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Everything You Need To Know About Customer Journey Analytics

Everything You Need To Know About Customer Journey Analytics

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Last Updated:  
March 18, 2024

Customer journey analytics is like a treasure map that leads to customer satisfaction. It helps companies discover new paths they can take to improve the customer experience and better meet customer needs.

Just like a real-life treasure map, it takes time and effort to create a comprehensive and accurate one. Companies must use reliable data sources, such as customer feedback surveys and customer journey mapping, to construct an effective customer journey analytics plan.

However, taking the time to understand customer journey analytics can pay off big for companies as it comes with a ton of benefits that will help them better understand their customers, make more informed decisions, and create a stronger customer base.

What Is Customer Journey Analytics?

Customer journey analytics is the process of collecting and analyzing customer data to understand their activity and behavior throughout the customer lifecycle. Companies can use this data to gain insights into how customers interact with their products, services, and brand.

For example, a company may use customer journey analytics to track customer behaviors across channels like social media, the web, and email. By understanding customer actions, companies can better understand how customers interact with their brand and come up with ways to improve the customer experience.

Overall, customer journey analysis includes:

  • Understanding customer behavior across different channels
  • Identifying customer pain points and emotional issues
  • Analyzing customer feedback to gain insights into customer expectations
  • Leveraging data to create more personalized customer experiences
  • Tracking key performance indicators to measure customer journey performance

The Importance Of Customer Journey Analytics For Companies

Nearly nine out of ten successful businesses stress the importance of anticipating customer needs and providing helpful experiences throughout their journey, in order to reach new heights. To do so, customer journey analytics is a must.

Customer journey analytics allows companies to understand how customers interact with their products and services, which helps them make more informed decisions about the customer experience. With this data, companies can identify potential gaps in their customer experience, as well as areas that need improvement in order to better serve their customers.

Customer journey management can also shed some light on the hindrances that are stopping your customers from taking the desired action. It takes your customers from first contact to the final sale and beyond, giving you insights into what works and what doesn't.

What Is Customer Journey Mapping?

Customer journey mapping is a visual representation of customer interactions throughout the customer lifecycle. It shows how customers interact with and experience your brand from their first contact to their last. This allows companies to identify potential pain points and areas of improvement in the customer journey, as well as find ways to better meet customer needs.

Customer journey mapping can be done at all stages of the customer lifecycle, including acquisition, onboarding, education, engagement, and retention. It can help companies identify key moments in the customer journey where they can make an impact, such as when customers are considering making a purchase or when they need help with a product.

Customer journey maps can be created using customer feedback surveys, focus groups, interviews, and other qualitative and quantitative methods. They can also be used in combination with customer journey analytics to gain a better understanding of customer behavior.

Customer Journey Analytics vs Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey analytics and customer journey mapping are both important tools for understanding customer behavior and improving customer experience. However, they each serve a different purpose.

Customer journey analytics is used to collect and analyze customer data, while customer journey mapping is used to visually represent customer interactions throughout the customer lifecycle.

Both are important for understanding customer behavior, but they should be used in combination to get a full picture of the customer experience.

Nevertheless, you must understand that a customer journey map can be the first step in customer journey analytics. With a customer journey map, you can gain insights into customer behavior and then use analytics to further explore the data and draw conclusions.

Examples of Customer Journey Mapping Surveys for eCommerce Businesses

Using intuitive analytics tools such as Triple Whale gives you insight into customer needs, preferences, and motivations, allowing you to craft the perfect customer experience for your eCommerce business.

To start you have to map out the different stages in the customer journey:

  • Awareness
  • Interest
  • Intent/Purchase
  • Engagement

Awareness

During the awareness stage, your goal is to capture their attention with compelling visuals, informative product descriptions, and enticing discounts. This is where customer journey mapping surveys come in handy.

Using surveys, you can ask questions about what drew customers to your business, what actions they took, and what type of content was most effective at capturing their attention.

You can also ask:

  • Who are you shopping for today?
  • What did you come here to do today?
  • What are you looking for today?

eCommerce businesses like NEXT.com use customer journey mapping surveys to help them better understand and meet customer needs.

Interest

In this stage, customers have shown an interest in your product or service and are evaluating their options. Your goal is to keep them engaged and interested in your offering.

Heatmaps can be used to track your customer's movements and pinpoint areas of interest. From which buttons they click to where their mouse hovers, heatmaps provide detailed insights into customer behavior.

Intent/Purchase

Here, customers are ready to make a purchase or have already made a purchase. For example, Hem & Stitch uses these surveys to help you understand what motivated them to purchase and where they may have had difficulty in the process.

Use questions such as:

  • What was the main factor that led to your purchase?
  • What do you think could have been improved in the buying process?
  • What made you choose us over our competitors?

Engagement

This is the stage where customers are actively engaged with your brand. It’s important to keep them engaged and ensure they remain loyal to your brand.

The Net Promoter Survey can do just that. For example Hem and Stitch uses this survey to ask customers to rate their overall experience with your business and can provide valuable insights into customer satisfaction, loyalty, and engagement.

Benefits Of Customer Journey Analytics

There are many benefits of customer journey marketing, including:

1. More Customer-Centric

64% of companies with a customer-centric CEO were more profitable than their CEO. Therefore, companies are now adopting a more customer-centric approach to their customer experience. Customer journey analytics helps companies gain insights into customer behavior, which can then be used to create more personalized experiences for customers. Learning about your customers with customer journey analysis can help you meet their needs, create a strong customer-brand relationship, and increase customer loyalty and retention.

2. More Unification

Unifying departments and teams across your company with one single source of data can be a huge challenge. Customer journey analytics provides data that can be used across the entire organization, helping companies create more aligned and unified customer experience strategies.

Now customers will receive a positive customer experience across all touchpoints, from customer service to product marketing.

3. Direct And Indirect Feedback

Customer feedback drives customer experience, and customer journey analytics opens the door to a variety of customer feedback. You can request direct feedback from your customers with the help of surveys, product reviews, and customer focus groups. You can also use customer journey analytics to measure customer sentiment from indirect feedback such as sales numbers, social media comments, website traffic, and third-party site reviews.

4. Find Track Issues As They Happen

Customer journey analytics help you become aware of your customers' issues in real-time, giving you the chance to tackle them efficiently. During customer journey analysis, you can identify customer pain points and track customer satisfaction over time. You can use the data to test what is working and what is not, so you can make quick changes or tweaks when needed as your bottom line can reflect these changes.

Many Teams Of Your Company Can Benefit From Customer Journey Analytics

Customer journey analytics can be beneficial to a variety of teams and departments within your company, such as:

1. Customer Experience Teams

Customer experience is known to have an impact on your company's bottom line. However, before the advent of customer journey analysis, it was difficult to quantify this directly. Now, customer journey analytics provide customer experience teams with the data they need to uncover customer pain points and improve the customer experience.

It helps CX team leaders record different aspects of a customer's journey. These include:

  • Journey milestones: What steps did the customer take to reach their goal?
  • In-journey signals: How to recognize when it's likely that your customers will accomplish their objective?
  • End-of-journey success metrics: What indicators can be identified to monitor and assess how easily customers accomplish their objectives, as well as the success of your business's desired outcome?

Coupled with the in-journey indicators, the end-journey success metrics clarify which customer journey is underachieving. Therefore, allowing you to optimize it to reach better outcomes.

2. Marketing Teams

Marketing teams can use customer journey management to understand customer intent and measure the success of their campaigns. With access to customer data, they can also create more personalized experiences for customers at each touchpoint in the journey. This is accomplished through customer segmentation based on various factors such as demographic, socioeconomic, and psychographic.

Customer journey analytics allows marketers to measure customer engagement levels across channels and optimize their campaigns for increased ROI. They can also identify and analyze customer behavior patterns to create more targeted marketing strategies, track the effectiveness of their campaigns, and optimize them for better performance.

All in all, these customer journey analysis tactics allow you to improve your customer acquisition, up-selling, and cross-selling strategies. Also, once you have aligned your strategy with the CX team, it will further bolster customer retention rates.

3. Analytics Teams

Data insight is the key to making informed decisions, and customer journey analytics provide actionable insights that help analytics teams better understand customer behavior and trends. With customer journey analysis, you can gain an understanding of how customers interact with your brand in different channels, what they expect from it, and where they drop out of the customer journey.

Analytics teams use customer journeys to identify trends and patterns, as well as issues and pain points that may pop up along the way. They can then trace the issue to the root cause while quickly tackling the issues and suggesting solutions to prevent a recurrence.

By working together as a unit, the analytics team offers the analysis results to the marketing and CX teams needed to make informed decisions.

4. Digital Teams

Digital teams are spearheading your company's efforts in boosting customer satisfaction while lowering expenses, and customer journey analysis is the bridge that provides the data they need.

Digital teams take a microscopic view of all digital channels to discern which goals customers are aiming to achieve within each channel. By analyzing customer behavior patterns in each of the channels, digital teams can optimize the customer experience to ensure users have an easy time navigating their way through the customer journey while preventing customer drop-offs.

For example, by studying customer journey map examples of simple and effective journeys, digital teams can quickly identify which customer journeys are not performing to the best of their ability. This allows them to identify potential usability issues and develop solutions for them promptly, across all channels.

5. Customer Service and Care Teams

Customer service and care teams are at the core of customer retention, and customer journey analytics offer valuable insights that empower them to provide better customer experiences. By leveraging customer journey analytics, they can identify customers who are stuck at certain touchpoints and take proactive steps to help guide them along their journey.

Whether it's web or mobile chat, email, SMS, or phone calls, customer support teams need to understand the customer journey in each channel to reduce costs and increase customer happiness. It will help optimize the customer support process, reduce customer churn, increase customer loyalty and further improve customer satisfaction.

Manage Customer Journey Analytics, Attribution, And Creative For Your Shopify Store In One Place

Whether it's tracking customer journeys, uncovering customer motivations and pain points, or predicting customer behavior, customer journey analytics offer a wealth of insights to ensure their customers have an enjoyable and seamless experience. 

By combining customer journey analytics with other valuable marketing tools such as attribution and creative, businesses can effectively manage their customer journey in one place.

Triple Whale, an all-in-one platform, offers intuitive dashboards and powerful data analysis tools to give you the edge you need to optimize and aggregate customer journeys and take your business to the next level. Book a free demo today to find out more about how Triple Whale can help you unlock the power of customer journey analytics.

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