How Teams Across Brands Can Benefit Using Customer Journey Analytics

Every day, companies accumulate massive amounts of customer data from multiple sources. Data is constantly accumulating everywhere (in 2020, each person generated 1.7 megabytes per second) and that’s only going to grow. Today’s biggest challenge for business leaders isn’t getting enough data--it’s making sense of it.

• 95% of businesses cite the need to manage unstructured data as a problem for their business.
• 50% of marketers say they struggle with up to 4 to 10 poorly integrated tools when trying to reach their audience.

If you’re like many enterprises, you’ve probably got contacts in Salesforce, contacts in a CDP, data from Google ads and operations log data in one tool, product usage data in another tool, and the list goes on. All these disparate systems mean data and information is siloed from department to department. Which makes it challenging for companies to align their efforts and get useful insights from all their data.

Customer journey analytics helps organizations get past these obstacles by providing real-time insights into customer behavior. These analytics tools bring together structured and unstructured data across all sources for a unified customer view. When you remove silos and make data easily shareable, the entire organization benefits. 

Read on to learn how your enterprise can benefit from customer journey analytics and the best way for which team members to take ownership in tracking them.

Why leading enterprises are turning to customer journey analytics

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the “flow” or path a customer takes with your brand. Comprehensive journey maps cover every touchpoint at every stage of the journey, from Attract to Engage to Convert to Retain--across all channels.

A journey analytics platform helps business teams find answers to their “What if?” questions and:

• Connect customer data across all systems and touchpoints over time. 
• Understand experiences from your customer’s point of view.
• Spot friction points and tests out potential solutions.
• Build more successful omnichannel marketing campaigns.

All of these capabilities lead to improved customer retention and loyalty, higher CLV, and increased sales overall. And, you can test against your KPIs for a quantitative measure of your progress. Read on to learn how different business teams within an organization could use a fully integrated customer journey analytics platform to achieve business objectives.

How business teams across your organization can benefit from customer journey analytics

Customer journey analytics is becoming standard practice, not only with marketers and customer experience professionals, but also in product management, operations, sales, and IT teams. With all teams finally looking at the same data across all systems, they can align roadmaps and strategies for a more customer-centric approach. Here’s a breakdown of how different teams can utilize customer journey analytics:

1. Product

Whether you’re launching a new product or looking to improve an existing one, customer journey analytics data offers valuable information. Product managers and designers need to understand how people interact with their products at every stage. Specifically, how do buyers find out about it, use it, fix it, learn more about it, and how do they buy it? 

With a customer journey map, product teams can view, for example, what a prospect goes through when viewing your product demo or throughout the buying process. Is there marketing or sales obstacles keeping people from trying the product, or does the product itself need to be tweaked? Gain insight into these questions by seeing the product from a user’s point of view. 

2. Sales

Sales teams have been using traditional journey maps for decades to understand and perfect the sales funnel. Now, with advanced analytics software that can connect and analyze trillions of data points across millions of individual customer journeys, we can achieve even greater results. Sales teams use real-time customer journey analytics to increase sales and revenue by: 

• Understanding exactly when to offer upsells, cross-sells, or discounts.
• Pinpointing which channels and offers (product nudges, push notifications, etc.) generate the most revenue.
• Retargeting to prospects who dropped off at any point in the journey.

3. Operations

Streamlining workflows and lowering the cost to serve will always be a priority for operations. Customer journey maps can help internal operations teams minimize downtime by tracking patterns and reduce support calls by finding out their root cause. 

A customer journey map built on behavioral data from all your digital properties enables you to see how people are using your self-support features (FAQs, knowledge base, etc.) and whether they’re getting the information they need. If they’re not, you might need to adjust. It also allows you to visualize any service or ops hiccups and prioritize resources to fix them based on which are most costly. Essentially, you can examine any and all touchpoints in search of ways to improve. 

4. Customer Experience

Customer experience teams in major enterprises are already using customer journey analytics software to reveal, understand, and improve micro and macro experiences along the customer journey. Real -time customer intelligence about the customer journey empowers CX teams to see how changes in service and support affect customer satisfaction and perhaps, more importantly, understand where problems start. For example:

• Identify your most engaged customer segments and understand which key interactions drive their satisfaction.
• Segment customers based on KPIs, for example, who are most likely to churn and who might be responsive to an upsell offer.
• Measure customer satisfaction scores at various points in the journey to learn what drives a change in scores.

5. Marketing

Most marketers have, at one time or another, sat down with colleagues to visualize static journey maps, sent them off to design for polish, and showed them off to the CEO--only for the finished product to just sit there. That’s because customer journey maps are only useful when you can see each unique customer flow (not a template version), and when you can compare to review how that flow changes over time. 

A dynamic journey map built on real-time analytics allows marketers to optimize ad spend, improve acquisition, and increase retention and loyalty by:

• Understanding what types of content have the most appeal.
• Improve targeting of marketing campaigns for timing, channel, and other preferences.
• Identifying emerging trends.
  
  

This new, real-time approach to customer journey analytics continues to gain momentum, as more enterprises recognize the value of monitoring and improving the customer experience. But poor data quality or incomplete data can lead to a weak or incorrect strategy--and you can’t afford that--which is why the right tools are so important.

The best customer journey analytics tool is the one that provides real-time insights and data visualization across all users, digital interactions, and operational data. Only a robust, unified view can provide the context your organization needs to benefit your teams cross-functionally. 

Scuba works with Salesforce, CDPs, marketing automation tools, and operational data to build comprehensive customer journey maps that you can query on the fly, with no complex SQL or reliance on data experts required!

Want to see how Scuba provides 360-degree customer journey intelligence for a wide range of stakeholders, without added complexity or the need for deep technical expertise? Schedule a demo.