Customer Journey Analytics: What Is It and Why Is It Essential

Customer insights are what drive marketing campaigns and business decisions nowadays. By collecting data across all platforms, businesses can obtain credible insights for their strategies.

What kind of insights business owners would need? - you might ask. It’s all about getting data from the customer journey and applying customer journey analytics to your business. Here are what you need to know.

What is customer journey analytics?

Customer journey analytics (or customer analysis) is the data-driven tactic in which all data drawn from the customer journey are analyzed to tell a story about how you are interacting with your customers.

If you have read about the customer journey map, you would wonder what the differences are between customer journey analytics and customer journey map.

>>> Read more: Creating a Customer Journey Map in 6 Steps

It’s true that both approaches highlight the touchpoints, point out the problems, and identify opportunities during a purchase. However, customer journey analytics tells you a story based on data. It’s comprehensive as all data is collected and taken into account, therefore, it will analyze all customers who have come into contact with you and do not just pick some of them as representatives.

Why is customer journey analytics important?

The customer journey analytics market is expanding as many companies are adopting data to assess their performance. Why is that such an important part? Here are the reasons and some of the customer journey analytics use cases.

Define the opportunities and deficiencies

Customer journey analytics mark the potential touchpoints where we can encourage customers to proceed and where the frictions are.

Looking at the analytics result, you can understand customers’ preferences: which online platforms they tend to browse, what payments are widely used, what problems they encounter, etc. From there, you can improve your business significantly.

Consequently, you can also enhance customer satisfaction, customer retention, and even customer lifetime value. These are what build a long term and sustainable business.

>>> Read more: Measuring Customer Satisfaction: The Ultimate Guide

Customer journey analytics example

A subscription business provides piano learning for beginners. They identify Covid-19 has made more people tune in online learning and now is the chance to encourage people to sign up for a long-term subscription. The company has designed excellent lessons and plans for the 12-month subscription. However, users do not increase as they expected.

Looking at the data, they recognize there are so many people drop out during the trials. By using surveys to investigate customer’s decisions, the company comes to understand the lessons in trials provide the general techniques only thus it does not prove to be potentially useful to users. 

Getting this insight prompts the company to look into improving the tryout. They start to let users get hands-on experience with a few unique techniques and practices that enable them to play several simple songs. This is a big encouragement to users to stick with the service thus they are more likely to make a purchase.

Get an overall picture and details at the same time

Customer journey mapping provides general information and visualizes it in a comprehensive and condensed way. Journey analytics helps us understand the big picture while narrowing it down to specific issues and solutions.

You can zoom in on every touchpoint, inspect each transaction to understand the root cause of a problem.

Constantly update and inform the current state

What is good about customer journey analytics is it provide you with real-time response, constantly updates on how all transactions are going, how customers are changing over time. From there, businesses can quickly adapt and strategize a different approach to keep up with the buying pattern or new habits.

Customer journey analytics can create differences for businesses. Many companies are relying on these data to change their business for the better.

Here is the customer journey analytics example.

You notice there are many customers who proceed to checkout but the payment is still incomplete. By looking at the rising percentage of cart abandonment rate and payment failure, you can investigate delivery service, card issues, or website glitches, etc and respond accordingly. On top of that, since the data also captures the customer demographics, you would know which customers tend to encounter such issues, then set out to fix it immediately for all customers at once.

Personalize the customer experience

Personalization is what is mentioned when it comes to customer experience. As businesses are going online, it’s hard to communicate and bond with your customers. Therefore, it’s essential to personalize the customer experience to leave a mark on their impression.

Mentioning their name is one. You can also use the data to offer something that excites them. For example, you have noticed this person has made a lot of purchases on sneakers, you can reach out on his/her birthday to welcome him/her back and give him/her a discount on the available shirts with the same color shade as the sneakers s/he bought. Anyone would be excited and appreciated.

You can look at the data, understand the customer’s habit, then reach out to them with the relevant content on the products purchased earlier. One way, you help your customer to gain more information, and in another way, you have another subscription for your newsletter aka email marketing.

Customer journey analytics platform

If you are wondering how you can integrate customer journey analytics into your business, then you should start to look at the customer journey analytics software and pick one that suits your goals.

The demand for customer journey analytics is increasing. There are many customer journey analytics tools to consider. However, these are the basics to stick to:

• It enables you to track and analyze customer behaviors/buying process on different platforms
• Provide functions to visualize the journey from collected data
• Equipped with predictive analysis based on customer’s buying habits
• Track customer activities from all different channels and integrate them together for comprehensive insight.

Adopting the customer journey analytics

The world is changing with business intelligence and data analysis present in our everyday life. It might be a challenge to adopt new customer journey management methods, however, staying relevant and changing for the better are the essential ways to survive and thrive. Take a wiser approach with customer journey analytics!