Are you taking advantage of customer journey analytics? Customers engage in multiple journeys and expect companies to be aware of and sensitive to all of them. Brands must be able to track and guide customer interactions throughout the lifecycle.
Understanding how and through which channels customers interact with your brand plays a huge role in improving customer experience (CX). Accordingly, many companies are investing in journey analytics technology to improve CX.
Journey analytics is a new way of thinking about the customer journey (the unique path of interactions a consumer has with your brand, products or services—from initial awareness through purchasing, paying for and using products/services). By giving you deep insight into how customers interact with your business, journey analytics helps you understand and guide customer behavior in ways that are relevant to them. It also identifies areas of customer experience that need improvement.
In a global survey of 484 CX executives, 40% indicate that lack of understanding or appreciation for customer journeys is one of the biggest challenges to delivering successful CX. Employees don’t have access to the tools and data they need to fully understand customer journeys. CX execs find it very or extremely challenging to:
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- Analyze and make sense of customer data to gain insights about customer behaviors (45%)
- Provide employees access to real-time customer behavior data (42%)
Journey analytics is the solution.
What is Journey Analytics?
Journey analytics is a way to understand each customer’s journey by tracking and measuring every interaction with your brand, across every channel (e.g., website, email or SMS) and device (e.g., laptop, tablet or smartphone) the customer uses. Connecting with customers is easier when you have a thorough understanding of their needs, interests and behavior at each point in the brand interaction (from discovery through purchase, post-purchase and retention). With journey analytics, you can personalize the customer experience based on who customers are and what they need at any given moment—by creating personalized interactions and/or delivering customized content via email, website personalization or mobile app push notifications.
Journey analytics does this by combining individual channel analytics (website, email, call center, etc.) and customer intent. Traditional channel analytics focus on KPIs specific to those channels such as clickthrough rate, time to serve, time on site, etc. This does not provide a picture of the CX challenges a specific user is having. This is why customer intent is so important to the picture. If a customer is trying to reset a password or search for information on changing their service, traditional marketing analytics will register them as failed conversions. In both cases, the customer is trying to interact with the brand but is having CX issues that are preventing them from achieving the desired behavior.
Benefits of Journey Analytics
Journey analytics helps you understand:
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- Customer needs, desires and expectations
- Which efforts drive or hinder revenue
- How to improve the customer journey and CX through actionable insights
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By using this information to improve CX, you can:
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- Improve conversion rates
- Increase customer loyalty and retention
- Boost revenue and reduce cost
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Journey analytics also helps you:
1. Improve the contact center agent experience, engagement and retention by:
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- Giving the agents insights about customers that empower them to be more successful in their roles and provide better CX
- Helping agents understand customer behavior in real time, enabling them to assist customers quickly
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2. Identify the customer journeys that have the biggest impact on specific business goals. For example, are customers delayed in bill payment because they are having login challenges?
3. Make data-driven decisions and respond more quickly. You can refer to real-time data analytics for the information you need right now instead of relying on guess work or waiting for reports from IT teams who may not have all the answers needed to handle an immediate problem.
Related Blog: Multivariate Testing vs. A/B Testing: Total Experience Optimization
How Does Journey Analytics Work?
Journey analytics tools continually track the paths and steps customers are following as they interact with your organization, giving insight into why customers are doing what they’re doing.
The reporting provides a visual representation of all customer journey steps (e.g., viewing products on your website, logging in to their account, calling the contact center). CSG’s journey analytics system assigns each step a positive, neutral or negative value, allowing you to see at a glance if journeys are leading to positive action (e.g., purchasing something or paying a bill).
Journey analytics measures these and other key metrics:
1. Customer Intent Indicators
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- Intent to purchase, cancel, etc.
- Observed product preferences
- Switched channels
- Journey completion
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2. Key Marketing Indicators
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- Page loading times
- Page views
- Email open rates
- Clickthrough rate
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3. Key Service Indicators
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- First-call resolutions
- Sessions
- Dropped calls
- Errors
- Customer satisfaction
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And addresses questions such as:
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- What were the most popular first and last steps (e.g., brand discovery or churn)?
- What were the most commonly used channels (e.g., email or SMS)?
- How are journeys performing against goals and key performance indicators (e.g., conversion rates)?
- What is the overlap between journeys?
- How many times has this journey been executed?
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Journey analytics goes beyond email analytics (e.g., open or clickthrough rates) or survey analytics (e.g., customer satisfaction), providing insight into what customers experience, their emotions and sentiment at each touchpoint throughout the journey, and what interactions had the largest impact on customer behavior. Using natural language processing, journey analytics can determine negative sentiment in customer actions and prioritize journey steps that will resolve.
Related Report: The State of Customer Experience 2023
Xponent Journey Analytics
CSG’s Xponent Journey Analytics provides data-led actionable insights for a deeper understanding of customer interactions, helping you enhance customer journeys and overall CX, and expand customer lifetime value.
Discover how customers are moving across channels and touchpoints—not just how they’re responding at a single step in the journey. Easy-to-understand, actionable data visualization reveals journey insights.
Monitor and manage journey activity in real time. You can identify and adjust journey steps where customers are stalling and potential overlaps in real time to meet customer needs and business objectives. For example, if a customer is complaining about receiving a faulty product in the mail, they shouldn’t be emailed about an upcoming sale.
Improve customer journeys for better business results by correlating key journey behaviors to critical KPIs like conversion rates and on-time bill payment. Breakdowns into critical segments and comparisons of various journeys give your team a robust view of journey performance.
Not sure where to start?
Assess your company’s CX maturity and identify areas for improvement with CSG’s CX Maturity Model. Then deploy one or two journeys, taking advantage of Xponent Ignite’s pre-built journeys for four industries: telecommunications, financial services, retail and healthcare. Xponent Ignite includes powerful journey analytics to help you improve journeys, overall CX and your company’s bottom line.
Contact us to learn more about how you can make your data more actionable.
