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What is Customer Journey Analytics? & Why is it Important?

Aarti Krishnakumar

Aug 24 2022
customer journey analytics

What Is Customer Journey Analytics?

The first thing to understand when getting started with the customer is their journey, which can be classified into three main stages: Acquisition, Activation, and Adoption.

Acquisition Stage

A buyer/customer is looking for a solution to their problem during the acquisition phase. They learn about the company via an acquisition channel such as advertising, organic search, billboards, television, review sites, or word-of-mouth referrals. Once on the website, the prospect will continue the discovery process by exploring content, searching the site, or watching videos. They may even start a chat conversation or contact the company to learn more about its services.

Activation Stage

A prospect advances to the activation stage after completing the acquisition stage. The prospect is now referred to as a user or customer at this point. The user goes through an onboarding process during this stage. This process may include both an automated product onboarding experience and training managed by a customer success team. The former is essential for B2C businesses, while the latter is more common for higher-touch B2B businesses.

Adoption Stage

Customers enter the adoption stage once they have been activated. Users begin to incorporate the product into their work or personal habits at this stage. The longer they stay, the less likely they are to leave. Users of B2B products will invite colleagues to join and collaborate with them. For B2C companies, users will begin to form habits and become dependent on the product in their daily lives. During this stage, excellent customer service is essential!

Users will become promoters during the adoption stage. They will recommend and defend the product as if it were their own. This scenario is more common in modern businesses that use the bottom-up customer acquisition approach, in which the buyer is the product’s actual user.

Measuring customer experience continues to be a challenge for many businesses. Organizations have ranked quantifying the ROI of CX initiatives and investments as their most difficult challenge over the last three years. The primary barriers are data and organizational silos, particularly for banking, telecommunications, and insurance companies that are inundated with massive amounts of data from millions of customers.

Customer Journey Analytics is the process of determining the significance of each interaction a customer has with your company. Customer journey analytics can help you determine why your customers act the way they do and link your customer experience efforts to financial outcomes.

The process begins with a customer journey map, which is presented as a graph, flow chart, or other visual that documents each stage of a customer’s relationship with a brand. However, rather than simply mapping their customer journey, customer journey analytics goes a step further by analyzing the impact of each interaction on your customers’ decisions. Through this post, you’ll learn how to use customer journey analytics to improve customer experience.

Hyperautomation in Customer Journey Analytics

Hyperautomation, a rapidly emerging trend in the field of customer journey analytics, is transforming the way businesses manage and optimize their customer experiences. Hyperautomation combines advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), robotic process automation (RPA), and natural language processing (NLP) to automate and streamline various processes within the customer journey.

By leveraging hyperautomation, businesses can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of their customer journey analytics initiatives. Here’s how hyperautomation can be integrated into different stages of the customer journey:

1. Acquisition Stage:

• AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can automate customer interactions and provide real-time assistance during the acquisition phase. These intelligent chatbots can answer queries, provide personalized recommendations, and guide customers through the initial discovery process.
• ML algorithms can analyze customer data from various acquisition channels to identify patterns and preferences, enabling businesses to target their marketing efforts more effectively.

2. Activation Stage:

• RPA can automate the onboarding process for new customers, ensuring a seamless and consistent experience. This includes tasks such as account setup, user provisioning, and personalized product tours.
• NLP algorithms can analyze customer feedback and sentiment to identify potential issues or areas for improvement in the activation stage. This information can be used to optimize the onboarding process and enhance customer satisfaction.

3. Adoption Stage:

• ML algorithms can analyze user behavior and engagement data to identify patterns and predict customer preferences. This enables businesses to personalize the customer experience, recommend relevant content or products, and proactively address customer needs.
• AI-powered automation can automate customer service processes, such as ticket routing, issue resolution, and follow-up communications. This ensures timely and efficient support for customers, leading to higher satisfaction and retention rates.

Hyperautomation also plays a crucial role in data integration and analysis throughout the customer journey. It can consolidate data from multiple sources, including CRM systems, social media platforms, and IoT devices, providing a comprehensive view of the customer journey. Advanced analytics techniques, such as predictive analytics, can then be applied to this integrated data to uncover actionable insights and optimize decision-making.

Moreover, hyperautomation enables businesses to continuously monitor and optimize the customer journey by automating the collection and analysis of real-time data. This ensures that businesses can respond promptly to changing customer needs and preferences, identify bottlenecks or areas for improvement, and implement data-driven strategies to enhance the overall customer experience.

In conclusion, hyperautomation is revolutionizing customer journey analytics by automating and optimizing various processes within the customer journey. By leveraging advanced technologies and data-driven insights, businesses can enhance customer satisfaction, drive revenue growth, and achieve competitive advantage in today’s dynamic business landscape.

How Does Customer Journey Analytics Work?

Businesses use customer journey analytics because it is one of the most effective ways to increase customer lifetime value, improve customer loyalty, and drive revenue growth.

Customer journey analytics typically includes in-depth analysis of:

  • Customer expectations and demands
  • Emotional behavior patterns
  • Key metrics across each step in the customer journey
  • Scores across various aspects- customer satisfaction, customer effort

Customer journey analytics can assist businesses in directing their customers’ attention and resolving any pain points that prevent them from taking the desired actions. It enables them to enhance their customer experience and create a customer journey that not only takes customers where the business wants them to go but also connects them to the journey itself.

Importance Of Customer Journey Analytics

Today, Customer journey analysis derives insights from massive amounts of historical customer and operational data (Big Data), which is especially useful for identifying complex patterns in customer journeys. This analysis is becoming increasingly predictive. The ultimate goal is to use real-time data to take actions that improve each customer’s experience right away. A similar analysis of employee experiences can aid in service level improvement.

The way a customer’s journey plays out across channels—searching online, speaking with a contact center agent, visiting a store, buying online—is valuable data that can be difficult to piece together, but it is critical to understand. Sophisticated research assists businesses in understanding their customers’ actual experiences in a variety of settings and linking that to business outcomes, such as a customer’s likelihood of becoming a Net Promoter® of the company or product purchase rates.

Customer journey analytics provide teams with visibility into every critical customer interaction.
They no longer have to rely solely on customer feedback, which, while valuable, rarely tells the entire story. For example, while some users may provide customer feedback via a customer satisfaction survey, the majority will not, and the company may never know why those customers churned without customer journey analytics.

Customer journey analytics incorporates advanced analytics techniques such as

  • predictive analytics,
  • real-time analytics & updates,
  • customer segmentation, and a few others
  • to provide businesses with actionable insight that can directly impact their bottom line.

Benefits Of Customer Journey Analytics Platforms

customer journey analytics platforms benefits

Customer Journey Analytics Use Cases/Examples

Journey Report:

Companies can use the journey report to visualize customer touchpoints across multiple channels. Companies can use this report to:

  • Identify potential points of friction where users are leaving.
  • Examine the impact of initiatives on the conversion process at each stage of the user journey.
  • Before converting, determine which paths users are taking.

Attribution Report

The attribution report enables businesses to zero in on successful customers and estimate the contribution of specific touchpoints to their success.

Product marketing teams, for example, can segment their revenue based on the features that prompted users to upgrade. Companies can fine-tune their product roadmap by assigning dollar amounts to different features in order to increase conversions and decrease churn.

Retention Report

Companies can use the retention report to see how long users stay engaged with the company after completing a task. Companies, for example, can examine the percentage of users who subscribe to an email or push notification and then return to use a specific feature.

Related article: The Complete Overview of Customer Journey Automation

Choosing the Right Customer Journey Analytics Platform

With the objective to earn more about their customers, customer experience (CX) professionals and marketers are increasingly relying on customer journey analytics. Customer journey analytics software aids in the creation of better experiences on a large scale by providing real-time insights about individual touchpoints and interactive views of the journey as a whole.

If the market trends are any indication, businesses are doubling down on CX and digital experience efforts. According to 451 Research’s most recent Voice of the Enterprise survey results: [1] In the aftermath of COVID-19, 50% of respondents increased overall budgets to improve online experiences. [2] Advanced customer experience management tools are already in place in 68 percent of digitally driven businesses.

Customer journey analytics can help you understand your customers, make better use of your data, and get answers quickly. However, finding the right tool can be difficult. There are numerous customer journey analytics tools available, each with unique strengths and capabilities. Factors to keep in mind when making a selection:

  1. Real-time data & updates
  2. Predictive analytics
  3. Strong data visualization
  4. Customer behavior-based segmentation
  5. Data integration across channels
  6. Customized alerts & notifications to customers and
  7. KPI measurement

As always, the best solution is determined by your specific business needs and objectives.

Here are some potential trends and developments that could shape customer journey analytics in 2023

Greater emphasis on real-time analysis

As the importance of customer experience continues to grow, businesses are likely to place a greater emphasis on real-time customer data analysis. This could enable businesses to respond quickly to customer needs and adjust the customer journey on the fly.

Integration with more data sources

In 2023, we can expect to see customer journey analytics being integrated with more data sources beyond traditional sources like website and mobile app analytics. This could include social media data, CRM data, and even IoT data to provide a more holistic view of the customer journey.

Increased use of AI and machine learning

As the volume of customer data continues to grow, businesses are likely to rely more on AI and machine learning technologies to analyze and interpret the data. This could enable businesses to identify patterns and insights that might be difficult to discern using traditional data analysis techniques.

Greater focus on customer journey personalization

As customer journey analytics becomes more sophisticated, businesses may be better equipped to personalize the customer experience. This could include using data to deliver more targeted marketing messages, tailor product recommendations, and provide more relevant customer support.

Improved visualization and reporting

As businesses become more reliant on customer journey analytics, we can expect to see improvements in how data is visualized and reported. This could include the development of more intuitive dashboards and data visualization tools and more advanced reporting capabilities.

Overall, customer journey analytics is a rapidly evolving field, and we expect continued growth and innovation in the years ahead. By leveraging customer journey analytics, businesses can gain valuable insights into the customer experience and make data-driven decisions to improve customer satisfaction and drive business growth.

Customer Journey Analytics Platform Trial – A8iQ

One of the most effective ways for businesses to democratize customer data is through customer journey analytics. It enables every employee to answer questions about their work in order to make better decisions.

Customer journey analytics is a critical component of a successful customer journey management program, allowing businesses to manage, measure, and improve customer experience and business outcomes. It is the component responsible for data analysis, generating actionable insights to optimize journeys, and continuously measuring the performance of CX initiatives. The A8iQ platform from Autonom8 liberates businesses from the constraints of static business processes by incorporating intelligence into the workflows. With A8iQ, you can see deep business metrics that you couldn’t before, and adapt your workflows to continuously optimize these metrics, creating a learning feedback loop. The main highlights of A8iQ are:

  • Learn about your business metrics across the enterprise
  • Introspect, Analyze, and Optimize – all in one place
  • Share your view of the business any which way you desire
  • No last-minute surprises, Stay informed every time.

A8iQ pairs up with other A8Studio capabilities like A8Chat and A8flow, making your customer workflows intelligent out of the box. Connect with us today to find out how you can achieve this.

FAQ’s on Customer Journey Analytics

What is customer journey analytics?

Customer journey analytics is the science of analyzing customer behaviour across touchpoints and over time to determine how customer behaviour affects business outcomes. This approach is gaining traction as businesses recognise the value of customer journeys in monitoring customer experience performance and identifying opportunities for improvement.

What are the 7 steps to map the customer journey?

Customer journey mapping is a visual representation of how customers interact with your brand from their perspective. The 7 steps to map the customer journey are:
1. Set the business targets
2. Create customer profiles
3. Identify challenges
4. Chalk out the different stages customer goes through
5. Maximize the touchpoints
6. Identify solutions to earn customer’s trust
7. Review & revise [if necessary]

What is a customer journey model?

One of the many customer journey models is the Loop model from the Pedowitz Group.
1. Initial consideration of brands by the customer
2. Evaluation of the options
3. Making a selection
4. The overall experience

What is a digital customer journey?

The digital customer journey is the approach taken by an internet user from the stage of awareness to the stage of purchase. It encompasses every online interaction between the customer and the brand throughout the purchasing journey.

How do you map a buyer's journey?

It all begins with some preliminary research, looking at comparable products and comparing prices. Then comes learning more about the benefits and issues that people commonly encounter after purchasing the product by reading customer reviews online. Even if one does end up going to a physical store to make the purchase, chances are you will do some online research first, as 67% of consumers do at least some online research before making an in-person purchase. The different stages in the buyer’s journey are:

1. Awareness stage
2. Consideration stage
3. Decision stage
4. Retention stage and
5. Advocacy stage