Businesses are realizing the power of customer journey mapping to monitor customer experience performance and identify opportunities for improvement. Customer journey analytics is enabling access to tap into the customer behavior across touchpoints and over time to measure the impact of customer behavior on business outcomes.
What is Customer Journey Analytics?
Basically, Customer journey analytics is a means to analyze how your customer engages with your product within a customer journey. Enables a comprehensive view of every customer interaction across separate channels that give insights into a customer’s movement, and time spent at a touchpoint and helps detect pain points from a customer’s point of view.
Why is it important to have Customer Journey Analytics?
In this hyper-competitive SaaS world, businesses that have enhanced customer experience make it to the top 10% of the SaaS businesses that are able to achieve 125%+ MRR(Monthly Retention Rate).
Companies use customer journey analytics because it is one of the most effective ways to
- Increase customer lifetime value,
- Improve customer loyalty, and
- Drive revenue growth.
Customer journey analytics gives teams a real-time comprehensive sight into customer behavior providing valuable insight into the journey. It allows companies to identify the customer journeys that have the biggest impact on specific business goals. Thereby helping in making data-driven decisions to influence those outcomes.
How is customer journey analytics different from other analytics tools?
In this data-driven world, businesses have adopted many analytical tools for pretty much every function within the organization. From marketing to customer support to even customer success. The widespread adoption of business analytics has led to myriad analytics tools and solutions. Most of which can be overwhelming for organizations trying to determine what type of analytics solution they need for their particular use case.
Most of the tools that businesses have been using these days generally provide analytics reporting to evaluate customer engagement trends for the touchpoints that are managed by that tool.
For example, a marketing automation software that is primarily used for email drip campaigns will provide an in-depth analysis of the performance of every email, such as the number of people who received the email, those who opened it and took action but will not provide any insight into the customer experience.
Similarly, an NPS survey software will provide an in-depth analysis of the survey results. That software can go as deep as analyzing the sentiment of the user using sophisticated Artificial Intelligence techniques.
This type of isolated analytics tool will fail when a company needs to analyze the effect of major touchpoints in the customer journey on the grand scheme of things. To that effect, data-driven companies have been investing in analytics tools that can address this limitation.
Whereas, the customer journey analytics goes beyond the surface to provide insight into what the customers experience, their emotions and sentiment at each touchpoint throughout the journey, and what interactions had the largest impact on customer behavior.
How Customer Journey Analytics can benefit your business teams?
Marketing
Customer Journey Analytics will help marketers have a better understanding of how to engage with each customer with respect to the overall acquisition journey. This will enable enhanced personalization efforts and make your customers feel that you truly understand them. Which in turn will eventually lead to improved acquisition, up-sell, and cross-sell campaigns, as well as increased retention and loyalty.
Customer journey analytics also facilitates segmentation beyond demographic, geographic, and firmographic information. It enables behavioral segmentation, a form of customer segmentation based on how your customers behave. This enables marketers to increase campaign performance through improved targeting.
Most importantly, this approach also enables marketers to connect strategy and tactics to customer experience and business results. This enables marketers to rise above opens and clicks and connect campaign performance to customer experience goals and business objectives such as revenue, cost, and retention.
Customer Care and Customer Service Team
Scaling success within Customer care and service effort is a nerve-wracking deal. But with the customer journey analytics tool, the team can leverage information from existing systems like natural language processors, text and speech analytics tools, and customer feedback management systems and use those insights to help address the customer needs.
Similarly, customer journey analytics will allow contact center professionals to smoothly monitor contact center metrics and help them analyze the serious metrics that impact key business objectives like the cost to serve, NPS, etc.
Customer Experience Teams
One of the biggest challenges that the Customer Experience(CX) function has been facing is to scale the ROI of CX investment put into the business. It nearly becomes impossible to make a business case for future budget increases when they cannot demonstrate how customer behavior impacts business performance. Customer journey analytics tools come into the picture here.
CX teams use Customer analytics to facilitate customer journey measurement. This fundamental journey-based approach helps CX leaders monitor:
- Journey Milestones: Key steps customers take on their path to achieve their goal.
- End-of-Journey Success Metrics: Metrics that capture how well the experience enables your customers to reach their goals and your company to achieve its desired outcome.
- In-journey Signals: Indicators along the journey that predict whether or not your customers are likely to achieve their goal.
Together, in-journey signals and end-of-journey success metrics enable you to score all of your journeys and prioritize underperforming ones for improvements. This approach helps you uncover the specific journeys that are driving changes in revenue or cost, which enhances your ability to make a powerful business case for change and future investment.
Metrics at different stages of the customer journey that require analytics
Let us look at the metrics that should be monitored at the various stages of the customer lifecycle journey. Along with that we have discussed the magic tools and features that would help analyze the respective metrics that follow the journey.
Awareness & Acquisition
In the initial stage of a customer journey, the customers are in search of a solution to their problem through various acquisition channels such as advertising, organic search, billboard, tv, review sites, or word of mouth referrals.
The marketing team can use tools like Google Analytics to know how the customer is interacting with your website. What are they searching for and trying to provide them with similar content? As well as understanding the number of customers that are engaging with the type of content.
Once the prospect arrives at the website, they need to be nurtured with the right type of content which will eventually lead them to the sales funnel. Once the prospect is qualified as a lead, an account executive will further develop this prospect into a sale. In the B2B market, most companies manage and analyze this process using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform/tools such as Salesforce or Pipedrive. Below is a list of touchpoints that should be monitored during the entire acquisition process.
Here you will predominantly monitor the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).
The formula for calculating CAC is:
| CAC= (Cost of Sales + Cost of Marketing) / New Customers Acquired |
This calculation includes marketing and sales costs such as advertising, publishing, creative, etc. Other metrics that you can take into account are:
- Traffic to MQL,
- How many ICPs from MQL
- MQL to SQL,
- SQL to closed-won
The following are some of the Acquisition Touchpoints
- Click on advertisement campaigns
- Click on links from other websites
- Land on the website through organic searches
- View website pages
- Initiate chat conversation
- Submit forms to access gated content
- Watch explainer videos
- Read blog posts
- Search website
- Download whitepapers
- Receive email nurturing campaigns
- Engage with sales activities (emails and phone calls)
- View demos
Onboarding Stage
Onboarding is the heart of any SaaS customer journey. This is the stage when your customers start to use your product, they learn to adopt the product. In order to analyze the efficacy of onboarding, a Customer Success Manager needs to predominantly monitor certain touchpoints like,
- Number of customer interactions during the onboarding process
- Days to onboard a new client
- Number of days to achieve key milestones
They also should be monitoring other metrics like the ease of implementation and satisfaction etc. An onboarding playbook plays a major role here in monitoring product adoption automatically and to further move the account forward in the onboarding journey.
The metrics that you must use to measure success are:
- Time to Value
- Number of Users onboarded
- Milestones completed
- Customer Engagement
Read here to know about designing a Customer Onboarding Framework for B2B SaaS.
Adoption Stage
This is when your customers have got a complete hang of your product and now have started to get acquainted with the features. In this stage, it is very important to measure how customers are using the platform, and what features they’re using most.
The analytics or the metrics to be used at the adoption stage are the following:
- Product Adoption rate
- Daily Active Users (DAUs),
- Monthly Active Users (MAUs),
- Key product milestones achieved,
- License utilization
Retention Stage
SaaS business relies upon retention to sustain and grow. It is more like the lifeblood of any SaaS business. It is at this stage that your customers will decide whether they want to continue using your product (renewal) or stop using it (churn). Your customer success journey map should lay out the journey that customers should take to achieve the most success with your product and renew at the end of their contract.
With CustomerSuccessBox, you no longer need to guess who will renew. Instead, with real-time account health coupled with customer billing and CRM data, you will have all the data to retain customers. It alerts you when it finds anything suggesting a future churn risk so that you can dive right into where you’re needed, while you still have time to save the account.
The analytics that you should use here is as follows:
- Retention rate
- GRR and NRR
- Customer Retention Cost (CRC)
- Repeat Customer Rate
- Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
Pro tip: Check out the Customer Success Cheat Sheet to know more about the customer success metrics!
Wrapping up!
Today’s extensive customer journey involves crossing multiple channels and includes myriads of touchpoints. It is only possible to get a clear vision of your customer’s experience by combining your data across channels over time with customer journey analytics. By providing a 360-degree view of the customer journey, customer journey analytics tools help companies adopt a concentrated and customized approach that optimizes the overall customer experience.
P.S. – The main image has been taken from pexels.com
