Unlocking the full value of customer journey analytics

Best-practice advice on how to use data analysis to optimise the all-important customer experience.

What are customer journeys?A customer journey is the total sum of experiences that a person has with a brand, whether direct or indirect, online or offline. It includes everything from the moment of discovery, through to pre-purchase activities, purchase and finally post-sales stages such as trust, loyalty and advocacy.

What’s important to recognise is that every customer journey can be different. It’s constantly evolving too — every new interaction has the potential to re-shape the journey, and a negative experience could stop it in its tracks completely.

2 apteco.com

How do we define the customer journey lifecycle?

Awareness and discovery

Research and consideration

Pre-purchase evaluation

Decision and conversion

Post-purchase review

Trust and growth Loyalty and advocacy

3 apteco.com

Why is customer journey analytics important?Today’s savvy customers have high expectations when it comes to their experiences with brands. They demand seamless, secure, omni-channel, on-demand and personalised interactions — and they have little patience for those that fail to deliver.

In fact, in its Future of CX report, PwC found that one in three customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience, while 92% would completely abandon a company after two or three negative interactions.

92%would completely abandon

a company after two or three negative interactions

4 apteco.com

Get it right, however, and the rewards are huge.

49%86%of shoppers have made impulse purchases after receiving a more personalised experience.

of consumers are willing to

pay more for a great customer

experience.

This illustrates exactly why optimising the customer journey is so important for brands today.

5 apteco.com

You can’t improve what you can’t measureTo optimise your customers’ experiences, you first need to understand their behaviour. For example, what has brought them to your website or store? What are they trying to achieve? Where are they experiencing friction? And what action has that friction led to? This is where customer journey analytics comes in.

6 apteco.com

“the process of tracking and analysing the way customers

use combinations of channels to interact with an organisation,”

Defined by Gartner as

customer journey analytics covers all channels present and future that interface directly with customers.

7 apteco.com

The insights gained are incredibly powerful — as the pioneers that are already using it are finding out. According to McKinsey,

more than

85%of companies that

report a more mature customer analytics function claim they

achieve a significant value contribution,

compared with around

20%for those with a low usage of analytics.

8 apteco.com

Quantitative analytics are objective statistics that can be presented in numbers. They can capture what all customers are doing and uncover broad patterns in customer behaviour, and display those facts as numerical data. For example:

Qualitative analytics can provide subjective, individual examples of journeys that provide more personal analysis. For example:

Qualitative or quantitative analytics?Qualitative and quantitative approaches both offer value — so a combination of the two is most effective.

Which pages have the highest amount of visitors?

Asking customers why they chose one product over another

Which products are most or least popular?

Requesting customer feedback on their user experience

Where are most customers abandoning their journey?

Monitoring social accounts or focus groups for anecdotal stories

9 apteco.com

Why traditional approaches are falling shortIt’s worth noting that customer journey analytics is different to customer journey mapping. The latter is a subset of the former, used by organisations to map out how customers move through their journeys. However, some organisations will create an ideal or perceived customer journey, rather than using data to understand how customers are behaving in real life.

10 apteco.com

While analytics can encompass mapping, as well as additional patterns and metrics, it offers far more insight and presents a much more realistic picture of the customer journey.

Customer journey analytics success often revolves around an organisation’s ability to overcome one rather particular challenge: data silos. According to Harvard Business Review, almost 60% of companies say that they’ve

experienced an increase in customer retention and loyalty after investing in analytics. However, Adobe reports that data silos were listed by 37% of businesses as the biggest barrier to creating a comprehensive view of their customers.

It’s easy to see why this is the case. Most teams within a business act independently and focus only on their own targets. Marketing wants to improve engagement,

customer service wants to reduce call handling times, sales wants to increase conversions etc.

With each team potentially using its own tools to measure engagement, data is collected in silos. ‘Vanity metrics’ are confused with journey optimisation — for example, greater social engagement may only be worthwhile if it results in increased traffic or sales.

Almost 60% of companies say that they’ve experienced an increase in customer retention.Harvard Business Review

11 apteco.com

Data silos also translate to poor collaboration and communication, as important information is not shared across the business. A common example could be complaints on social channels not being passed to customer service.

Both instances highlight that team targets must be aligned behind core business objectives, otherwise CX is not improved. Resources are wasted on efforts that are relatively insignificant, even if they do work. This is clearly highlighted through Gartner’s research, showing that although 82% of organisations have created a customer journey map, only 47% are using them effectively and seeing any real value.

82%of organisations have

created a customer journey map

12 apteco.com

How do you analyse a customer journey more effectively? While an alarming number of marketers attempt to manually track and analyse the customer journey, this approach often relies on assumptions and a large amount of guesswork. As Bruce Temkin, managing partner at Temkin Group, explains:

“Sometimes we fall into the trap of believing we know more about our customers than we actually do and we don’t do enough external research.”

When manually analysing the customer journey it’s also easy to focus on a small number of events rather than look at every single touchpoint. This is a common mistake. Forbes points out that some actions are easier to spot than others, which can lead marketers to incorrectly assume that they are more important.

13 apteco.com

For most organisations it’s simply impossible to analyse every stage of every customer journey manually. It’s not a scalable exercise, and it would take so long that any insights would immediately become outdated and useless.

Customer journey analytics tools, however, can process huge volumes of data. This data could include everything from email open rates and customer feedback, through to frequency of website visits, average value of spend — even social media behaviour. This data can be analysed at the click of a button, resulting in meaningful insights that help to build a really comprehensive picture of the customer journey.

14 apteco.com

Get the most from customer journey analyticsBy investing in an effective customer journey analytics platform that brings together all key data into a single location, you can deliver the exceptional experience that today’s customers demand — and reap considerable rewards as a result.

15 apteco.com

With a far deeper understanding of customer behaviour, you can actively optimise every journey, and prioritise the key elements that matter most.

You can deliver a consistent experience across all channels, with a new level of personalisation that makes customers feel recognised and understood. You can also optimise service by uncovering key areas of friction and either eliminating them, or adding in real-time help so that customers are supported when they face difficulties.

All of this has a huge impact on the success of your business. By using one data set that serves all teams, you can ensure that each and every employee is aligned behind your agreed business goals. This results in better collaboration, and a coordinated approach that delivers better business results.

What’s more, with a wealth of journey data at your fingertips, you can demonstrate ROI from analytics, and therefore link journeys and optimisation to better business outcomes.

16 apteco.com

You can also test and learn at speed — experimenting with different strategies and evaluating which work best in an informed way. Try trigger alerts for specific events, for example, so that customers get an automated timely message when a threshold is met or when certain behaviours are detected.

Ultimately, you’ll achieve the Holy Grail of business: happier customers who spend more, come back more often and tell their friends and family about how great you are. This powers your growth and success.

17 apteco.com

Five aspects of successful customer journey analytics

18 apteco.com

1. Data fusion

2. Journey discovery

3. Journey insights

4. Journey automation

5. Journey optimisation

Five aspects of successful customer journey analytics

19 apteco.com

1. Data fusion

The consolidation of data from different tools and sources to give the business complete and accurate information as well as a thorough picture for each customer. With only some of the data available, it is not possible to see your customers’ total value or total interactions with your business. This places a focus on the technical aspects of data integration as well as privacy from a GDPR perspective.

For example, you can start connecting data from a few key sources such as your CRM, online store and email data to help you understand how engagement with marketing communications impacts sales and conversions. Crucially, all the data is in one place so there’s no need to jump between different platforms and datasets.

2. Journey discovery

Combining active searching of data to identify the important events out of thousands of actions, alongside automated triggers to alert areas of friction or key events like major purchase commitments.

See how different segments respond to campaigns and how customers move between segments. Understand the business value of individual journeys and identify which journeys in particular are most important to your bottom line. For example, draw a line from an engagement with a social ad to subsequent website visit and purchase. Begin to understand journey patterns from data.

20 apteco.com

3. Journey insights

Customer journey analytics will give you the answers to your most important questions. How can the business better understand customer behaviour? What are the reasons behind changes in engagement and activity? How do certain actions or behaviours impact future outcomes?

A good place to start is response analysis and examining data such as conversion rates, open rates, click volumes and A/B testing. When you’re ready to take your analytics to the next level you can start to apply predictive analytics methods such as profiling, churn or clustering.

4. Journey automation

Put insights to work. See what delivers the best results and try to replicate that across more customer journeys. Understand how to design and execute the journey to meet business goals and keep an overview of multiple journeys and touchpoints. Understand which areas are ripe for automation.

Move on from relatively simple event triggers such as birthdays or basket abandonment to multi-stage multi-channel campaigns that support your customer’s journey and are customised to the stage of the journey they are at. By automating their messaging, marketers can remove the need for manual actions and improve speed and engagement.

21 apteco.com

5. Journey optimisation

Continuously improve and refine the customer journey by constantly identifying and removing struggles. Learn where and why abandonment is taking place so that more customers complete frictionless journey steps and have much better journey experiences as a result.

For example, begin by alternating channels for non-responders within your automated multi-step campaigns to improve engagement and performance. Use this as a building block to implement more advanced techniques such as campaign prioritisation and optimisation.

22 apteco.com

Companies that lead in CX outperform

laggards by nearly

80%

Get ahead of the competitionAt a time when the customer experience is the new battleground for business, better understanding the customer journey not only positions you for success, but puts you ahead of the competition. In fact, Forrester research has found that companies that lead in CX outperform laggards by nearly 80%.

This can only be achieved with the knowledge that comes from effective customer journey analytics. Choose the right platform, and you will

take the guesswork out of the process. You’ll understand the biggest cause of friction, and position your business to tackle it head on. What’s more, you’ll be able to pinpoint the events that deliver the best results, and use them as a blueprint for your future actions.

With the inside track on what’s most important to your customers, you will be able to not only meet, but exceed their expectations. This will drive loyalty — and ultimately boost your bottom line too.

23 apteco.com

See for yourself how interactive dashboards provide actionable insights on customer data

Book a one-to-one Apteco Marketing Suite demo to see how Apteco can help you master your customer journey analytics

BOOK A DEMO

BOOK A DEMO

START FREE TRIALLearn more about Apteco

VISIT NOW

apteco.com

Creating and building industry-leading software to convert

customer data into actionable insights.