Customer journey analytics provides businesses with insight into how their customers interact with their brand across multiple touchpoints, from an initial purchase to becoming a loyal customer. A solid customer journey analytics process provides visuals of each customer interaction and analyzes key data that companies can use to optimize and personalize experiences and drive customer satisfaction and loyalty.

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In this article:

• What is customer journey mapping and analytics?
• Why is customer journey mapping and analytics important?
• Key components of customer journey analytics
• How to effectively map and analyze the customer journey
• Overcoming challenges with customer journey analytics
• Put customer journey analytics tools to use
• Frequently asked questions

What is customer journey mapping and analytics?

Customer journey mapping follows a customer’s experience from brand awareness to customer loyalty and advocacy. This process plays a pivotal role in improving and optimizing the customer experience.

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Customer journey mapping is typically divided into the following stages:

1. Awareness: The customer first becomes aware of a brand through marketing or word-of-mouth referrals. During this phase, a customer is usually in the initial stages of looking for a solution to a problem.
2. Consideration: At this stage, a customer researches the product or service and compares it to other competitors in the space. They evaluate numerous aspects to find the best solution, including price, features, and reviews.
3. Decision: A customer chooses to buy a business’s product or service during this stage in the customer journey and completes their purchase.
4. Retention: After a customer chooses a company and its product, the company must work to retain that customer’s business. This phase might include providing personalized follow-ups, exceptional customer service, and attractive loyalty programs.
5. Advocacy: When customers are satisfied with the product or service they buy, they’re more likely to

Customer journey analytics is the data collection and analysis portion of customer journey mapping. This process delivers key insights to a company at each stage of the customer journey to help them optimize everything from marketing efforts to loyalty programs.

Why is customer journey mapping and analytics important?

Customer journey mapping and analytics are the backbone of customer experience. Without them, it can be challenging for a customer to gauge where in the journey customers are experiencing pain points that could turn them toward a competitor.

Whether it’s difficulty navigating a website, receiving poor customer support, or working through a complicated checkout process, customers want speedy resolutions that customer journey analytics can help companies provide.

These processes also allow brands to tailor their marketing and customer support strategies to better meet customer needs. Data gathered at each customer touchpoint and every stage of the customer journey shows a company what customers interact with the most, allowing them to do more of what engages their customers.

Using customer segmentation, companies can also use these insights to personalize the customer journey for various audiences, potentially increasing engagement and satisfaction.

Key components of customer journey analytics

Customer journey analytics tools rely on several components to track and measure customer interactions effectively across the customer journey. The following elements allow businesses to gather actionable insights into customer behavior to improve customer satisfaction and enhance the customer experience.

• Data collection: Data must be collected throughout the customer journey for analytics tools to analyze. Data collection tools can collect data from emails, customer support ticketing systems, social media, website interactions, and even in-store interactions. Data can be divided into quantitative (measurable) and qualitative (based on interpretation) data to provide a full picture of customer interactions and behaviors.
• Customer segmentation: Customer segmentation places customers into different groups based on their needs, behaviors, and other characteristics. This allows customer journey analytics tools to gather and interpret data differently for different groups of customers. Essentially, this leads to more personalized experiences for customer groups.
• Defined touchpoints: Touchpoints are the various places along the customer journey that customers interact with, like visiting a website, making a purchase, or contacting a company on their social media channels. Identifying and analyzing these touchpoints gives businesses a clear picture of what their average customer’s journey looks like and where they can optimize experiences to prevent churn.
• KPIs: KPIs, or key performance indicators, measure a business’s performance according to its goals. A few KPIs a company might use to gauge the efficacy of its website, for example, might be bounce rate, click-through rate, and engagement rate, while a call center might track average handle time (AHT), first-call resolution (FCR), and average speed of answer (ASA), along with customer satisfaction metrics. When businesses use analytics tools to track various KPIs related to the customer journey, they can measure their optimization efforts and adjust touchpoints immediately to address issues.

How to effectively map and analyze the customer journey

By taking a structured approach to customer journey mapping and analysis, you can uncover key touchpoints, identify areas of improvement, and deliver personalized experiences. Take the following steps to enable better decision-making and enhance overall customer satisfaction.

Step 1: Define customer personas

When you define the typical customers included in your customer segments, you’ll get a good idea of what those customers need and how your business and its products and services can help them.

Start by gathering data from various sources, like social media posts, customer feedback surveys, sales data, etc., to identify common traits and behaviors of your customers. You’ll want to know their demographics, goals, purchasing behavior, and pain points.

With this information, create different customer personas to represent your customers. These personas should represent the various customer segments that interact with your brand, capturing the distinct characteristics of each group. You’ll use your customer personas to help your brand speak directly to each customer segment with its marketing, services, support, and more.

Step 2: Identify customer touchpoints

This step involves pinpointing where your customers interact with your brand throughout the customer journey. They’ll occur before, during, and after a customer makes a purchase, and there could be dozens of them along the entire journey, such as seeing an advertisement, interacting with customer support, or receiving a follow-up email survey after they make their first purchase. Understanding where and when customer touchpoints happen can provide insight into how customers experience your brand across different stages.

To identify customer touchpoints, gather and analyze data from all customer interactions to determine where interactions happen the most between customers and your brand. Once you have this information, you can use it to map a defined customer journey.

Step 3: Map the customer journey

Next, you’ll lay out these customer touchpoints into a visual customer journey map, from initial awareness to after-purchase engagement. Many brands use a flowchart or diagram to physically map the typical customer journey across each of its stages, highlighting key moments that influence customer decisions.

For effective customer journey mapping, use the customer touchpoints you’ve identified from the previous step. Place these touchpoints in relevant stages of the customer journey.

For example, when a customer visits your website after viewing a social media advertisement, they’re likely in the consideration stage, but a customer contacting the support team after buying a product would be in the retention stage. By visualizing these interactions, you can analyze bottlenecks within the process and make data-driven improvements where necessary.

Step 4: Analyze data and customer feedback

With your customer journey laid out, you can now begin to analyze data across the customer journey and at various customer feedback touchpoints to learn more about the customer experience. Website analytics, sales trends, and customer behavior patterns all play a role in understanding the parts in the customer journey that are successful as well as those that may need to be optimized.

Ensure that there are multiple ways for customers to leave feedback, including social conversations, surveys, product reviews, phone conversations, and website ratings.

Step 5: Refine and optimize the journey map

The next step, refining and optimizing the customer journey map, involves continuous improvement to the customer experience based on the data and feedback your business has received. Businesses should regularly review feedback and customer behavior data and compare them to their key performance goals to determine where to make changes. This could mean improving support response times or simplifying a complicated checkout process, for example.

Be mindful that customer needs may evolve over time, and your customer journey map should reflect that. Monitoring customer trends and using A/B testing are excellent strategies to keep your customer journey map up to date.

Step 6: Create continuous feedback loops

Customer journey mapping and analytics should be an ongoing process for brands to continue learning about their customers and meeting their needs. Continuous feedback loops help you regularly and actively seek feedback from customers to understand and optimize their experiences.

Implement automatic data collection processes using customer experience software and tools, like CRM systems. Revisit feedback frequently to make timely adjustments and address new pain points as quickly as possible.

Overcoming challenges with customer journey analytics

Customer journey analytics isn’t without its share of challenges for brands.

Tracking customer behavior across multiple channels can be one of the most difficult parts of customer journey optimization. Modern businesses cater to customers on social media, through website support systems, on mobile devices, and in brick-and-mortar stores.

Everywhere the customer goes, brand representatives need to be there for support and analytics tools need to be employed to gather accurate and complete data. Adopting tools that offer omnichannel tracking is a must for most businesses.

Interpreting collected data can also be a challenge. AI-driven analytics tools can do much of the work as far as extracting and organizing data, but it’s still important to have qualified data analysts on your team to make sense of all the data gathered from each touchpoint.

Scalability is also something to consider. As your business grows, it can be tempting to add new tools to the mix to handle new tasks.

That’s okay to do unless new tools don’t integrate well with old tools. When this happens, you’ll have data siloed in multiple places, preventing you from getting a comprehensive and holistic view of your customer data. Look for scalable solutions that play well with other tools, like customer relationship management systems that offer seamless, end-to-end analytics.

Put customer journey analytics tools to use

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Actively utilize the tools and insights you gain from tracking customer interactions to optimize the customer journey for all customer segments. AI-driven customer journey analytics tools continuously refine their strategies as they learn more about your company and its customers, delivering powerful insights you can use to optimize each stage of the journey, resolve friction points, and identify opportunities for increased engagement.

CallMiner offers streamlined customer experience management from the moment your customers discover your business to their transition to a loyal customer. Request a demo today to discover how CallMiner’s AI-driven insights can help you understand what’s working and what’s not at every touchpoint.

Frequently asked questions

How do customer journey analytics improve the overall customer experience?

Customer journey analytics give businesses insight into customer behavior and engagement at each step in their journey. With consistent customer journey monitoring, analytics tools can show where potential customers might need more support before deciding whether to buy a product or where the brand’s website could benefit from showing a personalized offer to customers. Analyzing the customer journey allows brands to create more satisfying experiences for customers to increase retention, satisfaction, and loyalty.

What data is most important to collect for customer journey analytics?

Generally, any data you can gather about customers and the customer journey can be useful for your business, as it all points toward what is or isn’t working. However, some data is typically viewed as more important than other data, like customer feedback from surveys, time spent on a website, customer engagement, and touchpoint interactions that help define the customer journey.

How often should a customer journey map be updated?

Customer needs evolve with time, so it’s crucial to review and update a customer journey map at least once a year. Businesses that scale rapidly might want to update the customer journey map more frequently, like every six months or once per quarter. These updates ensure that the map reflects current customer trends and needs.