5 Interesting Use Cases of Customer Journey Analytics

5 mins

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Pallavi Pavithran

November 7, 2022

What if you could see the entire customer journey, from start to finish? And what if you could understand how customers interact with your company and each other along that journey? With customer journey analytics, you can. You've probably heard a lot about "customer journey analytics" in the past year or two. But what does it actually mean, and why should you care?

In short, customer journey analytics is the process of tracking your customers' interactions with your brand across all channels - from their first interaction to the point where they become loyal advocates. By understanding how customers interact with your brand, you can improve their experience and keep them coming back. This powerful tool provides a holistic view of the customer experience, so you can identify and address potential problems before they cause damage.

What is Customer Journey Analytics?

The customer journey analytics is a window for the leaders to see their customer behavior and use the data to figure out how their actions connect to the KPIs they used to measure the success of their business. Furthermore, the analytics will give profound insights into how friction, pain points, and positive experience decide customer journey flow.

The data acquired from the customer journey analysis can be used to improve the current journey, remove a specific customer interaction channel or add an additional channel to keep improving the customer experience, thereby the business bottom line and ROI.

Customer Journey Analytics is All About 3 Ws

When it comes to the analysis, brands will find it challenging to do it manually, so they can go for a customer journey analytics platform to get their back on this. If you use any platform, the data it can deliver should pivot on:

Who: Who initiates a specific action and interaction through a particular channel. There will be a unique identifier for each user. You can later tie that unique identifier with customer segments to identify similar kinds of customers and create personas. For example Working professionals, 30 - 40-year-old adults
What: What is the action that the customer does, and what metadata is associated with that action? For example: View the homepage, initiate a payment, etc.
When: What is the timestamp of the specific action or when that action occurred? For example, users from a particular location visit the site more around 5 - 6 pm.

These 3 data points are critical in customer journey analysis. When you get the analytics data with this information, you can design the customer experience action accordingly to avoid negative experiences, friction, drop-offs, customer efforts, etc., and focus on potential customer segments. Let’s check that in detail with the examples.

5 Use Cases for Insightful Customer Journey Analytics

Going through the categories one by one with examples and use cases will give you more ideas about them.

1. Enhancing Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty is very crucial to the sustainability and longevity of a successful business. Because you can’t always run in a cycle of attracting new potential customers, dissatisfying them/not delivering up to their expectations, and then again waiting for new customers.

Having loyal customers and a high customer retention rate is essential for the further growth of a company. Because your current customers are actual word-of-mouth marketers, their volume can influence new customers more than any marketing campaign.

Measuring the churn rate is essential here. Why a customer, especially a loyal customer, stops doing business with you is a big deal for your company. So, it is vital to calculate the churn rate and understand at which point of their journey they drop off or experience friction. Customer journey analytics is the single most important way to figure this out.

Use Case

An Air Purifier brand can use a customer journey analytics tool to understand the top drivers that lead to more negative customer experience, thereby creating a high customer churn rate.

The brand can find all common and critical customer experience issues customers face in all touchpoints and channels. Since the cross-channel system for customer interaction is very sophisticated and has a vast customer base, they had to use an analytics platform to find the most common customer experience issues across all channels. The analytics platform made the entire process more accessible, and they could quickly figure out the problems.

Light Type and Effects, Filter, Effects on Allergy/Breathing, Usage, and Speed are the main aspects that contributed to less positive customer experience. They can even dig further into the top concerns across all channels to determine the aspect that leads to higher churns.

It is found that the Light Type and Effects lead to more customer churn since there is a drastic dip of positivity in this aspect, and the main reason people dislike this feature is the bright night lights and the brightness of LED lights in the air purifiers.

2. Customer Experience Innovation

To get expected results in revenue, higher brand equity, and market share, brands need to understand what factors can cause a positive experience and what is the barrier to a delighted customer experience—understanding that is necessary to make improvements and innovation in the current customer experience practices and strategy.

Innovation is mandatory and necessary since the world is moving forward, and people expect more technologically advanced services. But finding where to place the innovation takes work. Customer journey analytics will assist you in that as well!

Use Case

A life insurance company can check the reason behind the mass drop-offs of customers from their journey. With the help of customer journey analytics, they can find that most customers drop off during payments.

So, here, the main problem customers face is that the insurance company’s app is not working promptly, especially when initiating a payment.

Check some customer verbatim:

“While making the online payment also the side of yours doesn’t allow it while making the payment, it always shows expire page.”

“Worst app, you can’t make the premium payment, difficult to login.”

Also, many other customers have concerns about different payment options. Many couldn’t find their favorite or trusted payment option in the app.

The brand can check the customer journey analytics and understand these issues and the customers’ most preferred payment methods. They can brainstorm for a new revamped app version with top-notch payment specifications that work smoothly and includes all customers’ preferences in that. With the help of customer journey analytics, this innovative idea can help a brand from huge losses.

3. Driving ROI

Capturing the targeted customer's attention is also a pathway to high revenue conversion. If your right customers can find you and connect with you seamlessly without any hindrances, you can ensure conversion and opportunities for upselling and cross-selling.

Upselling and cross-selling are indeed supplementary revenue generators. But these methods will only work if you market the cross-selling and upselling options to the right customers.

It is ideal to use customer journey analytics to find the right customers to do upselling/cross-selling.

Use Case

A luxury hotel in the USA can use customer journey analytics to find what makes the customers upgrade to a new package from a standard room booking. It's important to find 5 top delighting drivers to make the customer experience more delightful. From the study, it came out that buffet breakfast, cleanliness, service, staff behavior, and location are the top delighters for customers.

The buffet breakfast has more priority in luxury hotels. It is possible to even dig deep to find more insights into the breakfast option. Gourmet food options are a rising trend in this industry. People see food as tied up with the culture of a location and prefer to get options of wide varieties and fancier cuisines.

Also, customers believe that an extensive breakfast signifies a good hotel. If there are vast choices for breakfast, customers will feel value for their money, and it will contribute more to the overall customer experience. Travelers prefer these options more than other guests.

This way a hotel can curate campaigns for customers, especially travelers, for more upsell breakfast packages.

4. Assists Customer Experience Metrics

Measuring customer experience is one of the main challenges leaders face today. To know if the CX strategy is on track if the CX initiatives yield expected results, and if the practices result in ROI, brands need to use the right set of CX metrics and measure the results.

Analyzing cross-channel journeys is required in the overall assessment of success. Let’s check how to journey analytics can contribute to CX measurement with an example.

Use Case

When a telecom company sees a drop in its NPS, it can analyze the issues with the help of analytics. In this case, delayed customer service and inefficient support are significant issues raised by customers.

To fix these customer issues and improve the NPS scores, they can implement an AI-based customer service helpdesk and train employees to pick up every customer call or open tickets quickly and resolve any issues as soon as possible. This can help the company overcome negative customer experiences and gather more loyal customers.

Check a customer verbatim - “I enjoyed that the people I contacted over this SIM card were quickly responsive, understanding, and helpful.”

5. Cost Optimization

Reducing costs while keeping top-quality service is a bit challenging for organizations. Many leading companies have implemented strategies to reduce costs in areas like customer service by introducing self-service portals for customers, so that customer support executives can spend their time on complex issues and solutions that will take a long time.

Similarly, there are many ways companies can reduce their cost without compromising the quality of service they provide. Let us check an example.

Use Case

A wi-fi router company can analyze the complaints about the router setup from wi-fi service providers. They can use the analytics, and in this case, customers complained about the ports and other issues like loose connection and configurations.

They can understand customers’ confusion with the configuration and inefficiency of routers, and they can build a new router model which is highly efficient and handy to use. This will help the company with more expenses and will make the customers happy.

In Closing,

Customer experience analytics guide and direct leaders to the right path and discourage assumption-based decision-making. It allows us, leaders, to figure out the hidden customer pain points and the mystic reason behind negative experiences. It is also a source to improve customer experience and innovation that positively correlate with ROI.

5 Interesting Use Cases of Customer Journey Analytics

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