by Debashis Rana -
No matter the scope, scale, or size of your organization, one ingredient is essential to the recipe for success: knowing your customer.
Today, more tools, best practices, and approaches than ever before are available to capture and tap into available data so organizations can better understand their customers. However, all that data creates a new challenge—knowing how to develop a robust, consistent, and repeatable approach to turning customer data points into actionable insights.
A long, successful customer relationship can be ruined by one bad touch point, so addressing these hurdles appropriately is critical to supporting a modern customer experience (CX). That’s where standing up a robust customer journey analytics program comes in.
What is customer journey analytics and how can utilizing it take your organization’s CX to the next level? Let’s dive in.
What Is Customer Journey Analytics?
It may be hard to put into words (let alone numbers), but the last time you had an amazing customer service experience, you walked away feeling heard and understood in a way that was personal to your needs, interactions, situation and preferences—and that was a very real sensation.
Customer journey analytics is about putting the mechanisms in place to capture, organize, and analyze data surrounding experiences like those from across all of your engagement channels, for every touchpoint. In turn, your organization will have the data and capacity to:
- Identify customer needs and preferences
- Collect and react to customer feedback on engagement experiences
- Use advanced analytic models for reactions as appropriate
- Calculate metrics for each step in the customer journey
- Gain visibility into the entire history of the customer’s journey
- Implement secondary tools, processes, and scores to measure customer satisfaction and engagement
- Leverage insights from similar experiences of related customer groups
Together, these elements proactively identify and resolve any pain points for customers, align products with their preferences, and direct customers on the most effective path toward a successful sales and experience.
How Customer Journey Analytics Benefits Your Organization
The benefits of investing in a customer journey analytics program for your customers—and, in turn, your operations—are numerous. Some of the more prominent benefits include:
- Better alignment of your services and products with what your customers actually want
- Agile business practices that quickly respond to changes in customer situations and preferences
- A value-driven and customer experience-focused organizational strategy
- The ability to quickly collect, process, and react to customer feedback and issues, and to more effectively implement resolutions and marketing refinements
- Increased return on marketing and sales engagements by driving up conversions, targeting cross-sell and upsell opportunities, and aligning goals more closely with actual customer expectations
How to Kick-start Your Customer Journey Analytics Program
Every organization’s customer journey will be unique to their needs and preferences, but the key elements of a successful analytics program that can shape an organization’s successful path are well-placed in best practices.
The five key steps, processes, and tools involved in a customer journey analytics program include:
1. Mapping Your Customer Journeys
From inside your organization, the touchpoints, actors, systems, and processes that interact with your customers are obvious. To your customers, their experience is only defined by the system, people, and touchpoints they see and experience.
Begin by mapping each of the interactions, processes, and systems that your customers interact with—and the data they provide—from first touch to last.
2. Establishing the Elements to Make Data Actionable
Based on your customers’ journeys, identify which data points, systems, and tools are needed to capture, organize, and analyze your customer behavioral data, populate key metrics, feed analytic models, and make data-driven decisions.
In addition to digital elements, also identify any training or change management investments your organization needs to make to provide employees with the tools they need to perform effectively.
3. Ensuring that Data Collection Mechanisms Are in Place
Depending on their needs, goals, and preferences—as well as their history with your brand—customers can have very different journeys from each other.
With integrations, analytical tools, and metrics programs coming online, ensure that proper testing occurs to document the required data across all engagement channels and touchpoints. Then fine tune, as needed.
4. Supporting Ongoing Journey Optimization
The value of CX analysis is not in reaching a singular, defined finish line. Instead, it is about continuously adjusting, refining, and evolving your processes and products to meet changes in customer preferences for as long as the relationship exists.
In other words, building a customer journey analytics program isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it effort. Focus equal attention on putting in the necessary policies and controls to continuously monitor and optimize your customer journeys.
5. Prioritizing Identified Efforts and Insights
This is where the rubber hits the road. As trends, anomalies, and patterns emerge, use those data points to identify specific actions or investments to meet those needs. The same data can be used to:
- Prioritize efforts
- Inform metrics and analytic models to monitor the impact of proposed changes
- Calculate the return on investment
Bringing It All Together with Customer Journey Analytics
At the most fundamental level, customers are the reason that businesses exist, so investing in the aspects of your operations designed to consistently deliver delightful customer experiences is critical to sustainable growth.
This is why it’s essential to establish and maintain your own customer journey analytics program and give your employees the data, recommendations, and tools they need. With the right information, they’ll not only meet the expectations of today’s customers but also anticipate the needs of future customers.
Whether your organization is just beginning to learn about the value of having a customer journey analytics program or if it already has one in place, a trusted advisor like RCG can accelerate and amplify the impact of your investment. Leaning on our extensive experience in customer journey analytics, RCG can:
- Help your organization understand your current capabilities
- Provide an unbiased opinion on where your peers are in the industry
- Design a custom approach and solution that fits your business
- Build and deploy the solution to elevate your capabilities to the next level
- Sustain these capabilities in the long term
Ready to learn more about how to take your organization’s customer journey program to the next level? Connect with an expert from the RCG team today.
Works Cited
1. HubSpot "What Is Customer Experience? (And Why It's So Important)" Retrieved from https://blog.hubspot.com/service/what-is-customer-experience
