As the market and businesses evolve, customer interactions and customer journeys are becoming more complex with different touchpoints. In such a scenario, it is necessary that seamless customer engagement is provided.
This is why it is becoming important to attribute customer journeys well and improve the customer experience with customer journey analytics. So, we have made this customer journey analytics guide to help you get started.
What is Customer Journey Analytics?
Customer Journey Analytics is the process of analyzing and gaining insights on the impact of every customer interaction a specific customer carries out with your business. This often starts with a customer journey map, presented in the form of flowcharts, graphs or other visual representations of different stages of the customer’s relationship with your business.
But unlike a customer journey map, customer journey analytics helps you analyze the effect of each individual interaction from the customer and lets you understand how it impacts customer decisions and behavior.
Implementing customer journey analytics strategies also gives you an understanding of how each of these interactions drives customers towards the end stage, i.e., towards purchase.
Customer journey analytics will also include insight into:
- Customer’s emotional highs and lows
- Customer effort scores
- Customer satisfaction scores
- Customer needs
- Key metrics relating to each step in the customer journey and more.
By maximizing insights through journey analysis, you get a better understanding of customer pain points and lets you resolve them while allowing you to fine-tune customer experience based on data.
What is the difference between customer journey mapping and analytics?
Most brands often only have a broad sense of their customer and fail to optimize the journey by connecting the dots in customer journey mapping or by analyzing their customer experiences and understanding what affects them.
It should be understood that customer journey mapping and customer journey analytics, even though they are complementary processes, are different. Before we get into our customer journey analytics guide, let us have a look into what customer journey mapping is.
Customer Journey Mapping
Mapping out the customer journey from end to end is what we call customer journey mapping. You do this by mapping every single touchpoint in the customer experience. This will give you a comprehensive overview of the steps a customer takes towards actions like purchases, signups, support calls etc.
These are some of the components commonly seen in customer journey maps are:
- Different stages of the journey
- The process that is under evaluation
- Important touchpoints and customer interactions
- Key expectations of customers
- Key metrics like mention volume, NPS, and customer satisfaction scores
- Customer quotes
- Important trends in the topic related to the customer journey
Usually, customer journey mapping is done at the process level. For instance, in an insurance firm, the insurance provider will be mapping the claims process.
Using customer journey analytics with customer journey mapping
Customer journey analytics is simply put, the process of collecting all the information from every step of the journey and studying the pain points and successes of the journey.
By using customer analytics with customer journey mapping, you can understand which parts of the journey work how you want, and what obstacles hinder the progress of the customer towards the end goal.
Benefits of customer journey analytics
From better insight into customer behavior to better ROI, customer journey analytics has a lot of benefits. Let us take a look at them.
Makes for a customer-centric business
With a deeper understanding of the customer journey, your brand can become more customer-centric. You can evaluate your customers’ activities, track their expectations and understand their feelings to ensure that the customer is always at the centre. By connecting the dots in customer journey mapping and complementing it with customer journey analytics, you can assist customers through the journey and ultimately improve customer retention.
Real-time issue tracking
With a competent customer journey analytics tool, you can find and track issues in real time as they happen. Customer journey analytics also lets you test out alternative strategies and see how they influence the customer experience.
Streamline business across departments
By utilizing customer journey mapping and customer journey analytics, you can streamline your services across different departments within. Giving a common understanding of the customer experience across teams, helps you align everyone and provides them with a better visibility on what influences their interactions with customers have. As a result, you are able to improve the quality of customer experience.
View both direct and indirect feedback
You can track both the explicit and direct feedback as well as the implicit, and indirect feedback such as sales numbers, social media mentions, third-party reviews etc. There is no way of getting to know how the customer feels, thinks and acts based on customer interactions, without asking them. This is where tools such as customer journey analytics can come in handy.
How to calculate the value of customer journey analytics?
Tangible and realistic estimation of ROI is critical for any business, or any strategy for that matter and with customer journey analytics, you can easily understand various impacts on customer experience and its outcomes.
Customer Journey analytics helps you calculate value by comparing customer actions and end goals with relevant KPIs. This bridges the gap that existed between solid business benefits and improvements in metrics such as customer satisfaction score and net promoter score. In short, journey analytics assist businesses to translate customer experience into business outcomes, and utilize actionable insights for growth.
How to use customer journey analytics?
Customer journey analytics, if focused properly and implemented rightly, can significantly improve customer experience and ultimately, your churn rates as well. Businesses can foresee customer behavior, recognize patterns and use this behavioral data to build better customer experiences. But how do you use customer journey analytics? Here’s how.
1. Map customer journeys and aggregate data
The first step is to create a customer journey and collect your existing customer data. Having competent customer journey analytics tools will help you do this with ease. By employing journey analytics tools, you save your team’s time that would have otherwise been spent on obtaining data from service chat logs, survey results and third-party locations.
You can utilize a good analytics software that will track customer data for you in real time. With this, you can create an in-depth map of customer interactions and behavior. A good journey analytics tool will be able to collect data from different sources and offer insights into customer interactions across all areas of sales, marketing and support.
2. Analyze customer behavior and collected data
After mapping out your customer journeys and gathering all the relevant data, you can associate specific interactions with distinct customer behaviors, survey findings, social media feedback, and other related information. Knowing your customer is key to building highly performing, and seamless customer journeys and to streamline this process effectively, utilizing a customer journey analytics solution is essential.
3. Take data-driven and informed actions based on insights
By implementing customer journey analytics strategies, you can have a comprehensive view of the cause and effect of interactions. You can take further steps to change particular interactions, enhance the journey or completely change the entire journey. Negative reactions to processes or interactions can be studied so as to test out alternatives and see how new changes impact future customer actions.
Data-driven actions can be promoted across your team so as to improve customer satisfaction. By having everyone on page, it becomes easier to resolve problems and craft journeys that work seamlessly towards positive results. For instance, if a customer is dissatisfied with a purchase that they made through your marketing team, they will be going through your marketing, sales as well as support teams. If all of these teams are informed of the cause of the problem and are advised on the right action that needs to be taken, resolving the issue can be a seamless task.
Conclusion
Customer journey analytics can greatly enhance the quality of customer experience while also enabling you to identify behaviors that will increase operational costs.
For example, if a bank notices an increase in call volume from customers, they can utilize journey analytics to gain insight on customer actions that preceded the calls and hence can implement target fixes. Arvig, for instance, has been able to do precisely this, by using journey analytics to understand what causes customers to call, and further exploring alternate channels to address the issues.
In this customer journey analytics guide, we have discussed in detail how effective journey analytics and connecting the dots in customer journey mapping can be, in order to provide a seamless customer experience. Without the right tools, understanding what actions impact customer experience and estimating the return on investment on these actions can be difficult. This lack of a proper tool to track the impact of actions greatly handicaps your business from offering the finest experience.
Radarr and Genesys, together enable you to tap into real-time data that allows you to build improved customer journeys, while also utilizing analytics that are well-attributed to help you further optimize them.
