Customer journey analytics is the process of gathering and analyzing key CX data points across every touchpoint in the customer journey. This helps businesses better understand what their customers want and need so they can provide optimized experiences and help them move forward in their purchase journey.
Through a variety of quantitative and qualitative data, customer journey analytics can help illuminate customer behaviors and guide the decisions of marketing, customer experience (CX) and IT teams on where and how to improve customer experiences. This can involve providing the right content at a certain stage of the journey and reducing pain points that are causing friction and abandonment.
Multiple digital tools and techniques help businesses ensure they are providing an exceptional customer experience at every touchpoint of the customer journey:
Behavioral analytics (BA) tools
Customer data platforms (CDPs)
Customer engagement platforms (CEPs)
Business intelligence (BI)
Teams can measure the effectiveness of customer journey analytics by establishing initial CX goals that align with industry best practices, along with tools that show the behavior of users before and after changes are made. In addition to setting goals for particular interactions or performance metrics, every experience and related touchpoint should be aligned with supporting the business's goals to demonstrate if they are ultimately impacting the bottom line.
Customer journeys involve multiple channels that may or may not be in the digital space. As a result, there are multiple functions within an organization—along with separate systems and data silos connected to those systems—that are involved in providing the end-to-end customer experience.
Customer expectations have also never been higher, as they expect businesses to provide connected experiences that anticipate who they are and where they are on their journey. In addition to the CDPs and CEPs mentioned above that can help aggregate data into one centralized location, businesses can utilize digital experience intelligence and a comprehensive set of digital experience tools to provide the data and actionable insights to help their teams optimize the various parts of the customer journey.
