Journey Analytics is an upcoming trend of opportunity for CX Professionals to gain valuable insights into the customer experience. It’s a practical approach to identify opportunities and justify with firm ROI. In fact, some recent examples we have seen with clients, Journey Analytics are the basis for continued investments in Customer Experience.
So, let’s start with our perspective on the definition:
“Customer Journey Analytics is a combination of quantitative and qualitative data to identify customer failures and analyze customer behaviors across critical journey interactions, in order to optimize the experience and predict future behavior.”
What makes this such a challenge for organizations is that the data resides in many locations, and there isn’t a clear priority for which data is most important. This is compounded by the fact that multiple channels such as the phone, web, chat, email, IVR and so on often each have their own metrics and departments that support them.
So how should someone get started with Journey Analytics?
Customer Understanding – This is a fundamental element of a Journey Analytics program. This should include an understanding of elements of the experience that matter the most to the customer, important touchpoints, channels of interaction, etc. Only after this is established can further steps be taken toward analytics. We typically start with developing customer personas, journey map, and identifying moments of truth for the customer.
Cross Channel Support – It’s possible to initiate a Journey Analytics effort in a single channel, but inevitably you broaden to multiple channels. Gaining a cross-channel team will help with access to systems and data that will be critical to building your analytics program. We always recommend establishing this right away.
Common Goal and Objective – As a means of gaining support for your effort, it’s tremendously helpful to establish a singular goal. This can be broad (e.g., reduce the cost to serve) or more specific (e.g., fix payment processing because we know it’s a problem for our customers). Either way, start with a singular goal, purpose, and objective. From there, you can always expand your efforts.
Technology – Microsoft Excel can only do so much. It’s important to have a way to fuse the various data elements together. Many times journey analytics data will come in the form of surveys, call data, online transactions, retail interactions, etc. Software can be a tremendous asset in pulling it all into a single location to be further analyzed.
Data Analytics – With the mountain of data consolidated, it’s now time to turn data into information. This is where the deep analysis comes into play. There are too many options to list here, but suffice it to say that there will be a need to use the information recently gained and link to other insights into the customer or the journey. This is where the Journey Analytics program gets exciting.
Stakeholder Management – This is an often overlooked part of a program and is where the ROI comes to life. After the journey is understood, insights are understood and quantified, and then it’s time to develop recommendations. With the previous data collected, a rough ROI is within sight! Take the efforts needed to enroll stakeholders in the solution and the result may well be continued efforts in Journey Analytics.
Looking to get started with customer journey analytics? Request a consultation to speak with one of our experts.
