By now, every company knows the value of customer experience. Forbes reports “84% of companies that work to improve their customer experience report an increase in their revenue”. And “customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable compared to companies that don’t focus on customers”.
The modern customer experience is ongoing, involving not just the sale but everything that happens before, during, and after too. Understanding how that plays out across multiple channels—from a web search to visiting a store, to watching product review videos, to purchasing online, to nurturing the relationship—is incredibly valuable. But it’s not always easy to stitch together (and traditional journey maps weren’t built for today’s dynamic journeys).
Thus, customer journey analytics is becoming more important as the ever-evolving marketing funnel becomes more complex. Many enterprises are already using customer analytics software to bring all these touchpoints together, no matter where they occur.
In this post, we’ll cover the basic steps to performing a customer journey analysis in real-time for more valuable and actionable insights.
Performing a customer journey analysis helps companies put themselves in the customer’s shoes. A customer journey consists of all the experiences a person has with your brand across multiple channels over days, weeks, or months. Different channels where touchpoints might occur include:
By mapping the data around all those experiences into a unified, contextual picture, then analyzing it and taking informed action, companies can optimize their products, services, and experiences for customer success.
Customer journey analytics combines customer behavioral and operations data with predictive analysis models to bring deep insights to the surface. And live data pipelines make it possible to see actions you can take immediately to improve customer experience.
You may wonder why we need to map and analyze the customer journey. And how is it useful for companies looking to connect with loyal buyers and potential fans?
When properly executed, customer journey analysis unlocks insights that can be used across the enterprise. There are multiple benefits to understanding user behavior, especially in an increasingly complex online environment. Collecting and leveraging user insights helps you:
Companies can also use the journey analysis process internally to learn about and improve employee experiences.
To understand and adapt to the ever-changing needs, opinions, and behaviors of your customers, journey analysis should be an ongoing process. By continually collecting, evaluating, and acting upon your data in real-time you can continue improving the customer experience over time.
Your customer journey analysis will be shaped by your business goals and objectives. Start by asking questions like:
Going in prepared with questions will help you get more from the process - but be curious, too, as questions may arise that you hadn’t expected.
Before you can analyze, you need to understand the journey your customer takes with your brand, including all touchpoints at every stage, and on every channel.
Actionable journey maps should include real customer feedback, input from customer-facing internal teams, and first-hand consumer behavioral data. Each touchpoint provides event data about a customer’s actions, including critical details like
By visualizing event data aggregated from multiple sources, customer journey analytics tools allow you to build comprehensive, real-time customer journey maps in a few clicks. Real-time data is key to getting full context within your journey map, as customer feedback can only tell you so much.
Another benefit of customer journey analytics software is that you can map individual journeys for different user segments. No two people will interact with your brand or your sales funnel in the exact same way - the customer journey often varies significantly between age groups, gender, device type, purchase history, and other key factors.
Once you've achieved full visibility into your customers’ unique journeys, it’s time to analyze. Examine each touchpoint for every segment of the target audience from different angles in search of those critical “aha moments” or “moments of truth”:
In the past, the evaluation process was overwhelming and time-consuming due to the sheer volume of data accumulated. Now, many customer journey analytics tools include AI-driven features to simplify and speed up the process.
Here is an example of what your visualization could look like with Scuba's platform:
Now it’s time to put your insights into action - make changes and adjustments based on what you discovered in your map analysis. For example:
Determine which KPIs you’ll use to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. Your KPIs should be based on the goals and objectives you set out in step one, with adjustments made for the insights discovered and plans made in steps 2 and 3. Take baseline KPIs and then compare after your changes are implemented.
For example, you might track whether shortening an intake form increases conversion rate, whether a new cross-sell offer increases average cart value (and by how much), or whether streamlining your order process reduces customer churn rates and increases customer satisfaction scores.
Remember, customer journey analysis is an ongoing process. Use the KPIs set out in step 4 to measure the impact of your actions. Compare your predictions with what actually happened. Then measure, test, iterate, and optimize as needed. Customer journey analytics software makes it easy to remap, test, and repeat without coding knowledge or long waiting times.
Through continuous analysis and active understanding of the customer journey, business leaders can make incremental improvements over time and keep a pulse on ever-changing customer needs, habits, paths to purchase, trends, and other outside factors that influence consumer behaviors.
Advanced customer journey analytics tools like Scuba can help you analyze, visualize, and manipulate your data quickly, without the help of data scientists. You can create new queries on the fly, change or create new customer segments, and adjust existing queries easily.
Ready to visualize millions of complex journeys in just a few clicks? See Scuba Analytics in action--request a demo today!