If there is one thing that’s certain about customer expectations, it’s that there is no certainty. Customer expectations are constantly and rapidly evolving, and businesses across the board (but especially within mobile communications) cannot rely on legacy-based customer experience strategies to help the modern-day customer.
Within the world of the customer experience, the ever-changing landscape means that businesses need to remain highly alert and sensitive to minute changes in customer behavior, whether they are positive or negative. It is essential for businesses to identify and understand what aspects of the customer experience have the greatest impact on targets and key performance indicators that a business is looking to hit.
Customer journey analytics and dashboards can help businesses to identify, improve and prioritize the customer journey into an intentional, frictionless experience.
Examining Customer Journey Analytics
Customer journey analytics is the practice of analyzing customer behavior and engagement across all customer touchpoints (apps, web, chat, etc.) over time to assess the impact of customers’ behavior on business outcomes.
The aggregation and analysis of customer journey data allows businesses to monitor their customer experience performance, identify areas for improvement, forecast risk and opportunity, and understand and segment their customers at a granular level.
Businesses need to understand where, how, and why their customers are interacting with their brand. These interactions hold the answers to how to improve customer service, customer retention, and how to reduce churn and attrition, all of which contribute to an increase in Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
Customer data can be generated from a variety of channels, Touchpoints, SDK platforms, and messaging methods. Often, these data sets exist in segmented silos that make it difficult to create an end-to-end view of the customer and their journey.
Eliminating these data silos using a unified customer journey library as part of a digital customer experience platform allows companies to combine fragmented customer data to create a cohesive unified customer journey picture. This picture makes it easier for businesses to identify common issues or behavior patterns emerging throughout the customer experience.
Knowing Your Customers Starts with Understanding Their Journeys
Knowing and understanding your customers is impossible without considering and understanding the journeys they take with your business. Leveraging insights taken from customer journey analytics brings numerous capabilities to businesses, including:
Identifying what matters to your customers
Through first person customer data, businesses can look deeper to identify noteworthy trends, patterns, and abnormalities in a customer’s online behavior, and take appropriate action to reinforce or alter the customer’s journey to achieve a particular outcome.
Create real-time awareness at an elevated level
Customer journey analytics enables companies to track and monitor customer actions as they play out, creating real-time awareness of significant interactions at particular touchpoints. Real-time awareness and monitoring allow businesses to monitor developing customer opportunities and issues and if the need be, act.
Design and tailor emotional connections with customers
Engagements with customers should have a certain amount of emotional impact for them to be meaningful and long-lasting. Personas such as GenZ like to associate themselves personally with the brands they select and use. Positive customer experiences based on emotional connection can be created with help from customer data.
Through customer journey analytics, businesses can assess the underlying emotion driving certain customer actions and create engagement strategies that either cater to this emotion or minimize it.
It helps businesses identify why customers do what they do so businesses can make more informed decisions that have a positive impact on the customer experience.
Predict customer behaviors and concerns
Customer journey analytics not only helps businesses to monitor and understand customer interactions in real-time, but it can also help businesses to forecast and predict future customer behaviors based on current trends.
Businesses can also predict future purchases customers will make, based on personal history, and send personalized, customer-focused product recommendations as a result, to drive more business and build long-term customer lifetime value.
This has tremendous potential for improving services and the customer experience. Customers who have stopped using and engaging with Apps and Web channels can be identified and highlighted so digital proactive reach out using rich push messaging and re –engagement promotions and offers can specifically target them to reduce the chance of churn.
Enhance business growth using insights from customer journey data
Businesses that want to drive ongoing growth through customer experience optimization should be looking at how to align their CX strategies with their business goals. To do this they need data, data they can take directly from customer interactions (first person data) to help inform these policies.
No matter what the goals are, whether they are cross-selling, upselling, customer acquisition, or retention maximization, the data that tells the story is vital to building better customer experiences and driving business growth across key areas.
Designing the Kinds of Experiences Customers Want Using Data and Analytics
The essential nature of customer journey analytics to business success can’t be overstated. The more information a business has about its customers as well as their needs, experiences, and habits, the more intelligent and effective the business decisions are that they can take as a result.
Customer data and customer journey analytics provide businesses with the means to improve their customer service and deliver an intentional frictionless experience, perfect customer lifetime value, and drive growth across key business areas not only for customers today, but the future customers of tomorrow.
