How to Solve Common Challenges in Measuring CX with Analytics

Providing outstanding customer experience has never been more important than now. Consumers expect an easy and efficient check-out process, with personalized service and recommendations along the way. They want rewards for repeat purchases and for their problems to be solved quickly. But, if the experiences your brand provides aren’t up to standard, your consumers won’t hesitate to leave you for a competitor.

When successfully executed, CX is one of the biggest drivers of brand loyalty and revenue for companies, thanks to massive amounts of customer data they can leverage to provide better experiences. However, the potential for data to enable a more personalized, omnichannel experience does not come without challenges. 

In a Salesforce survey of senior marketing industry leaders: 

• 67 percent said creating a connected customer journey across all touchpoints and channels is “critical” to the success of their larger marketing strategy.
• Only 23 percent of industry leaders are “extremely satisfied” with their capacity to use customer data to craft more relevant experiences.

Customer experience teams are up against some tough challenges--like rising customer expectations, increasingly fast-moving and complex customer journeys, limitations from outdated or insufficient marketing analytics tools, and more.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Let’s review some of the common obstacles keeping organizations from making the most of their customer data--and how the right analytics tool can help you overcome them. 

How customer journey analytics can help companies overcome CX challenges

While the challenges mentioned above are complex, CX professionals aren’t entirely at a disadvantage. Thanks to customer journey analytics, designing--and measuring--outstanding experiences is easier than ever. 

Customer journey analytics technology is powered by event data, which captures information about customer interactions indexed via a timestamp. A few event examples include clickstreams, logs, sensor data, and call detail records. By aggregating and modeling this data in real-time, you can look at customer journeys as a whole and uncover insights to use to optimize customer experiences actively.

Leading CX, marketing, and other business teams are leveraging customer journey analytics to:

• Understand which journeys help customers achieve their goals.
• Identify customer experience issues as they are happening.
• Determine the best and fastest way to solve these problems.
• Prioritize CX efforts based on business goals and potential impact on ROI.

Common challenges in customer experience measurement and how to overcome them

Marketing analytics tools have long been a pillar of deducing and leveraging information for marketers. These tools and resources--like online survey platforms, CRMs, CDPs, traditional journey maps, campaign managers, and social listening--are powerful components to optimizing customer journey analytics and CX. 

But as the volume of available data continues to grow and customer journeys gain speed and complexity, many current or legacy analytics platforms are falling short. Meaning, that while the tools and resources mentioned above are still relevant and viable, there are new challenges in measuring and analyzing customer experience. 

Here are five challenges CX professionals face when it comes to measuring CX with legacy tools--and how you can overcome them.

1. 1. Breaking down data silos

Operations, marketing, finance, and technology all possess valuable--and often completely separate--data about customer behaviors. Oftentimes, data across an enterprise is housed in different systems with incompatible data schemas. Aggregating and cleaning data is time-consuming, costly, and labor-intensive. This leads to data remaining siloed, under-utilized, and rendering you an incomplete view of the customer journey.

Solution: The most effective customer journey analytics tool will aggregate and unify data from all departments. Utilizing a centralized data platform, like Scuba Analytics, brings everything together across, all sources, systems, and data formats.

1. 2. Increasingly complex and individualized journeys 

Every customer journey is different, with unique touchpoints, timelines, and sentiments. If you have millions of customers, that could mean billions or even trillions of data points across the enterprise. Static journey maps simply don’t allow for a dynamic exploration of multi-channel journeys, and traditional Martech tools aren’t always up to the task of processing such mass volumes of data.

Solution: CX teams need journey maps that target every unique buyer persona and every path to success in real-time--not a templated version of the “most common” paths. Adopting real-time analytics platforms can change the game when it comes to pinpointing each moment in a customer’s journey. Platforms like Scuba Analytics enable you to see the big picture in real-time, drill down to a single touchpoint, and back again in seconds. 

You should also segment your audience by purchasing behavior, timing, benefits sought, or their stage in the buying journey to capture personalized insights for each individual customer. Note that segmentation varies across different industries and enterprises, depending on what your goals and objectives are. 

1. 3. Quantifying the ROI of CX efforts

Attribution is not always simple, due to a complex web of touchpoints across multiple channels and timelines. According to a recent McKinsey survey of more than 260 CX leaders using survey-based measurement systems, only 15 percent were fully satisfied with how their company was measuring CX. Only 6 percent had confidence in their measurement system for tactical and strategic decision-making.

Solution: Customer journey analytics software links customer behaviors to all the KPIs that matter to you and your company’s goals. To better quantify the ROI of CX efforts, choose metrics most impacted by customer experience--such as new customer acquisition rates, up-sells, cross-sells, retention rates, NPS, and cost to serve. Track and compare them over time to optimize journeys, and prove the impact of your efforts.

1. 4. Reports don’t support effective storytelling

A spreadsheet of numbers will sooner give you a headache than help you draw meaningful connections from your data. It’s also important to keep in mind not everyone has the knowledge or training to read data, build templates, or input queries. Your customer insights platform plays a major role in democratizing information across all company teams, to make the information more digestible and accessible. Data that is easy to understand--regardless of whether you’re a data analyst or marketer--can provide them with rich information about customers, which they can leverage to understand and optimize the needs of the market. The easier it is to present and digest this information, the faster your teams can get to actionable insights.

Solution: A customer journey analytics tool should have robust data visualization features to make it easy to find compelling stories within your data--no analytics expertise required! Advanced journey analytics platforms can easily switch between types of visualizations (bar, line, pie, Sankey diagrams, etc.) in a single click to discover new behaviors, cohorts, and critical touchpoints.

1. 5. Measuring the moments of silence

Sometimes a customer will abandon the checkout process or pause their product search only to return days or weeks later. Other times, they drop off and never return. These moments of silence are actually critical opportunities to understand the reasons behind a user’s inactivity--and an opportunity to win back their loyalty if their churn is due to a CX failure. Yet, many customer insights tools fail to capture, track, and learn from them. 

Solution: Adopting a truly comprehensive customer journey analytics tool lets you see every piece of the journey in real-time, including any gaps and moments of silence. This allows companies to get a granular view of customer journeys and enables them to find out where a drop-off point or point of friction may be. Companies can then create new queries and run comparisons against varying metrics to find answers to questions like: Why are prospects dropping off at a specific moment? And then leverage that information to make adjustments to your CX.

Looking to visualize your customer journey for an improved customer experience? Learn how Scuba can give you 360-degree visibility in your customer journeys--through a single pane of glass.