When you run a successful business, it’s easy to take customer relationships for granted. After all, you’re making sales and paying the bills, so you must be doing something right. Doing something right, however, doesn’t mean you aren’t doing anything wrong. Customer journey analytics helps you untangle the complexities of customer relationships. This arms you with a better understanding of each stage of a customer’s interaction with your business, so you can address the weakest links.
What is customer journey analytics about?
There’s a lot more to online business-customer interactions than just the moment of purchase. Customer journey analytics breaks these interactions down into stages called touchpoints.
Understanding each stage of the customer journey helps you to expose the obstacles and stressors they meet trying to engage with your brand. This is useful not just for dealing with the general public, but also as part of a B2B marketing sales funnel to engage potential clients and provide personalized experiences.
This analysis helps to contextualize issues you may have noticed, such as high bounce rates or numbers of carts abandoned. Of course, you won’t get far on guesswork, so you need reliable data.
Until recently, getting data on customer interactions has been difficult. In fact, survey stats published by Statista show that 31% of US business decision-makers rated lack of real-time customer insights as the biggest CX challenge facing their organizations.
The steps involved
This may seem complicated, but it’s actually quite straightforward. To give you a better understanding of what customer journey analytics is, let’s run through the basic steps you’ll need to follow.
1. Create a customer journey map
The customer journey map is an essential part of any data-driven sales strategy. That’s because it’s the bedrock of all your analytical efforts. Simply put, it’s a map of each touchpoint on the customer journey.
Let’s use the example of a B2B customer to get a basic sense of what the journey might include:
- Customer researches relevant businesses online and discovers your website
- Customer visits your site and social media accounts, and browses the various pages
- Customer clicks on your CTA button “Book a sales call”
- Customer enters their details and the call is booked
- Customer receives an email confirmation and calendar notification
- Salesperson calls the customer to discuss solutions
- Salesperson follows up with an email or a second call
- Customer goes ahead with the purchase
- Salesperson follows up with a thank-you message and invites the customer to leave feedback
2. Identify relevant data for each touchpoint
Simply identifying touchpoints isn’t very useful. It’s like making a geographical map without any detail. You need to include relevant data, such as:
- Which employees they interact with (such as tech support or front-facing staff)
- Time to complete a given task (e.g. finish an order checkout)
- Web stats (such as click-through and bounce rates, or devices used)
- Customer insights (reported pain points, misunderstandings or nice-to-haves)
Say you’re running a streaming service. There’s a lot of potentially useful data to keep track of. How long people spend choosing something to watch, whether they enable parental controls, or how often they set their subscription to renew, for example.
That’s all without considering your stable of content. Obviously, for the touchpoint of actually streaming things, the most important forms of data are what people watch, how consistently they make it to the end, and how well they review it.
It’s worth remembering that, according to a recent survey, 65% of customers have stopped doing business with a company after a poor experience, and 67% are telling others about it.
3. Collect and analyze your data
Even the best sales prospecting tools need relevant and organized data to be useful. Otherwise, what would those prospects be based on?
You need to establish your methods for data collection and analysis. To ensure consistency and accuracy in data handling, follow strict standard operating procedures (SOPs) for every stage of data collection and analysis. You’ll likely be collecting a few key types of data, such as:
- User data, which can include personal credentials and demographic info
- Interaction data, which details how they engage with your product or service
To get this data, you’ll have to rely on a few key sources, including data from the back-end of your website or app, and data from customer surveys and reviews.
Then you need to analyze it. Of course, you could just feed it all into a spreadsheet and comb through it manually. That said, it’s quicker and more effective to use a dedicated tool or algorithm (more on that later).
Additionally, understanding these engagement metrics can also help you better monetize your website. By identifying the most lucrative touchpoints and optimizing user interactions, you can enhance your site’s ability to generate revenue through targeted advertising, subscription models, or exclusive content offerings.
4. Update your journey map and test new insights
Once you’ve analyzed your data and turned it into actionable insights, you need to update your journey map. This provides a frame of reference for future CX interactions, meaning it’s the basis for how you track changes in customer behavior, or how they respond to changes in your service.
Got a new landing page and streamlined checkout service for your website? Monitor customer activity to see what changes. If your changes are working, you should see your bounce rate go down while your click-through and conversion rates rise.
The role of AI
Artificial intelligence is shaking up a lot of fields and industries, from marketing to HR to procurement. When it comes to the customer journey, things are no different. AI-powered tools such as chatbots, for example, are making waves, with 43% of CMOs and executives around the world stating they are planning to use these technologies increasingly more in the next couple of years.
The reason AI excels at tasks like data analysis is because it can do it much faster than humans, and with a very low margin for error. AI has gotten so good at pattern recognition that these algorithms can identify trends and correlations that human researchers miss.
The CX and sales benefits of customer journey analytics
Now you know what customer journey analytics is and how it works, let’s finish off by going over the benefits.
Increased understanding of your customers
Studying each step of the customer journey in detail delivers a much deeper level of insight. Rather than guessing how your target demographics think and feel based on generalized assumptions, you can back each decision up with facts and figures.
By learning about the various beliefs, preferences, and dispositions of your customers, you can start tailoring your marketing, services and product development accordingly.
Improved ROI prediction
Say you’re a company specializing in B2B infrastructure with an increasing number of clients managing remote teams. Are the advantages of VoIP worth the cost of implementing and offering such a service?
So much of what businesses do to reach new customers is a matter of risk versus reward. From investing in new products to deciding which ad campaign to go with. Knowing how customers think and behave helps to ensure that whatever you decide is money well spent.
Quickly identify friction points and other weaknesses
There are various types of CRM, but no matter which approach you prefer, customer journey analytics stands to bring you the same key benefit: granularity.
When you only focus on the top-level ideas and financial bottom line of your business, it leaves a lot of room in-between for subpar performance. By examining each customer-facing element of your business thoroughly, you can shine a spotlight on the glitches, faults, and imperfections holding your business back.
Given the prevalence of mobile interactions, it’s also critical to ensure robust mobile cybersecurity to safeguard against any vulnerabilities that could lead to unauthorized access and data breaches.
Customer journey analytics refines and improves sales performance
Customer journey analytics is one of those tools that, once properly implemented, you’ll wonder how you ever did without.
When you analyze your business’s customer journey, you’ll be able to see how your brand appears to others. Customer journey analytics can also offer a better understanding of the demographics frequenting your business. It can even serve as a vital first step into the increasingly popular world of personalized marketing and customer service.
