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GUIDE

Optimize the 5 pillars of the digital customer journey.

A guide to asking the right questions of your data with insights from digital leaders across top industries.
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Introduction
Discovery
Acquisition & Conversion
Account Management
Help & Support
Platform monitoring

Introduction.

Too many tools, too much data, and too few insights.
Efficiency is the name of the game in today's changing digital landscape, and every investment in time and resources is critical. There's just one problem: Digital expertise is in short supply and high demand.

You'd assume digital teams have all the answers in our data-rich world. But, in fact, the opposite is often true. Teams still have trouble understanding their customer's needs and determining what will drive the most business impact.

Why? Because, more often than not, they struggle to find the Quantified Why—that clear understanding of the root cause and business impact behind digital issues and opportunities. Without it, they're left to guess, stuck in a data flood without a clear entry point.
Are these time wasters hurting your digital experience?
Say you notice a sudden rise in customers abandoning the funnel. Yet, you're unsure why, where the dropoff is happening, or how to bring the issue to the attention of your digital team, who's already overwhelmed with a messy backlog of bugs and fixes. 

Sound familiar? This is an all too common scenario we see between product, engineering, and development teams, and it's what makes the time from discovery to resolution often take longer than it should. But remember: your customer's time is valuable to them, and they aren't waiting. The time to act is now. 

Even if you attempt to get to the bottom of the issue, how do you know you're not falling down a rabbit hole of irrelevant data or if your team is focused on the wrong issue? 

These time wasters often signal a dead-end.
You'd assume digital teams have all the answers in our data-rich world. But, in fact, the opposite is often true. Teams still have trouble understanding their customer's needs and determining what will drive the most business impact.

Why? Because, more often than not, they struggle to find the Quantified Why—that clear understanding of the root cause and business impact behind digital issues and opportunities. Without it, they're left to guess, stuck in a data flood without a clear entry point.
Time waster:
Why it happens:
Prioritizing the wrong issues or data anomalies
Reliance on guesswork, too many unquantified issues and anomalies
Deliberating / arguing over what to prioritize
Misalignment across teams, silos, pushback
Waiting for/relying on analytics experts to deliver insights
Lack of self-service dashboards linked to quantification
Siloed teams re-creating dashboards
Missing pre-built dashboards for every customer journey
Reactive/waiting for issues to be reported
Reliance on manual/static customer feedback
Chasing false positives
Unqualified / unquantified alerts
Executive fire drills / escalations
Lack of quantifiable evidence to validate their issue is worth pursuing
Manually reproducing errors
Lack of visual evidence in real-time
Manually coding analytics tags
Missing autocapture
What are the five pillars of the digital customer journey?
You're not alone if you feel your organization struggles with digital transformation. Many teams come up against barriers on the path to building a digital-first culture while trying to align on a vision, achieve business goals, and decide what's right for customers.

There’s a path to digital excellence, and you can learn from the companies already doing it. You just have to know the right questions to ask about your data. Luckily, many of the same questions have been asked over and over by companies across different industries, seeking to understand similar digital micro-experiences.

Listening to these companies, we’ve distilled their experiences into five pillars to boost confidence, remove organizational drag, and deliver digital excellence:
Discovery eye
1. Discovery
Acquisition and conversion
2. Acquisition & conversion
Account management
3. Account management
Help and support headset
4. Help & support
Platform monitoring icon
5. Platform monitoring

The 5 pillars of the
digital experience
to optimize.

CHAPTER 1:
Discovery.
In digital, first impressions really matter.

That initial touchpoint starts when the customer lands on your digital doorstep as they first get to know your brand. From here, it takes only a few seconds of being on your website for the customer to decide whether they'll buy or bounce.
We see it all the time.
One of the world's largest athletic retailers was puzzled why the same landing page for women's wear converted at a significantly higher than the men's. With the right data to guide them, they discovered adding a banner to the top of the men's landing page enticed customers to scroll further, increasing their conversion rate.
It's the little things that make a big difference in digital. That's why it's so important to design a first-impression experience and provide a clear roadmap of your site for the customer to search, navigate, and understand your value.
An icon of an eye representing user visibility into issues.
Micro-experience
Questions to ask about your data
How to answer them
Homepage and landing pages
Site navigation
Search
  • Is my bounce rate too high?
  • Where are site visitors coming from? What’s the breakdown between mobile and desktop? 
  • What role do the different audience segments play in the trends and performance?
  • Do visitors understand how to navigate my site?
  • Are navigation errors driving them away?
While bounce rate is a helpful indicator of overall page effectiveness, you'll know whether yours is good once you've looked at industry benchmarks and established a baseline.

The same goes for device types and audience segments: Should you expect mobile to have a higher bounce rate than desktop? Would account holders convert at a higher rate than guests? Or is your data signaling an anomaly somewhere along the customer journey?
Your site's navigation is what connects the customer's experience as they browse through pages—the easier it is for them to navigate, the longer they'll hang around.

But how do you know if it’s not? Rage clicks, product SKU anomalies, and buttons that go nowhere are all telltale signs.
  • Do visitors find my search results helpful? 

  • What searches yield zero results?

  • How are page load times impacting search?
Like navigation, effective site search helps visitors quickly find what they're looking for. To understand the problem areas in your site search, look at search continuation rate, slow API call, and the "no results" occurrences that could help chart a new pathway forward.
Micro-experience: Homepage and landing pages
Questions to ask about your data
  • Is my bounce rate too high? 

  • Where are site visitors coming from? What’s the breakdown between mobile and desktop?
  • What role do the different audience segments play in the trends and performance?
How to answer them
While bounce rate is a helpful indicator of overall page effectiveness, you'll know whether yours is good once you've looked at industry benchmarks and established a baseline.

The same goes for device types and audience segments: Should you expect mobile to have a higher bounce rate than desktop? Would account holders convert at a higher rate than guests? Or is your data signaling an anomaly somewhere along the customer journey?
Micro-experience: Site navigation
Questions to ask about your data
  • Do visitors understand how to navigate my site? 

  • Are navigation errors driving them away?
How to answer them
Your site's navigation is what connects the customer's experience as they browse through pages—the easier it is for them to navigate, the longer they'll hang around.

But how do you know if it’s not? Rage clicks, product SKU anomalies, and buttons that go nowhere are all telltale signs.
Micro-experience: Search
Questions to ask about your data
  • Do visitors find my search results helpful? 

  • What searches yield zero results?

  • How are page load times impacting search?
How to answer them
Like navigation, effective site search helps visitors quickly find what they're looking for. To understand the problem areas in your site search, look at search continuation rate, slow API call, and the "no results" occurrences that could help chart a new pathway forward.
See how a leading brand turned homepage hesitation into engagement. Watch now.
CHAPTER 2:
Acquisition & conversion.
What happens after your customer crosses the digital threshold? Too often, we see unclear payment options, confusing forms, and messy designs that make customers reluctant to continue on the journey.
Delivering a top-notch digital experience builds trust and confidence with customers, showing them the value of their purchase and leading to increased conversions. In fact, our research shows that 46% of travelers say the online booking experience is the most significant factor in choosing which airline to fly.
The goal is to make it easier, not harder, for them to convert. So, how do you build a funnel that flows? Start by getting to know your customers, understanding their needs, and sussing out the holes that are either causing them to fall out of the funnel or abandon the checkout process altogether.
An icon of four arrows pointing together to meet a circle representing getting customers to converge into the journey you want.
Micro-experience
Questions to ask about your data
How to answer them
Conversion funnel
Payments
  • Are customers falling out of the funnel?

  • If so, has this been impacting every customer segment or just specific ones?
  • Are customers able to choose between payment types?
  • How does page load time impact conversions?
  • Have there been changes to how customers move through the payment flow?
Drill down into account open rate, next step completion rate, and conversion rate to understand where and why customers are falling out of the funnel. Breaking the data down further by customer segment can also help you see the journey by device and account type.
The payment flow greatly impacts whether customers will convert or drop out of the funnel. To ensure a seamless payment process, look at the autopay enrollment rate, payment error rate, and Zelle/P2P conversion rate.
Micro-experience: Conversion funnel
Questions to ask about your data
  • Are customers falling out of the funnel?

  • If so, has this been impacting every customer segment or just specific ones?
How to answer them
Drill down into account open rate, next step completion rate, and conversion rate to understand where and why customers are falling out of the funnel. Breaking the data down further by customer segment can also help you see the journey by device and account type.
Micro-experience: Payments
Questions to ask about your data
  • Are customers able to choose between payment types?
 

  • How does page load time impact conversions?

  • Have there been changes to how customers move through the payment flow?
How to answer them
The payment flow greatly impacts whether customers will convert or drop out of the funnel. To ensure a seamless payment process, look at the autopay enrollment rate, payment error rate, and Zelle/P2P conversion rate.
Don't let indecision kill your conversion rates. See how one team tackled a checkout roadblock.
CHAPTER 3:
Account management.
Now, you've converted the customer and want to continue offering self-service options to keep the experience seamless. That's why a thoughtful login and account management flow is a must-have for any digital-first organization.
Even the tiniest friction points within the digital journey can make or break the experience. Until Telegraph's digital team tapped into the right data, they didn’t know 22% of registered users attempting to access restricted content failed to retrieve their passwords and were abandoning the password reset flow altogether. Guided by this new insight, they prioritized cutting out the password reset entirely to enable a seamless login experience.
Self-service account management enables customers to create personalized profiles on your website or app to tailor their experience which, in turn, will build trust and brand loyalty.
An icon of a person on a laptop representing account management.
Micro-experience
Questions to ask about your data
How to answer them
Account creation
Account login
Manage account
  • Is the number of new accounts created declining?

  • If so, why are customers falling out of the funnel?
  • Do customers know where to log in?

  • Can they tell if the caps lock is on when entering their information?

  • Are errors impacting the login process?
Have there been fewer clicks on the register button? It could point to friction along the registration process, prompting visitors to abandon it before they can finish creating an account. The account creation success rate and number of page sessions can provide a pulse on what's happening.
Likewise, the tiniest friction points during the login process can lead to a spike in customer frustration. Double-check the login and password recovery success rates to ensure customers can access their accounts without issue.
  • Are customers able to easily view account details or order history, update their address profile or delivery date, and manage their subscriptions?
Once inside their account, customers expect seamless service with the ability to manage their orders and subscriptions easily. Keep an eye on the success rates for ordering tracking, update delivery, and service upgrades.
Micro-experience: Account creation
Questions to ask about your data
  • Is the number of new accounts created declining?

  • If so, why are customers falling out of the funnel?
How to answer them
Have there been fewer clicks on the register button? It could point to friction along the registration process, prompting visitors to abandon it before they can finish creating an account. The account creation success rate and number of page sessions can provide a pulse on what's happening.
Micro-experience: Account login
Questions to ask about your data
  • Do customers know where to log in?

  • Can they tell if the caps lock is on when entering their information?

  • Are errors impacting the login process?
How to answer them
Likewise, the tiniest friction points during the login process can lead to a spike in customer frustration. Double-check the login and password recovery success rates to ensure customers can access their accounts without issue.
Micro-experience: Manage account
Questions to ask about your data
  • Are customers able to easily view account details or order history, update their address profile or delivery date, and manage their subscriptions?
How to answer them
Once inside their account, customers expect seamless service with the ability to manage their orders and subscriptions easily. Keep an eye on the success rates for ordering tracking, update delivery, and service upgrades.
Watch how a brand eliminated account login pain points to improve retention.
CHAPTER 4:
Help & support.
Not all of your customers have the exact same needs. Each customer segment shops differently, behaves differently, and has unique factors influencing their buying decision. This also applies to help and support.
Before tapping into session replay, Western Union's call agents spent so much of each call gathering the backstory to understand the source of customer frustration. Now, agents can see precisely the point of struggle while helping customers complete their transactions, reducing call times by 3 minutes and escalations by half.
The first step towards creating exceptional customer service is ensuring efficiency and convenience across every channel, digital or otherwise. In turn, nailing the self-service aspect of the customer's journey will help increase overall lifetime value and reduce your contact center's call volume and potential for burnout.

In addition, be on the lookout for fraudulent activity that could harm your business. Enabling automatic fraud detection saved Western Union $5M over a three-year period.
An icon of a headset representing customer service.
Micro-experience
Questions to ask about your data
How to answer them
Help & FAQ pages
Payment fraud
  • How is digital FAQ and self-service impacting contact center volumes?
  • What’s happening with customer churn and retention? If anything, what’s driving the change?
  • Has the team flagged any suspicious behavior, like repeated cut and paste of credit card info?
Help and FAQ pages are important components of your company's customer service as they provide solutions and significantly reduce the burden on contact centers. Look at cost savings, customer lifetime value, and churn rate to understand if customers are being guided to the answers they need.
There are a few fraud red flags to look out for. Keep an eye on account lockouts, multiple login attempts, and multiple transactions in a single session.
Micro-experience: Help & FAQ pages
Questions to ask about your data
  • How is digital FAQ and self-service impacting contact center volumes?
  • What’s happening with customer churn and retention? If anything, what’s driving the change?
How to answer them
Help and FAQ pages are important components of your company's customer service as they provide solutions and significantly reduce the burden on contact centers. Look at cost savings, customer lifetime value, and churn rate to understand if customers are being guided to the answers they need.
Micro-experience: Payment fraud
Questions to ask about your data
  • Has the team flagged any suspicious behavior, like repeated cut and paste of credit card info?
How to answer them
There are a few fraud red flags to look out for. Keep an eye on account lockouts, multiple login attempts, and multiple transactions in a single session.
See how proactive support cut costs—and boosted satisfaction.
CHAPTER 5:
Platform monitoring.
Better response times yield higher conversion rates. Yet, fast-evolving digital technologies can make it challenging to keep your website or app running smoothly, often resulting in the opposite of what you want: slower response times and lost sales.
That was the case for 3M's digital team, who had trouble pinpointing the root cause of slow page issues and tying performance to conversion. But, once they had the right data in hand, they could see how customers experienced slow-loading pages, identify the technical problems causing delays, and prioritize fixes based on conversion and revenue impact.
When it comes to your organization's digital strategy, be sure to ask the right questions about your technology to provide a seamless experience across multiple devices, browsers, and operating systems.
An icon of a gauge, representing faster movement through technology.
Micro-experience
Questions to ask about your data
How to answer them
Page speed
API monitoring
  • Is slow page performance due to an issue on the frontend or backend? 

  • How is page speed impacting revenue and conversions?
  • Are certain API errors showing anomalies?

  • How are specific APIs impacting revenue and conversions?
Your site's navigation is what connects the customer's experience as they browse through pages—the easier it is for them to navigate, the longer they'll hang around.

But how do you know if it’s not? Rage clicks, product SKU anomalies, and buttons that go nowhere are all telltale signs.
API issues can also cause hiccups along the digital journey and affect things like conversions and page speed. Key metrics to monitor include API response size, median API response times, and API failure.
Micro-experience: Page speed
Questions to ask about your data
  • Is slow page performance due to an issue on the frontend or backend?
  • How is page speed impacting revenue and conversions?
How to answer them
Nothing frustrates and causes website visitors to bounce faster than a slow page speed. To evaluate and improve page performance, check your conversion rate as well as DOM interactive metric and long-running spinner count.
Micro-experience: API monitoring
Questions to ask about your data
  • Are certain API errors showing anomalies?


  • How are specific APIs impacting revenue and conversions?
How to answer them
API issues can also cause hiccups along the digital journey and affect things like conversions and page speed. Key metrics to monitor include API response size, median API response times, and API failure.
Watch how an enterprise acted quickly on a critical problem through smarter monitoring.
Summary.
Achieving digital excellence is possible. While doing so will take time, knowing where to optimize is half the battle. And with the five pillars and key focus areas listed above, you have all the questions to go forth and find the answers.

Learn how Quantum Metic can help simplify your approach to understanding the why behind customer needs by checking out our product tour library or signing up for a demo.
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