5 Ways Analytics Can Improve Customer Experience

⏱ Reading Time: 5 minutes

If you’re running an online business, your customers interact with your website on a daily basis. No one is perfect, and you’re bound to hit a few bumps when it comes to how customer experience your website in the long run. Moreover, up to 75% of customers are prone to judging a brand solely on their website design during the first interaction. That’s why it’s essential to make sure your brand leaves a great first impression, in every possible aspect.

How can you make sure your website is working perfectly?

You should be paying close attention to relevant indicators, namely through the smart use of analytics. They’re a great way to improve customer experience. This can be done by identifying pain points, testing out a new website copy or further optimizing your website to fit rising business standards.

There are countless ways to use analytics to your advantage. We’ll explore a few important ones in this article, to help you get ahead in the user experience game.

Heatmaps

Heatmaps are user road maps to your website. They allow you to track where your customers are clicking, and what grabs their attention. Being one of the crucial analytic experience elements, Heatmaps allow you to check the number of clicks certain buttons receive in real-time. No messy statistics or scattered data involved, as they’re a visual tool.

Picture 1. Example of a Heatmap – Wikipedia

Let’s explain exactly how a Heatmap works. The thing you’ll want to focus on is the different colors, each representing a certain click rate. Red is the most prominent one and symbolizes the most clicks, followed by yellow and green. This visual approach allows quick and effective data interpretation, and lets you know exactly which parts of your website users focus on. If a certain section isn’t getting enough attention, it might be a good idea to optimize in order to maximize customer experience on that page.

Scrollmaps

Much like Heatmaps, Scrollmaps help you track the scroll depth of your website. This allows business owners to track how far an average customer scrolls on your website. Much like Heatmaps, instead of meddling with complicated statistics, they offer a visual representation of the data. Together they represent a comprehensive map of interactions, best suited for tracking long-form content. The ultimate goal of each website, regardless of the niche, is for users to scroll to the end of a page.

Picture 2. Example of a Scrollmap – JustAskKim

Similar to Heatmaps, Scrollmaps are color-based. In those manners, each of the colors is associated with a scroll depth. Red signifies the biggest amount of total customers on a website scrolled to that certain point on a page.

In the color scheme, you’ll also find yellow, green and all blue. In case you’re tracking long-form content you’d want to avoid blue, as it symbolizes the lowest possible amount of people scrolled past that point on a page. This is also an indicator that you should rethink parts of content, re-write or pay closer attention to it.

Sales Funnel Analysis

What drives an online business?

Profit!

To run a successful one, you’ll want to set up a rock-solid sales funnel and that’s where analytics come in handy! In order to create an amazing user experience and perfect the sales funnel, business owners set up specific triggers to track how good customers convert trough different steps of the sales process.

Related: How to Improve Sales Funnel with the Help of Live Chat?

The mission is to test out stress points as users transition from one point to another, measuring the conversion rate. Analytics, from this standing point, are helping you track how well user experiences connections between different parts of your website.

Picture 3. Example of a sale funnel analysis

Once you have a sales funnel in place, it’s easy to notice a blind spot where customers are having difficulties and bounce. Finding the root of a problem will let you further analyze and remove any obstacles that may affect user experience and the number of conversions. Furthermore, you can implement more elements into the funnel, e.g. live chat. This process can lead to greater customer satisfaction and inspire loyalty.

Form Fill

Feedback form is one of the most useful tools business owners use to improve customer experience. They’re used to gather relevant data about the product, service or feedback about the overall brand experience.  

Before deploying a form of any kind, pay attention to what is your goal and what exactly are you trying to figure out. Also, it’s not all about what questions are you asking for, but how did you construct them. Some parts or questions might be intrusive or badly optimized and may cause the customer to leave.

Picture 4. Example of a website Feedback Form

You’re trying to collect data and there’s a lot of visitors, but no one is completing a form you’ve put on your website? Chances are, there’s something wrong and people are giving up at a certain point of their journey.

Using analytics and having a complete overview of data lets you find gap points in your form submissions, bad questions or even a bug in the whole process. That’s a simple way to ensure your customer experience stays on point while making sure you keep collecting valuable data and continue making a profit.

Pop-up Widget Tracking

If there’s anything that you need to market on your website and you want everyone to see, there’s a good chance you’ll use a website pop-up and advertise it to everyone that visits your website. In such a situation, it’s a good idea to make sure that the pop up is performing as intended. Using analytics to track user responses will tell you that, from the number of clicks, best-performing pages and a total number of users that completed the desired action.

Picture 5. Example of a website Pop-up Widget

You’ve set up a pop-up but you’re unsure on how well it’s performing. That’s where analytics comes in and helps you track any number of different metrics. This can include the number of raw clicks or the exit rate on a page. It measures how well the pop up is doing, allowing you to optimize your message and placement. This inspires a better experience for customers and helps you run a smooth and well-organized business.

To Sum Up

Digital customer experience is based on a lot of different factors, some of which may be outside your control. Yet, when it comes to analytics and its role in customer experience, the influence is quite tangible. Using analytics as to the main diagnostic tool not only helps you run a smooth business, it benefits your customers and increases satisfaction.