How To Make the Most of Customer Journey Analytics

⏱ Reading Time: 9 minutes

For any organization, alignment between marketing and customer experience is of prime importance. 

Around 34% of leading businesses said that the customer journey has been a top priority for them in 2020. 

Likewise, the V12 report suggests that customer journey is crucial for brands. It helps to engage your customers. Also, It can increase marketing ROI by 54% and upsell revenue by 56%. 

🚀Read Customer Service: A Guide for Successful Business Growth🚀

For this reason, businesses are using customer data platforms to optimize user journeys. For instance, they are helping users with personalized communications. This helps to make the experience memorable.

In this article, we will learn the basics of customer journey analytics. Besides, we will discuss the steps to make the most of customer journey analytics.

Let’s begin!

What is Customer Journey Analytics?

Customer journey analytics enables organizations to manage the customer experience across all channels. It is a software to track and measure customer interactions across all channels. Also, it helps businesses to react in real-time and execute behavior-driven strategies.

Picture 1. Customer journey

CJA provides a solution that eliminates data silos and combines segmented data. It empowers marketers to optimize the user experience throughout the entire journey. 

Customer Journey Mapping Vs Customer Journey Analytics

Customer journey mapping is a practice of documenting consumer behavioral flows. It lets you design ideal experiences for customers. 

User journey is a visual representation of how consumers interact with your organization. 

A journey map covers physical touchpoints like in-store experiences. It also includes human touch points such as calls to customer service. Besides, it also measures digital touchpoints like website and mobile app interactions.

Picture 2. Customer journey mapping

Customer journey analytics is a program for connecting data across channels. It measures customer behavior. Further, the software lets you join data from every channel into a single interface. Thus, it helps in real-time and cross-channel analysis.

Read Behavioral Marketing Strategy – How to Get People Clicking

Which is Better? 

Journey map is a qualitative exercise whereas CJA is a quantitative program. Therefore, journey maps provide a starting point for journey analytics. 

An organization should use both. This is because these two solutions are complementary and practically interdependent. 

A customer journey map is an easier way to understand your customers. You can easily find out what your customers feel when they buy from you.

Similarly, it is crucial to use customer journey analytics because it helps to gather data. You have insights for every customer interaction. Further, it determines all the paths that customers take to make a purchase. Besides, it also determines the most effective methods for reaching customers.

How Customer Journey Analytics Works

User journey analytics is a data-driven marketing strategy. It lets you understand how end-to-end customer experiences affect revenues.  

It works with tools such as customer journey maps, web analytics, and CRM. User journey analytics fills the data gaps between customer experience tools. 

Here are the steps as to how your customer journey analytics should work:

Step 1: Collect Data

You can collect data from any location, for example:

• Data lake
• An enterprise data warehouse
• Raw system logs
• Call center
• IoT 

Thereafter, use a flexible data schema. It should not be bound by order or the hit-visit-visitor model.

Step 2: Connect Customer Events

Next, connect customer events that relate to the same individual. In particular, it should make the data useful for journey analysis. Combine link events and link attributes. For example, you should connect the attributes such as:

• User logins 
• Mobile check-ins 
• Email addresses
• Phone numbers. 

Likewise, you can connect the following elements:

• Web sessions
• Mobile app sessions
• Phone calls
• Store visits
• Orders
• Complaints
• Survey feedback.

Step 3: Discover Customer Journeys

Thereafter, discover actual customer journeys within the data. This can be done by mapping events together. You can combine events of individual customers into individual time sequences.

Step 4: Analyze

After that, analyze and break down the journey map into different segments. These should correspond to different phases of the customer journey. For example, awareness, interest, engagement, purchase, and retention.

Step 5: Determine KPIs

Lastly, identify the key KPIs that you will track within each section. Trackable KPIs are the touchpoints that make customer journey analytics possible.   

Then, break down the journey map and assign KPIs. As a result, you will get more valuable feedback.

Use the data collected from web analytics and CRM platforms. It will help you build customer profiles. 

Moreover, it will also let you track individual customers. You can place them in the journey map based on their real actions. This will be irrespective of the device and channel used.

Read 13 Unique Sales KPIs that Boost Business Growth

Benefits of Customer Journey Analytics

Implementation of customer journey analytics helps organizations in several ways. As a result, you gain a better understanding of customer needs and wants. 

Henry Ford once said, “If I had simply asked people what they wanted, they would have asked me for faster horses!”

Picture 3. Henry Ford

What does this mean?

This means that your customers might be unaware of the problems they have. Accordingly, you should take a deeper look at the customer journey to identify the bottlenecks. 

Consumer journey analytics results in improved customer experiences. It exhibits an impact in the enterprise. As a result, it leads to higher customer acquisition, retention, and revenue.

Eliminates Guesswork

Buyer journey analytics uses data, facts, and statistics. Consequently, it helps to take out the guesswork from the customer experience. Hence, you can deliver the best solution. 

Integrates with Existing Tools

Shopper journey analytics integrates and extracts data from several platforms. In particular, it allows the usage of historical data to build existing infrastructures. It also helps to add new data sources, capabilities, and analytical models.

Enhances Customer Experience

Customer journey analytics helps identify customer experience obstacles and challenges. Therefore, it provides crucial quantitative data to determine the impact on business objectives. Insights gained from the analysis help brands improve customer satisfaction scores. Consequently, it helps businesses to predict customer needs. It does so, before the customer has a chance to reveal them in real-time. 

Read Customer Experience Guide: How to Put your Customers First?

Helps in Customer Acquisition

Buyer journey analytics helps you acquire new customers faster and cheaper. In addition, it makes it easy to identify relevant customer journeys that result in a purchase. You can reach out to potential customers at the right time. Likewise, you can use the right channel that brings in higher conversion rates.

Improves Customer Retention

CJA helps predict customer behavior and preferences. It allows organizations to identify optimal actions for different situations. CJA reduces churn by interacting with at-risk customers. In this way, you can reach them before they join your competitors.

Increases Marketing and Sales ROI

Data analytics tools collect data from every touchpoint. It improves cross-channel efforts. As a result, you can increase the ROI of current marketing campaigns. 

Read How Retailers Can Increase ROI In The Omnichannel World

Improves Revenue

Analytics software helps identify enhancements and implement revisions throughout the journey. As a result, it lets you reduce costs and grow sales. It fuels marketing teams’ ability to deliver upsell and cross-sell offers. So, it maximizes the customer retention rate and improves the overall revenue.

Optimizes CLV

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a measure of the total worth of customers. It calculates the total revenue generated by the customers during their association with the company. Accordingly, it identifies factors such as:

• Acquisition channels
• Average purchase price
• Customer experience

Moreover, it also takes into account retention methods. It helps to activate the paths to increase customer lifetime value.

Picture 4. Increasing customer lifetime value

How to Leverage The Power Of CJA

Traditional analytics solutions collect data from multiple channels. They provide crucial customer insights to map customer journey stages quickly.

Besides, CJA is a marketing technology that supports your existing customer analytics tools. In addition, they take into consideration other factors in the life cycle mix. Also, it incorporates them into real-time marketing decision-making.

Let’s understand how you can leverage customer journey analytics powerfully. You can identify and optimize complex customer experiences.

1. Start with a Customer Journey Map 

Create a customer journey map to know the touchpoints of your customers. This step helps organizations to step into their customers’ shoes. You can see your brand from the users’ perspective. 

2. Use Data to Identify the Most Significant Opportunity

Businesses should leverage data to make a customer journey map actionable. The data can be collected from several sources. These sources are:

• Websites
• Point-of-sale systems
• Email marketing platforms
• Data warehouses
• Call center logs
•  IoT devices 

It helps you identify the most crucial customer journeys. Likewise, you can prioritize those opportunities. This can significantly impact your business goals.

Read How To Improve Customer Experience With Data

3. Visualize the Real Journeys of Customers  

Creating customer journeys results in hallucinating customer needs. Hence, it is crucial to know that customer journeys are discovered and not created. 

Buyer journey analytics collects actual customer data. Different sources are used to acquire the data. Thereafter, it is used to perform identity resolution.  

4. Take a Comprehensive View of Your Customers’ Journeys

Different customers move at their own pace and take their unique journey. In the same way, journey mapping assumes a pattern for all customers. As a result, relying on just journey mapping leads to missing out on opportunities.

Data analytics help you solve such problems. You can see the real paths that customers take across channels and over time. However, do not ignore qualitative data. You should choose a platform that deals with both quantitative and qualitative data.

5. Analyze and Influence Customer Behavior in Real-Time

Businesses cannot afford to provide a sub-par interaction with customers. The entire entire customer journey should be optimized. 

So, make use of customer journey analytics to identify opportunities. Reach out to customers using different forms of personalization. It will help you spot different behavioral patterns and interactions in real-time. 

6. Choose a Customer Service Analytics Solution that Learns Over Time

Historical data helps better predict customer behavior. A customer journey analytics solution that leverages AI is the best choice for you. You can take actions even before the customer churn happens.

Final Thoughts 

Excellent customer experience starts when the customers interact with your brand for the first time. Good customer experience helps you to increase your sales and save costs. 

Therefore, you must have the measures in place to understand your customers’ needs and expectations. Collect customer feedback across the touchpoints in the customer journey. As a conclusion, CJA provides an effective solution in a customer experience program.

–

Joydeep Bhattacharya is a digital marketing specialist. He is the author of the SEO Sandwitch Blog. He helps businesses identify the bottlenecks in their online marketing strategy. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.