Customer Journey Analytics: The Guiding Beacon for a Thriving Business

Without a steady supply of data about your customer's journey, you can't create a satisfying customer service experience. Customer journey analytics are how you equip your brand with the tools needed to get customers coming back for more.

Just how important are customer journey analytics to your business model? According to Grand View Research, the customer analytics market is expected to grow at a rapid CAGR of 19.24% in less than five years. Some of the main reasons behind this massive change include the evolving digital landscape customers are navigating as they interact with businesses.

From ecommerce sites to social media, customers leave a trail of valuable information about their preferences, pain points, and goals. When businesses curate most -- or sometimes all -- of their presence online, customer journey analytics tell you what is or isn't working.

We'll teach you how to track the entire customer journey, the benefits of analytics to your bottom line, and how Rightpoint can help you implement a winning customer journey analytics solution.

Key Takeaways:

• Customer journey analytics involves the hard data surrounding the customer journey from beginning to end. It includes essential details such as friction, pain points, satisfaction scores, reviews, and customer sentiment.

• Businesses need to consistently use customer journey analytics tools and overarching customer service frameworks to understand customers on a deeper level. These data sets provide vital insights that boost ROI, increase customer satisfaction, and improve customer loyalty.

• Keeping track of rapid-fire customer journey analytics can be tiring at the best of times. Rightpoint provides businesses and organizations with the strategic perspective and cutting-edge tools to curate, organize, and analyze valuable customer data.

The Definition of Customer Journey Analytics

Customer journey analytics involves any and all data related to the customer's journey, from awareness to purchase. One of the most common results of customer journey analytics is creating a customer map in the form of a graph, flow chart, or diagram.

However, these analytics are more than numbers and statistics. Customer journey mapping gathers up useful insights to narrow down insightful patterns, helping marketing and sales team draw productive conclusions on where to take their next strategy.

Below is a general overview of the kind of customer data and key performance indicators that a robust analytics strategy should look at.

Related Post: Building a Winning CX Strategy: Key Elements for Success

Customer Needs

What do your customers need from your business and why? Businesses can pull these analytics out of everything from customer reviews on products to social listening on Facebook.

Actionable insights in this area can help businesses:

• Add new products to their line-up

• Refine the quality or accessibility of existing products

• Alter their services to be more compatible with emerging needs

Customer Advocacy

Are your customers so happy about their customer experience that they're recommending your brand to others? Your analytics could look at useful details like customer interactions, blog posts, video reviews, or forum threads.

This customer journey data is incredibly useful for:

• Gauging customer sentiment on details like product quality or customer service

• Predicting the probability of customer retention or customer churn

• Determining the efficacy of current customer service efforts

• Customer Satisfaction Scores

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores are one of the most common KPIs of an analytics strategy because they clearly outline whether or not a business is performing well. This metric is easy to track through simple surveys and provides customers with a simple one to five score on their satisfaction levels.

The five Ps of the customer satisfaction score are Product, Price, Place, People, and Promotion. Customer satisfaction scores help businesses:

• Decide what to change or keep about their customer service efforts

• More accurately predict customer expectations and customer lifetime value

• Analyze the impact of brand identity and brand reputation

What's the Difference Between Customer Journey Analytics vs. Customer Journey Mapping?

Customer journey analytics involves gradually gathering, then analyzing customer data related to purchases, customer satisfaction, and customer sentiment. A customer map neatly lays out the customer's journey in terms of the steps they take to interact with a business and complete a purchase.

Let's dive into the subtle differences between these two terms and how they work better together.

Customer Journey Mapping Lays Out the Journey

We're going to paint a picture of what a customer journey map can look like in the wild. We'll use the example of a small, sustainable e-commerce fashion brand that needs to use customer journey mapping to better meet the needs of their eco-friendly customers.

They could create a customer journey map on the steps that lead customers to interacting with their brand online, such as talking about their brand's sustainable values on social media or interacting with your content supply chain. They could then break down the steps customers take to study their products, fill up their cart, and make a purchase.

This map not only looks at successfully completed purchases, it can take a look at common pain points to support an updated customer journey strategy. They could make notes of cart abandonment rates, common complaints after purchase, or negative reviews around a specific product.

Customer Journey Analytics Provides the Data for an Improved Customer Map

Trying to create a customer map without analytics is like trying to bake a cake with half the ingredients: the end result just won't be very good. The customer journey mapping process would be nearly impossible to complete without a steady stream of accurate data on customer behavior.

To expand upon the above example, the small e-commerce fashion business would use their analytics to craft a map to guide their next marketing and sales campaign. They would learn about pain points through negative customer reviews or study cart abandonment rates statistics for deeper insights into their product performance.

The Main Tools Needed to Analyze Customer Journey Analytics

While you can manually analyze your customer's behavior page by page, even the most shrewd business owner will still miss insightful patterns or subtle details that could influence their strategy. Customer journey analytics tools often draw upon AI solutions and digital organization to ensure nothing vital escapes your notice.

Customer Surveys

One of the most cost-effective and accessible ways of analyzing the customer journey is through a simple survey. You can prompt customers to complete this survey after a purchase: both new customers and repeat customers will have valuable insights to offer your business.

These surveys shouldn't be too complicated. Short, simple answers and a lean toward yes or no questions will increase the chances of a customer completing the survey. You can even offer incentive in the form of discounts or first dibs on new product drops.

A few examples of survey questions you could ask for customer journey analytics are:

• How did you find out about us?

• Did this product meet your expectations?

• Would you purchase this product again?

Social Listening and Social Media Monitoring Tools

Customers regularly share their thoughts on businesses online, often in the form of social media comments, text posts, and videos. According to Sprout Social, 73% of social users agree that they'll switch to a competitor if a brand doesn't respond to them on social.

Social listening and social media monitoring tools make sure no customer data slips through the cracks. Whether a customer is asking a question or simply sharing their thoughts on a purchase, these tools gather up real-time data and compile them in a format you can use.

These tools enable you to:

• Monitor conversations about your brand or your competitors

• Track conversations to study new developments or growing sentiments

• Discover influencers

• Provide custom alerts for industry trends or unsatisfied customers

• Track metrics related to hashtags, emojis, or post types

Sprout Social and BuzzSumo are a few social media listening tools you can start using to track customer journey analytics through social media.

Analytics Software

When you need a centralized hub to gather up all the customer profiles, interactions, and online activity, an analytics platform will be one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal. These tools combine valuable resources like machine learning and automated customer insights to save you valuable time gathering and analyzing data.

An industry-standard customer journey analytics software you can start out with are Adobe Analytics. This versatile marketing automation platform provides advanced analytics tools such as:

• Data collection: How do you keep up with the evolving activity of hundreds or thousands of customers? With useful tools like offline data collection and identity stitching that combines user IDs from multiple channels, you can create consistent and accurate customer journey maps.

• Artificial intelligence and machine learning: When you don't have time to pore through page after page of data, AI and machine learning tools quickly detect data trends, anomalies, and insight discovery to fill in the gaps.

• Journey visualization: When you need a quick graph or table to clearly outline each step in each customer journey, Adobe Analytics automates the process flow visualization tools. They provide convenient drag-and-drop features so you can rearrange customer steps or compare and contrast with other customer segments.

Amazon Web Services and Google Analytics are other well-known tools for analyzing the customer journey. You don't need to master every single tool to deliver more value to your customers: even choosing one will make a huge difference in your customer experience strategy.

These tools are just the beginning of automating and improving your customer journey analytics process. With actionable insights about customer interactions, pain points, and satisfaction levels at your fingertips, you have the opportunity to bring more revenue to your business.

In fact, we have five key benefits of the direct results that customer journey analytics deliver for leading brands.

The 5 Key Benefits of Customer Journey Analytics

Customer journey analytics translate into more money, saved time, and happier customers. Let's break down each benefit so you can get closer to the analytics strategy you need to grow.

1. Spotting Pain Points and Resolving Them More Quickly

The customer journey evolves rapidly: your brand perception can change seemingly overnight from a one-star review to a social media marketing mistake. You can use customer journey analytics tools like social media listening to quickly spot pain points, respond to customer complaints before they turn into negative reviews, and maintain a consistent brand image.

2. Keeping Both Implicit and Explicit Data in One Place

Customer journey analytics software makes it easy to keep explicit and implicit data where you can use it. Instead of attempting to tediously track your customer interactions or experiences through spreadsheets, these tools give you a steady stream of information to help your brand grow.

To clarify, explicit data revolves around any information a customer offers on their own, such as filling out a survey or buying from your business. This data provides hard numbers you can analyze, such as the amount of purchases, subscriptions, or shares.

Implicit data is any information a customer provides from their general behavior instead of active interactions with your brand. For example, you can draw implicit data based on customers' browsing behavior on your website. Heatmaps are useful for showing which pages customers lingered on or bounced from.

3. Increasing Customer Loyalty to Help Customer Retention

A steady stream of real-time data on your customers' behaviors, purchasing patterns, and pain points makes creating a great experience easier than ever. Even better, customers who enjoyed a frictionless experience are often eager to recreate it.

VOC analytics -- or voice of customer analytics -- is closely related to customer journey analytics by turning customer preferences and pain points into hard data. According to a Forbes analysis, 70% of customers reported higher customer loyalty when their feedback was implemented by the company.

Another study by McKinsey found high-performing customer loyalty programs can boost revenue from redeemed points by 15% to 25%.

4. Vastly Improved Customer Service Satisfaction

Without customer journey analysis, you'll miss out on the data that tells you what customers enjoy -- or don't enjoy -- from your business. A 2022 Statista survey saw a staggering 94% of customers saying a positive customer service experience would make them more likely to purchase again.

5. A Reliably High Return on Investment

Customer satisfaction has a direct connection to repeat business -- and positive word-of-mouth -- for your brand. A 2023 Qualtrics XM Institute study found that customers are over three times more likely to recommend and trust a company after submitting a five-star review, while also being over twice as likely to purchase more.

Customer Journey Analytics: Real World Use Cases and Examples

Curious to see how these analytics translate into undeniable results? Let's look at two real world use case examples to see the impact customer journey analytics leave on your bottom line.

How Spotify Used Customer Journey Analytics to Improve the Customer Experience

Spotify used customer journey analytics to analyze how well their ads were performing in terms of addressing customer needs at the right place and time. When they found out 65% of their digital audio listeners were still torn between purchasing from different brands, they found an opportunity to help their advertisers reach more people at a crucial time.

After analyzing customer behavior analytics during specific actions they take while using the platform -- such as shopping or eating -- they found that ads on Spotify during music met customer needs at 2.6 times the media touchpoint average. Display ads on Spotify also performed at twice the media touchpoint average.

How Rightpoint Helped Outrigger Analyze the Customer Journey to Streamline Purchases

Outrigger is a beach resort and hospitality brand that's been operating since 1947, working with travelers to provide them a premium experience they won't find anywhere else. When they found a disparity between customer bookings and customer satisfaction rates, they reached out to us for a robust customer journey analytics campaign.

After analyzing the customer journey across multiple business touchpoints, we soon drew the conclusion that customers were struggling with too many sites and landing pages to make a decision. We decided to overhaul their CMS, centralize their information, and provide a more personalized customer experience.

Thanks to customer journey analytics and the help of a seasoned marketing team, Outrigger increased their launch day booking revenue (almost rivaling their Cyber Monday sales). They also saw a significant uptick in both revenue and customer engagement.

Track Customer Journey Analytics With the Help of a Strategic Marketing Partner

Customer journey analytics offers you a clear path toward sustainable business growth by keeping your strategy where it needs to be: happy, satisfied customers. Rightpoint is a marketing agency with a track record of helping businesses turn their customer data into positive results.

We partner with industry leaders like Adobe and Optimizely to stay ahead of the curve with digital analytics tools that track, gather, and analyze customer data. Our digital marketing portfolio spans across industries such as technology, financial services, healthcare, retail, and more. With industry expertise and customer analytics tools, your next transformative business strategy is around the corner.

We're ready to help you craft customer journey maps that engage, delight, and convert. Contact us today for a consultation so we can help grow your brand through a targeted analytics strategy.