base. Besides this, you can also obtain immediate alerts, enabling you to resolve issues swiftly.

Customer journey analytics can also help you gather customer journey requirements by combining and evaluating data from different touchpoints. This data can assist various teams across departments, such as sales, tech, and even marketing.

Lastly, you can scale your data analysis and measure the micro and macro customer journeys, which will give you personalized insights according to your business objectives.

How to Use Customer Journey Analytics?

Customer journey analytics involves identifying and analyzing a customer's journey from the moment they engage with your platform until they exit. This process may seem straightforward; however, it involves collecting significant data throughout the journey.

The process of analyzing the data includes collecting, aggregating, evaluating, and finally, extracting insights about a specific customer’s behavior, experience, and preferences. 

Let us discuss the three key steps for implementing customer journey analysis.

• Use Right Analytics Tools: Since all your data resides in the digital space, you will need a robust tool stack to track and analyze it effectively. You need a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform to assimilate all your data into one single place. Other tools that you would need are:

. Product analysis platform
. Social media monitoring tool
. Survey tool
. Web analytics tool
. Heat Mapping tool
. Session recording tool
. Journey mapping tool

• Map Customer Data: You need to determine the different points of contact your customers communicate with throughout their journey. The touchpoints can be paid ads, sign-up/registration forms, or the landing page. You need to analyze websites, applications (both mobile and desktop), social media applications, emails, and even offline activities such as store purchases and customer service.
• Collect Customer Data: Your customer data is quantitative and collected through web and product analytics tools. Web analytics allows you to track customer behavior on your website through page views and clicks, while product analytics helps you understand how your customers interact with your product.
• Analyze Customer Behaviour: Once you have collected and gathered your data in a centralized platform or database, you can move on to the next step, revealing actionable insights. Several advanced analytic techniques, such as machine learning and statistical analysis, can be used to determine patterns and correlations. 
  Analyzing qualitative data can be challenging and time-consuming, as extracting important observations from the captured data is hard. However, several platforms offer tools and solutions that help companies automatically implement qualitative data analysis.
• Take Action: You can now leverage the data collected to improve your customer journey. This includes enhancing your website, optimizing user experience, creating better campaigns, or adapting to a more robust customer service.
• Test Various Flows: You have made improvements, but how would you determine if the changes that you have made have improved customer experience? You would not know until you have tried and tested it out with real customers.

Implementing your strategy across the entire customer base may be risky, but a safer approach would be to run A/B tests and validate the results before rolling them out. A/B testing can help you compare which strategy works better and is effective for your conversion rates.

Benefits of Customer Journey Analytics

Customer journey analytics can give you valuable insights to enhance your customer experience. However, gaining a better understanding of your data is just the tip of the iceberg. Below are some benefits of using customer journey analytics for your platform:

• Understanding of Customers: Understanding how customers interact and what emotions influence their decisions can be pivotal in your planning. By gathering and aggregating this data, you gain more than surface-level knowledge of your customers; you uncover deeper insights into their preferences, emotions, and behaviors.  

• Finding Issues: Customers often drop out midway. However, you will better know customers' time on your website or what influenced them to lose interest through customer journey analytics.

• Optimizing Customer Journey: Once you have a clear view of your customer's pain points, you can take a step back and plan strategically. By crafting a well-rounded strategy, you can optimize the customer journey to ensure it aligns seamlessly with your business goals.

• Improving ROI: It is important to measure the ROI of your campaigns, as it will allow you to analyze and cut costs where necessary. For example, if you run an expensive advertisement with no measurable benefit, you can halt the ads and redirect your investment toward more effective strategies.

Having broad knowledge about your customers' journeys, such as how they interact with your product and what influences them to purchase, can help you further strategize your campaigns.

Customer Journey Analytics vs. Customer Journey Mapping 

Customer journey analytics is often confused with customer journey mapping. Under customer journey mapping, you can visualize customer journey stages from the beginning to the end. Conversely, customer journey analytics gives you information about how a customer interacts at each stage.

Let us look at some of the differences between customer journey analytics and customer journey mapping:

Customer journey mapping can be considered a bridge between mapping and analytics. It builds a simple, easy-to-understand visual narrative. On the other hand, customer journey analytics can be used to optimize customer experience. It assesses a situation and provides measurements in the areas where they are most needed.

Customer journey mapping also includes the following steps:

• Buying Method: It can estimate customers’ purchasing methods by pulling in information from Content Management Systems (CMS) and other prospecting platforms. 

• Customer Emotions: Understanding how a customer feels can help you develop loyalty and form deeper customer relationships. 33 percent of customers prioritize being treated with empathy when interacting with companies. This underscores the importance of emotional intelligence in building trust (Source: Qualtrics). 

• Customer Actions: You can identify detailed actions that customers perform in their journey. 

• Customer Challenges: You can add pain points to the customer journey map. This will give you a clearer picture of the obstacles the customer has or may face.

• Customer Solutions: Once you identify the challenges, resolving them can help ensure a smoother customer experience. The information and insights you have gathered can help you implement effective solutions. 

Customer journey maps can be considered the outline of your artwork, while customer analytics represents the final version. Once the artwork is displayed in the gallery, the audience’s feedback helps you refine it and create an even better piece in the future. 

How Can Customer Journey Analytics Improve Customer Experience?

Several companies use customer journey analytics to build loyalty and guarantee product or service satisfaction. Large companies like Salesforce, IBM, SAP, and Adobe leverage it to understand and optimize customer journeys. 

Listed below are some important customer journey analytics features that will enable you to enhance your customer experience:

• Identifying Patterns: Customer journey analytics helps businesses identify patterns in audience behavior.

• Analyzing Pain Points: It reveals pain points in customer experience, such as pages or products that customers find difficult to use. 

• Enhancing Personalization: Customer journey analytics provides insights into an individual's preferences, such as which products or services they purchase. 

• Improving Customer Retention: Audience behavior data can help businesses identify customer churn patterns and take the right actions.

• Increasing ROI: It helps businesses make data-driven decisions that ultimately increase revenue and ROI.

Using these tools ensures that your customers get a more engaging, tailored, and seamless experience. 

Examples of Customer Journey Analytics

Various industries, from retail and travel to healthcare and financial services, can leverage customer journey analytics to address different use cases and enhance customer experiences. 

Below are a few examples of how customer journey analytics can make an impact in terms of operations and customer experience:

Retail

• Measure App Usage: Brands can easily track a customer’s mobile usage. Given this insight, they can devise an improvised strategy to develop a user-friendly platform.

• Increase Conversion Rate: Companies can easily quantify not just the feature usage but also the impact. 

• Reduce Churn: Often, it is difficult for companies to discover friction points, resulting in customer churn. However, with customer journey analytics, companies can identify barriers and analyze at-risk customers, allowing them to take proactive measures (Source: Experience League).

Healthcare

• Improve Patient Health: Customer journey analytics can help organizations determine how many users engage with them and how many have stopped doing so.

• Evaluate Cross-channel Actions: A healthcare organization may wish to analyze how active customers use its plan and tailor its messages accordingly. These insights can help create an effective and personalized strategy. 

• Immediate Reports: Organizations may require real-time data to make informed decisions. Customer journey analytics can provide the answers they need more quickly and simplify the process of reporting critical information (Source: Experience League).

Thus, customer journey analytics streamlines your operations, helps you make impactful decisions, and creates a seamless experience for your customers. Using data such as customer behavior, website clicks, and engagement time, you can improve your strategy and develop a customer experience that drives results.

Creating Seamless Customer Experiences with Tredence’s Advanced Solutions

Companies often struggle to meet customer demands. However, platforms offering customer journey analytics can help them address issues more effectively and improve their overall customer experience strategy.

Gaining valuable insights from analytics can also help you determine customer pain points, build better features, and strategize your campaign based on your goals. Customer journey analytics will continue to grow, as it has enabled organizations to reduce customer churn, optimize their applications, and ultimately drive better customer outcomes.

Tredence’s customer journey solution uses advanced NLP and ML algorithms to analyze the root cause of your customer experience challenges. You can extract valuable insights from customer journey maps, identify problem areas, and refine your strategy to align with your business goals. 

Tredence’s prowess in customer behavior intelligence using advanced data science models guarantees a 360-degree view of your customers, enabling strategic decision-making and improved customer engagement. 

Contact Tredence today to optimize your customer journey analytics.

FAQs

1. What is the role of B2B data in customer journey analytics?

B2B data provides insights into buyer behavior, preferences, and touchpoints, enabling businesses to map and optimize the customer journey for better engagement and conversions.

2. What types of data are analyzed in customer journey analytics?

Customer journey analytics examines transactional data, behavioral data, customer feedback, engagement metrics, and demographic information across multiple channels.

3. What challenges do companies face in implementing customer journey analytics?

Key challenges include data silos, integrating data from multiple sources, ensuring data accuracy, and leveraging insights effectively to personalize customer experiences.

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Tredence