Customer Journey Analytics: A Comprehensive Guide

Delivering an engaging and effective customer experience (CX) is more vital than ever before. 

According to PwC, 41% of consumers will pay more for a product they can purchase quickly and easily. By the same token, nearly 90% say that the experience a company provides is as important as their products or services.

But meeting these expectations is far from easy. Customer behaviour is becoming more complex and incorporating a wider range of touchpoints across physical and digital channels. Without an effective way to track and analyse your customers’ behaviour, you won’t be able to meet their rapidly evolving needs.

And that’s where customer journey analytics comes in. This powerful, data-driven approach enables you to track, map and measure how your customers interact with your business – from their very first encounter to the moment of purchase and beyond.

In this guide, we’ll explain what customer journey analytics is, how it works, and the benefits it can bring to your business.

What is Customer Journey Analytics?

Customer journey analytics is a comprehensive, data-driven approach to studying how customers interact with your business. 

At its core, it involves gathering and integrating data on your customers’ behaviour as they move through different touchpoints. This data is then used to deepen your understanding of their preferences – the channels they are more likely to use, for instance, or the interactions that lead them to look elsewhere.

Most importantly, this data doesn’t just tell you how your customers interact with your business. Used properly, it can be turned into actionable insights for improving your CX. By implementing customer journey analytics, you will be able to identify points of friction in your customer journey and highlight your most successful sales strategies – all without relying on intuition or being misled by a partial view.

Of course, achieving this kind of comprehensive insight into your customer journey requires sustained effort, but the benefits can be far-reaching.

Customer Journey Mapping vs Customer Journey Analytics

Customer journey analytics is closely related to another essential method for understanding how customers engage with your business: customer journey mapping. And in fact, these two approaches are complementary.

Customer journey mapping – also known as customer experience journey mapping – offers a detailed visual overview of how customers move from their initial encounter with your business to (hopefully!) becoming long-term customers or even brand advocates.

As the name suggests, a customer journey map helps you understand how your customers navigate the complex process of making a purchasing decision.

In the above example, you can see how the customer journey is broken down into different stages and connected to specific experiences and feelings on the part of the customer. As a result, the map offers major strategic benefits if you’re trying to refine your customer experience – but it’s only the start.

A customer journey map provides a visual narrative about how your customers behave, but to be truly useful it needs to be supported by data. And this is exactly what customer journey analytics can offer.

The Benefits of Customer Journey Analytics

Implementing customer journey analytics is not a simple process, and below we’ll offer a step-by-step guide to getting started. 

But first, it’s important to stress the far-reaching benefits that you stand to secure by adopting a customer journey analytics solution. The benefits include:

• Understanding your customers. Customer behaviour is becoming more complex, with research showing that 2 in 3 customers use 6 or more channels when researching a product. Customer journey analytics can help you untangle the messy middle of the purchase journey and provide deeper insights into your customers’ needs and expectations.

• Breaking down silos. Customer behaviour may differ across channels and touchpoints – and that means different teams will have different ideas about what customers expect. Customer journey analytics can integrate data from sales, marketing, product and customer success teams to deliver a more comprehensive and unified view of your customers.

• Identifying points of friction. With comprehensive data in hand, you can identify touchpoints where customers are most likely to drop off. This helps you spot any major red flags and focus your efforts when it comes to improving your CX. 

• Delivering omnichannel experiences. Customers increasingly expect omnichannel experiences that allow them to move between channels as and when they choose. Customer journey analytics helps you identify any blind spots in your channel mix and ensure customers can access the support they need, when they need it.

• Securing ROI. It’s called the bottom line for a reason, and it’s important to stress that customer journey analytics can lead to a significant impact on your revenue. With a data-backed strategy for improving your customer experience and a way to measure results effectively, you can directly track your return on investment.

As you can see, the benefits of implementing customer journey analytics are extensive and the potential impact on your business is hard to overstate. So, how can your business secure them? Read on below for our step-by-step guide on getting started.

How to Implement Customer Journey Analytics: A Step-By-Step Guide

1. Define Your Goals

Implementing customer journey analytics is not a quick fix. Like any major project, it requires an upfront investment of time and money. That means it’s essential to understand what your goals are before you take the first step.

Do you want to improve conversion rates from your paid ads? Are you aiming to boost your NPS or CSAT scores? Or perhaps you want to increase the uptake of your loyalty scheme? By setting out in advance what you hope to achieve, you can ensure your business takes a strategic and targeted approach.

Whichever aim you decide to focus on, you’ll also need to ensure that you have the right metrics in mind to measure your progress. This ensures that you won’t have a vague and ill-defined sense of what success will look like. Instead, you’ll have a clear, quantifiable way to track your progress.

2. Identify the Tools You Need

As we’ve stressed above, customer journey analytics is a data-focused approach. To generate the kind of insights that will make a real difference to your customer experience, you’ll need the right tools to gather and analyse this data in the first place.

With this in mind, it’s vital to invest in software that is up to the task. Look for software that provides dedicated business analytics solutions capable of integrating multiple channels. Ideally, it should also have the ability to deliver real-time data and customisable dashboards for visibility. 

This will help ensure you have the data you need on hand and ready to use when it comes to analysing your customer journeys and identifying points of friction.

3. Map Your Existing Customer Journeys

The next step is to fully map out your customer journeys – and note that we’ve used the plural here. 

Not all customers will follow the same process for engaging with your business. It will depend on various factors, including where the first encounter takes place and what their specific needs and interests are.

With this in mind, consider mapping out multiple journeys based on both specific sales funnels you’ve set up and different customer personas you are targeting. For instance, it’s likely that your Gen Z customers will engage in quite different buying behaviours from older demographics, and you’ll want to be able to capture this difference.

Make sure you include all the touchpoints for each journey and identify the essential sources of data at each step in the journey. Finally, ensure you’ve chosen a clear and intuitive way of presenting your maps – this will make it significantly easier to analyse and interpret them.

4. Integrate Your Data

At this stage, you want to gather all the relevant data across the various touchpoints you’ve identified. They can include:

• NPS, CSAT and CES scores
• Impressions and clickthrough rates for paid ads
• Conversion rates for landing pages
• Average session time on key product pages
• Average handle time (AHT) for customer calls

Of course, just having this data to hand isn’t enough. Now, you’ll need to analyse it effectively to identify specific issues. 

For instance, does AHT increase on particular types of calls, suggesting these aren’t dealt with effectively? Or perhaps your NPS score decreases depending on which channel customers used to make their purchase?

At this stage, it can be helpful to draw on insights from across your organisation to deepen your analysis. A cross-functional approach that embraces the knowledge of different teams can ensure that you’re getting the most value from your data.

5. Implement Improvements

Once you’ve identified any key points of friction in your customer journey, you can start making targeted improvements.

At this stage, it’s essential to take a cautious approach. Making large-scale changes to multiple aspects of your customer journey at the same time is a recipe for disaster – as well as making it harder for you to measure the impact of any specific change.

Instead, focus on tackling the most pressing issues. If there is a specific moment in your customer journey that is causing a large number of drop-offs, then tweaking this is an obvious first step.

6. Track the Impact

Now you’ve made your adjustments, it’s time to measure their impact. And as with every other aspect of this process, it’s vital to focus on the data.

While it may seem that a particular change to your customer journey is bound to benefit your business, it’s important not to jump to conclusions. Businesses are complex things, with many moving parts – and that means unintended consequences are hard to avoid. 

Thankfully, you should have defined the metrics you’re tracking in step one, so you know what to look for when measuring the success of any changes. And don’t be afraid to revert back to your previous approach if you don’t see the improvements you’re expecting – as we’ll stress below, customer journey analytics is not a simple fix.

7. Iterate, Iterate, Iterate

Customer journey analytics is not a one-off effort. Rather, it’s an ongoing process that requires consistent effort. But that also means it will continue to deliver results for the long-term, allowing you to identify new issues as they emerge and explore ongoing refinements to your process.

With this in mind, it’s important to continue making targeted, data-backed adjustments to your customer journey. These could be continuous improvements to a specific touchpoint, or a wider rearrangement of your channel mix. What’s essential is that you continue to measure their impact and adjust your strategy accordingly.

As you gather more customer data and see how specific changes affect their behaviour, your understanding of your customers will continue to grow. And that means your ability to deliver an impactful customer experience will grow, too.

Key Takeaways

• Customers won’t settle for poor CX. Customers now demand frictionless experiences that fit their exact needs. If you don’t deliver, they will likely start to look elsewhere.

• Data is essential. Improving your customer experience means truly understanding what your customers want. The best way to achieve this is by gathering, integrating and analysing your customer data.

• Set clear and measurable goals. Implementing customer journey analytics is a complex process – it’s essential that you have a well-defined aim in mind, alongside ways to track your progress.

• Embrace the process. Customer journey analytics is an ongoing, iterative process. It will bring continued benefits, but only if you commit for the long term.

Transform Your Customer Journeys with MaxContact

With customers increasingly expecting a smooth purchasing journey that is fully adaptive to their preferences, focusing on your CX is no longer optional. It’s now a fundamental part of attracting and retaining customers – and customer journey analytics can help you outpace your competition.

At MaxContact, we’re committed to developing software solutions that help you deliver the exceptional CX your customers expect. With a range of advanced features including real-time speech analytics and quality assurance metrics, you’ll have cutting-edge tools at your disposal to analyse, evaluate and improve your customer journeys.

To learn more, request a demo today.