An Expert Guide to Customer Journey Analytics

Harry McKay
4
min read
March 22, 2023

“I’ll be back...”

Said a customer and never returned.

It’s heartbreaking when customers drop off midway 💔

But then, identifying the reason behind the behavior is crucial for growth.

Customer journey analytics can help you nail down why customers behave as they do, making it possible to link customer experience with financial outcomes.

So, let’s not waste time and get into learning more!

What Is Customer Journey Analytics?

Customer Journey Analytics is the process of analyzing customer behavior at every touchpoint across marketing channels and measuring the impact it creates on a business over time. It includes an analysis of several factors,

  • Customer requirements,
  • Key metrics in the customer journey,
  • Emotional highs and lows
  • Customer satisfaction scores
  • Survey outcomes, and many more.

Customer journey analytics gives you a closer look at how each customer interaction influences their purchasing decisions and drives them toward the end goal.

Further, customer journey analytics can help you resolve any issues customer queries that prevent your target market from taking specific action. Moreover, it can provide actionable insights and help you make informed decisions and create an improved customer experience.

Christina Luttrell from Relay Network talks about Customer Journey Analytics

Here are two customer journey analytics examples for better understanding.

  • Customer journey analytics helps you gather channel-specific insights to provide personalized experiences. Suppose you find that users on your mobile application bounce at a higher rate than the users on your website. This information can indicate that you need to improve a few elements of your mobile application.
  • In eCommerce, brands can view the steps customers take in the entire customer journey to complete a purchase. Thus, they can easily identify any barriers to completing the transaction. For example, you find that the checkout page takes a long time to load, which frustrates customers. You can then use this insight to run an A/B test and reduce the page load time to see if it eliminates the friction.

Difference Between Customer Journey Analytics and Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey analytics and customer journey mapping may sound similar, but they are pretty different. Both concepts complement one another.

Here’s how.

The most distinct difference between customer journey analytics and customer journey mapping lies in customer behavior.

A customer journey map is created before the customer onboards. It is assumption-based as the business team structures the flow considering how the journey would pan out. Hence, the journey is never realistic. Customers behave differently at different points and exhibit multiple patterns during the journey.

On the contrary, customer journey analytics provides a real-time and more comprehensive view of how the customer behaves within the journey. This means that marketers can evaluate several customer interactions and interpret them at any point and at any time of the customer journey.

Here’s a quick glance at the differences between customer journey mapping and customer journey analytics.

Difference Between Customer Journey Analytics and Customer Journey Mapping

According to a Salesforce survey, 67 percent of marketing leaders say that a connected customer journey across all touchpoints and channels is crucial to the success of a marketing strategy.

But how is customer journey analytics important? 🤔

Let’s understand better to create a robust and effective sales strategy!

Benefits of Customer Journey Analytics

What are the Benefits of Customer Journey Analytics

Get Real-Time Insights

Customer journey analytics gives you real-time valuable insights into customer behavior. It provides you with data about customer patterns and marketing metrics that help you get a wholesome understanding of what your target market needs.

Moreover, customer journey analytics also facilitates journey measurement used by the CX (customer experience) teams to monitor three significant aspects of the customer journey.

  • Milestones – The journey milestones tell you about the key steps customers take to reach their destination.
  • In-journey signals – These are indicators along the sales process that predict how likely the customers are to achieve their goals.
  • Success metrics – Success metrics or customer journey KPIs indicate how well the journey experience encourages potential customers to reach their goals and enables your business to achieve the desired result.

Create a Seamless Customer Experience

Customer experience is the new battlefield. 86 percent of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.

In a survey by SuperOffice, 1920 business professionals were asked to share their number one priority for the next five years. Here’s the result.

Top priority in business for next 5 years

So, it’s evident that customer experience is the most effective way to conquer your target audience. With the right customer journey analytics platform, you can test and track the journeys of your ideal customers. You can identify friction, understand customer needs, and take instant actions to make real-time improvements, providing them with the best experience with your brand.

Reduce Customer Churn

Customer journey analytics help you predict customer behavior and identify the customers at risk of leaving your website or product. After that, you can take the necessary actions in customer journey management to retain the at-risk customers.

Once you identify the customers at risk of leaving abruptly, you can use customer journey analytics to personalize their interactions throughout the journey and revolutionize your market plans. The role of an interactive demo is significant here. You can show customers how your product works rather than telling them about it, allowing them to see its value.

Storylane helps you build quick interactive demos tailored to the customer’s needs. It offers auto-personalization and rich editing features, enabling you to create a fantastic user experience.

Thus, you can create a positive brand impression on the customer, hoping they’ll change their minds about leaving.

Track ROI (Return On Investment) on CX

How much are you earning from the CX initiatives?

One of the biggest challenges that customer journey analytics solves is measuring the ROI on CX initiatives. Your product managers, product teams, and customer care teams can use the data from customer journey analytics to track the returns.

For example, customer journey analytics tools can help you compare the return generated from two customer journeys. Thus, you can identify and switch to the journey that results in more business revenue.

Additionally, customer journey analytics also makes it possible to,

✔️Understand customer-product interaction;

✔️How customer behavior changes due to changes in the customer journey; and

✔️The impact of changed customer behavior on product metrics.

Boost Customer Acquisition

After reading the above benefits, understanding this one’s easy!

Since customer journey analytics provides you with real-time information, you can respond to customers without delays. This eliminates several sales challenges, boosting your overall customer acquisition rate.

We hope you’ve got a deeper understanding of what customer journey analytics can do for your business.

Now, to get started, let’s explore the different stages in the customer journey.

Different Stages in the Customer Journey

Understanding the different stages in the customer journey will help you make the most out of customer journey analytics. Moreover, you’ll be able to deliver more value at every stage of the buying journey.

Different Stages in the Customer Journey

1. Acquisition Stage

The first stage is all about awareness and consideration.

At this awareness stage, a buyer explores solutions to their problem. Finally, they come across companies offering solutions through acquisition channels like organic search, review websites, referrals, social media ads, and more.

Once the prospect lands on a website, they explore content, navigate through the sites, and watch videos and interactive demos to understand the product/ service. Prospects may clear their queries through live chats and contact the team to understand the buying process further.

B2B companies engage prospects at this stage mostly via emails or phone calls. The process goes like this👇

  • SDRs (Sales Development Representatives) reach out to prospects.
  • They ensure that the prospect has the qualifications to make a purchase. SDRs use the BANT process (Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing).
  • Account executives then handle qualified prospects to convert them into a sale.

The acquisition stage also characterizes users taking free trials, signing contracts, and more.

Acquisition touchpoints

  • Navigate website pages
  • Read blog posts and other resources
  • Click on ads and links from other websites
  • Submit forms/ sign up to access gated content
  • Download whitepapers and eBooks.

2. Activation Stage

The second stage fowling the acquisition stage is activation. You may also relate this stage to purchase or decision-making.

During this customer journey stage, the prospect becomes a customer and goes through the onboarding process. The process is performed through an automated platform or a well-trained customer success team.

For eCommerce businesses, the activation stage is about making a purchase.

  • The process begins with a customer choosing a product.
  • Then, they add it to the cart.
  • Finally, they make the payment to complete the transaction.

The activation stage is critical as customers start forming opinions about the business. Though several companies overlook this stage, it is vital to take care of customers to ensure their positive feedback.

Activation touchpoints

  • Create an account & set up a profile
  • Respond to survey
  • Receive onboarding emails
  • Watch tutorials and training videos
  • Place first order

3. Adoption Stage

Activated customers finally reach the last stage of the journey – the adoption stage. This stage is all about retention and advocacy.

In this stage, the customer incorporates the product into their everyday life. For B2B products, customers will collaborate with teams and work with the product.

The key to sustainable success at this stage is customer service. At the adoption stage, customers become advocates for brands. They recommend products, leave positive reviews, refer others, and more. Hence, you must focus on building customer loyalty.

SaaS businesses, at this stage, limit their communication with the customer but check on them occasionally. They send emails informing them about company updates, newsletters, action-oriented content, new offers, recommendations, tutorials, and best practices. Further, they also send reminders for subscription renewals to stay in touch with the customers.

Adoption touchpoints

  • Use product
  • Invite other users
  • Submit support tickets
  • Make payment
  • Refer to family and friends

Also read: Guide to customer satisfaction

How does Customer Journey Analytics Work?

Customer journey analytics is all about leveraging customer behavioral data to understand issues in the buyer journey and addressing them for financial success.

Customer journey analytics provides insights to manage your user journey better and make it hassle-free. From reducing friction and customer churn to predicting customer behavior and boosting sales, it has all solutions.

But how to work with customer journey analytics?

Here’s the three-step plan for success.

How does Customer Journey Analytics Work?

1. Map Customer Journeys and Aggregate Data

First, create a customer journey map and gather all the customer data you have.

Avoid doing it manually, as the process is time-consuming. Instead, get relevant customer journey analytics tools. These tools will help you save time on sourcing data from surveys, chat history, and third-party websites.

Advanced customer journey analytics tools can also track data in real-time, creating a journey map corresponding to the current customer behavior. These tools also draw data from multiple sources, helping you to understand customer interactions from different perspectives – marketing, sales, customer success, and more.

2. Evaluate Customer Behavior and Data

Once you have the journeys mapped out and the data gathered, link customer interactions with specific customer behavior like survey outcomes, social media comments, reviews, and more.

Further, analyze and measure the key metrics along the journey. This way, you’ll be able to understand where customers spend their time, what engages them and for how long, what’s causing friction, which behaviors result in a high churn rate, and which behaviors lead to revenue growth.

Customer journey analytics solutions can help you link all data and behaviors and finally draw conclusions from deep insights. This brings us to the last step of the process – action!

3. Take Informed Action

With comprehensive insights into customer behavior and the reasons behind them, you need to develop effective solutions and new customer experience initiatives. Brainstorm with marketing teams and create an action plan to enhance customer touchpoints. Build concrete steps to improve specific interactions within the user journey.

When target customers respond not-so-positively to specific processes, test them immediately. Make improvements and see how these changes affect the customer's future decisions and your market strategies.

Lastly, coordinate with your teams and work on customer satisfaction. Consider the data from customer journey analytics, identify the underlying issues, and take steps to improve your target buyers' experience.

Improve your Customer Experience with Customer Journey Analytics

Nothing works better than data-driven decisions.

Customer journey analytics software enables businesses to take action based on real-time insights, move past obstacles, and provide customers with a clear path from awareness to sale.

However, to ensure the best results, ensure to equip your teams with the right resources. With Storylane, you can train your sales team better and make prospective customer interactions more effective. How?

It’s simple. Schedule a free demo to explore the nitty-gritty of the platform!

"Previously, there was scope for error and we’ve gone from a process that could be time consuming and painful to a process that’s super quick."
—CHRIS LANCASTER, SUPPLY CHAIN PROJECT
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"Previously, there was scope for error and we’ve gone from a process that could be time consuming and painful to a process that’s super quick."
—CHRIS LANCASTER, SUPPLY CHAIN PROJECT

"Previously, there was scope for error and we’ve gone from a process that could be time consuming and painful to a process that’s super quick."

—CHRIS LANCASTER, SUPPLY CHAIN PROJECT

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