How to improve customer experience using customer journey analytics.

Customer centricity is the key to providing an excellent customer experience. Unfortunately, 82.4% of businesses don’t know their customers’ pain points.

Businesses don’t have clarity on how their customers think, their exact needs, and why they favor the competition. As a result, they leave even when businesses have a great product and complete trust. But customer surveys aren’t enough to figure out the reasons for churning. 

Customer journey analytics go beyond customer surveys that limit the questions and scope of the examination. With customer journey analytics, you can view customers’ experiences when interacting with your digital product, showing problems and pain points they don’t consciously record or remember. 

What is the customer journey?

The customer goes through five stages while interacting with your digital product:

1. Awareness. The customer becomes aware of your product through advertising or recommendations.
2. Consideration. The customer sees the need that your product or service meets, then considers whether or not to buy.
3. Purchase. The customer decides to buy your product or service.
4. Retention. The customer uses the product and decides to be a loyal customer.
5. Advocacy. The customer recommends and reviews the product through word of mouth or online reviews.

While the customer journey might seem straightforward, businesses can face challenges during this process that affect the customer experience (CX).

Challenges businesses encounter during the customer journey.

An excellent customer experience (CX) during the customer journey is vital. But, customers’ behavior and expectations change throughout their journey—making customer acquisition and retention challenging.

Businesses face three primary challenges during customer journeys, affecting CX.

Customers use multiple channels and devices to complete one purchase.

Customers use multiple channels to buy, expecting a seamless experience across devices. Your business should invest in multichannel retailing to sell similar products across different channels to increase sales and exposure to customers.

Tracking all these channels is easy with customer journey analytics. It shows you the devices used at all customer journey stages, including data such as the most popular and unpopular devices at a particular stage.

Customers expect personalized journeys.

Customers expect a personalized experience when shopping—and delivering personalized customer experiences can get you an edge over the competition. However, implementing it can be challenging, especially with a large customer base.

Use customer journey analytics tools to leverage data and send customers products, offers, and communication that are uniquely relevant to them.

Customers crave authenticity and a human touch.

Technology is only an enabler of customer experience. Your customers want a humanized interaction with your brand—boosting authenticity and making real connections with your clients.

The need for human interactions has led organizations to train their customer service agents to be friendly, empathetic, polite, knowledgeable, helpful, and relatable.

Empathy in customer experience is an essential metric. Your brand’s customer experience team should hone this skill to remain competitive and offer cutting-edge customer relationship management.

The 7 steps to customer journey mapping.

To effectively map the customer journey—and identify friction and pain points—follow these seven steps to customer journey mapping.

1. Research and journey analytics.

Tools like Quantum Metric’s customer journey analytics perform user analytics to track user actions. Session replay, for example, is a research tool that allows you to relive the customer’s journey when interacting with your brand. You can use this feature to analyze your customer’s experience. Any friction/pain points are identified and addressed to the right team for resolution.

2. Create customer personas.

Your brand deals with multiple customer personas that need personalized interactions. You may gather this information through customer surveys, interviews, and interactions with the customer service team.

However, data analytics is the best approach because it increases analysis breadth by looking at behavioral and technical data. For example, you can create a gratifying personalized experience for loyal customers who like playing video games intermittently. 

Data analysis reveals a pattern, helping you make a data-driven strategy to keep such clients entertained and loyal to the brand.

3. Target touchpoints and devices.

Understand the points of customer interactions with your brand across three main phases of the customer journey-awareness, consideration, and post-purchase. Touchpoint analysis creates an informative customer journey map, reducing your cost to service by between 15% and 20%.

Customer journey mapping shows you touchpoints within the customer journey that need customer experience improvement.

For example, a customer has a great experience learning about your investment product through a social media post and scrolls through your page to learn more. Unfortunately, they find your website mobile-unfriendly at the consideration stage. So, they stop their journey. Later, they decide to revisit your website via desktop, but they find the sign-up process lengthy and leave.

In this case, you should optimize your website for mobile and shorten the sign-up process/form.

4. Workshop.

Customer journey mapping gives you all the information needed. But, you’ll need to assemble all relevant teams to develop a wholesome brand strategy based on the information gathered. 

Micro analysis helps you to strategize for specific departments, while the macro data helps the brand formulate a new strategy to meet the ultimate goal. Customer emotions are a crucial consideration. As you analyze, try to understand if the customers were worried, excited, impatient, satisfied, or frustrated at any point.

5. Identify and address customer pain points.

Micro and macro analysis reveal customer pain points individually and collectively. All teams concerned should take note of the identified issues and address customer pain points to improve customer experience.

Once these issues are fixed, you can send personalized marketing messages to inform customers about the new changes.

6. Monitor feedback. 

Customer feedback is critical at this point. Although some customers leave after poor CX, some stay, serving as information sources on the effectiveness of the changes. Monitor their journey during repeat visits and see if their experience has improved. Please take note of new problems and promptly address them.

7. Repeat the process.

Customer journey mapping isn’t a one-shot process. It’s a continuous procedure subject to several iterations and revisions to fine-tune customer experiences. Every new customer journey map improves the previous one, making the customer journey analytics process more successful.

What is customer journey analytics?

86% of loyal customers will leave your brand after only two to three poor customer experiences. Poor customer experience results from failure to understand customer needs and friction points when interacting with your digital product.

Customer journey analytics is the science that analyzes customer behavior to provide insight into every touch point and quantify how it affects business. Customer journey analytics helps you understand how customers think, making data-driven decisions that will improve customer experience and increase sales. 

Customer-centric culture guarantees customer satisfaction. You’ll understand different customer experiences when they interact with your brand’s digital platforms, such as live chat, social media, email, mobile application, website, and other channels.

How customer journey analytics improve customer experience.

Customer journey analytics transforms your brand’s customer experience by offering a data-driven problem-solving approach. Customer experience improvement is no longer based on intuition and general industry standards that may not work for your case. Instead, it offers specific statistics for your customer base.

Your brand benefits from the following:

• Data-driven information on customer interaction with your digital products. 95% of purchase decisions are subconscious, and only customer data can help us understand the factors that affect these decisions.
• Real-time actionable information. Quantum Metric’s customer journey analytics tool takes this step further by sending you experience alerts within 60 seconds for action.
• A broad view of customer interaction. There’s relevant information for all teams, including sales, tech, and marketing.
• Scalable views to assess micro and macro customer journeys.
• Actionable engagement personalized to each customer.
• Live customer experience after digital product releases. Quantum Metric features live user interactions after every release to assess CX.
• Clarity on points customers complete their journey and reasons.

Real-life examples of customer journey analytics.

Brands use customer journey analytics to improve CX, leading to customer retention, positive recommendations, and increased sales/revenue.

Mizuno’s user experience (UX) team uses Quantum Metric to watch live user interactions after every major release. The exercise is now part of the brand’s release process for quality control and assessment.  

Customer journey analytics also shows you problematic areas at a micro and macro scale. The digital team at a Fortune 500 retailer noticed sudden drops in the checkout process that instigated a $300,000 in abandoned cart value, leading to a loss of $15 million in annual opportunity. The team immediately viewed session replays of customer journeys, using the errors detail page to identify the issue. It was fixed within three hours.

Build a cross-functional customer success team to implement the customer analytics strategy.

Customer journey analytics tools only provide information and identify areas that need action. They save you time and money you’d spend calling and meeting colleagues to figure out issues. However, they don’t eliminate the need for teamwork.

Implementing the customer analytics strategy requires a team whose magnitude depends on the company’s size. At the minimum, have one member from each department, including, but not limited to:

• Sales 
• Marketing 
• Product development
• UX and UI designers
• Customer support 
• Data analytics/ engineering
• Department heads and executives, e.g., CFO, CTO
• Project manager

Invest in the right tech for customer journey analytics.

A customer analytics partner is essential in effectively mapping the customer journey and identifying pain points and frictions.

Tech should be intuitive, user-friendly, and do these three main functions.

Automatically populate visualizations.

An automatic population of visualizations is valuable as it helps visualize how new features impact the customer journey, as seen in the Mizuno case study. You immediately discover friction points and address them to prevent loss of sales, as seen in the Fortune 500 case study above, which eliminated the 40% conversion loss.

The right tech also improves workflow at the office, keeping teams focused on other vital issues. It mitigates long wait times, phone calls, and department meetings to resolve issues. Simply replay, pick out the exact errors, and solve them.

Capture behavioral, technical, and business-level indicators out of the box.

Tech should have all necessary features out-of-the-box. It should also serve the interests of all members of the cross-functional team. Behavioral indicators advise the sales and marketing teams, technical indicators advise the development team, and business-level advises the CTO team.

Capabilities to replay micro and macro journeys to visualize the extent of the issues saves time by showing exactly where to focus and what individual team members should prioritize.

Populate customer journeys in real time.

Customers expect an immediate resolution to their problems. Populating customer journeys in real-time helps achieve this. Experience alerts in less than a minute help to improve efficiency and problem resolution speed.

In some cases, issues are solved before customers even notice they exist.

The journey population capability sharpens your customer service team’s level of empathy. Reliving customer journeys help them offer more humanized customer support.

Surpass customer expectations using customer analytics.

Understanding your customers’ paths through your website or mobile app is not enough: you need data to know why. 

The process starts with entire customer journey mapping, assessing how they interact with your product from the awareness to the advocacy stage. Understanding their behaviors through multiple channels and why some channels are preferred for certain stages helps refine experiences during these stages.

You’ll need a team to develop the customer analytics strategy and robust technology to collect and assess the data. The technology should populate customer journeys in real-time, automatically populate visualizations, have session replays, and capture out-of-the-box behavioral, technical, and business-level indicators.

Request a demo today to see how the Quantum Metric customer analytics tool can help improve your business outcomes.