CX analytics

What is customer experience (CX) analytics?

Customer experience analytics, also called CX analytics, is the practice of collecting and analyzing customer data in order to better empathize with customers. CX analytics helps teams to understand the entire user journey, including any pain points. The customer experience involves every step of the sales funnel and involves sales, marketing, customer service, social media, and review sites like G2. Think about the customer experience as starting the moment that the customer first learns about your product or brand. Advertising, product features, accessibility, and reliability all factor heavily into the customer experience. Overall customer satisfaction, then, can be calculated by subtracting the negative customer experiences from the positive ones. This means that each and every encounter with a brand, also referred to as touch points, matter. In the B2B context, measuring customer experience is primarily focused on how effective the company is at solving their customer's business problem.

CX digital analysts tend to focus on metrics such as:

Open rates
Click through rates (CTR)
Heatmaps
Page views
Bounce rate
Pages per session
Time to launch
Cart abandonment rate
Return visits
Macro & micro conversions
Marketing campaign analytics
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

In particular, CX researchers focus on these metrics:

Customer Effort Score (CES)
Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

What are the business benefits of using customer experience (CX) analytics?

By measuring and acting on customer experience analytics, teams can increase customer loyalty, improve customer acquisition, and better predict future spending trends. Businesses that focus on addressing customer friction and complaints are more likely to retain customers and receive positive reviews, both of which are crucial for growing a business. This leads to word-of-mouth referrals, recommendations, and positive reviews. To offer top notch customer service, business should:

Avoid long wait times
Train employees to understand customers’ needs
Add a human touch by offering a personalized experience
Make sure that employees avoid expressing rudeness or anger

Organizations that prioritize customer experience analytics empower employees to make decisions that benefit customers, clients, and prospects. undefined

What are some examples of platforms with customer experience (CX) analytics tools?

Platforms that offer customer experience (CX) tools include:

What is Voice of The Customer (VoC)? What does VoC mean?

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a methodology describing how customers share feedback about their experiences and/or expectations with your products or services. Businesses learn about the Voice of the Customer through conversations, interviews, surveys, complaint forms, and focus groups. Analyzing the Voice of the Customer helps teams to improve products by better understanding customer needs, wants, and frustrations.

What’s the difference between Voice of Customer (VoC) and Customer Experience (CX) analytics?

The Voice of the Customer focuses on customers’ direct feedback, that is, what the customer actually said or wrote about the experience of using a product. This means that the Voice of the Customer is a more narrow measurement, as it tends to focus on how the customer expresses frustrations about a specific interaction or problem. Customer experience analytics, on the other hand, measure how the customers themselves interacted with the product. They provide key insights into product usage, purchase patterns, demographics, and more. In general CX analytics is all about the raw numbers, not the voice.

Customer service vs. Customer experience analytics

Customer service is just one part of customer experience. When a customer requests help or receives unprompted assistance for an agent, that’s customer service. Some examples of customer service including talking with a customer support specialist on a Chatbox to process a refund or calling an agent to change your flight. Customer experience, on the other hand, includes every possible interaction between a company and a customer, from a word-of-mouth referral to the moment a package arrives at your doorstep.

Customer experience (CX) analytics, privacy, & compliance

When GDPR and CCPA came into effect in 2019 and 2020, they changed the ways companies collected data in the European Union and California. GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation, is an EU law that requires businesses and other data controllers that handle personal data to build systems that safeguard user data. Many business leaders, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, see the GDPR as an opportunity for organizations to better organize, and benefit from, large amounts of user data. CCPA, or California Consumer Privacy act, is similar to the GDPR, but less broad in scope. The regulation mandates that users should know that personal data is being collected, sold, and disclosed (and to whom). It also requires companies to provide end-users with access to personal data and protects consumers against discriminate if and when they choose to exercise their privacy rights. Whenever you see a “Do Not Sell My Personal Information” link on a business’s website, this allows you to opt out of sharing most of your data with that specific organization. You can thank the CCPA. As these laws suggest, customers are looking for transparency when it comes to how companies are using their data, as well as what steps the company is taking to protect their customers from identity theft, fraud, and other cyber crimes. Customers are more likely to share their data if they know companies are using that information to deliver a better shopping or user experience. With popular browsers such as Safari, Google Chrome, and other browsers implementing new restrictions on cookie acceptance, data collection and tagging has become more challenging. Some solutions include server side tagging via tools like Google Tag Manager or channel specific fixes.

What are the best tools for measuring customer experience?

To measure these customer experience metrics, teams rely on CX analytics tools such as:

A/B testing
Google Analytics
Heatmaps
Social media analytics
Session replay
Marketing automation software
Content management systems (CMS) tools
Customer relationship management (CRM) tools

These analytics methods are also used by UX designers and other stakeholders, as they help design teams improve the user experience design — and thus the customer experience. When the experience of making a purchase on an app or changing a flight is efficient and straightforward, customers start to build trust and loyalty with a brand.