Back to Blog

Can you see every customer journey through your mobile app?

You know that customers are using your mobile app, but do you know how they’re using your app? Recent data shows that 42% of consumers use a mobile shopping app, but only 32% of companies rate themselves as providing a good mobile experience for their customers. Mobile use is only expected to grow in the future: current predictions call for $188 billion in revenue from mobile apps this year. With so much at stake, how can you make sure that you’re providing customers with an easy and enjoyable journey through your mobile app?

Maps versus funnels

Marketing professionals tend to visualize the customer journey in the form of a funnel, narrowing down to the end point of the desired conversion. But in reality, the customer journey looks more like a subway map, representing different paths to a destination—hopefully, conversion.

Let’s consider an analogy:

Four friends all want to meet at the same restaurant for dinner. They all have the same end destination, but they start from different places. One friend might be able to take a single line of the subway straight from her home to the restaurant. Another might have to make a transfer along the way. Still another might need to make a side trip to complete an errand along the way. And the final friend may have something come up at the last minute and abandon her trip to the restaurant entirely.

Your customers are just like this group of friends, and with an automated visualization of every customer journey through your mobile app, you can learn how to make it easier for each of them to get from point A to point B.

The direct path

The customer who takes the direct path knows what she wants. She enters your app and she goes straight to her desired action—whether it’s making a purchase, paying her bill, or checking the status of an order. Understanding the path of this straight-forward customer can help you determine where best to introduce new elements or key information, where this customer won’t miss it on her usual path. You can even leverage customer behavior analytics to trigger personalized offers to upsell complementary items or services.

The transfer

Some customers start out on your website, and move to your app, or vice versa. Some may spend several days (or longer!) visiting both platforms before making a final conversion. With Glassbox, you can view both web and mobile app journeys, and determine whether users are switching between the two platforms in order to better find the sort of information they’re looking for, or whether they’re switching because they encounter a “struggle” along the way, such as an error, a broken link, or a screen on the app which loads slowly.

The side trip

Some users take a meandering journey through your app before making a conversion. They may visit almost every area of the app, reading the FAQ, consulting Help, viewing multiple products or services. They may perform several actions in the same visit, such as submitting a ticket and making changes to their account. By viewing their user journey through the mobile app, you can determine whether you’ve made it easy to navigate from one area to your app to another and back again, without getting lost or trapped in a dead end along the way.

The abandoned journey

Some customers never make the desired conversion. Instead, they abandon their journey along the way, leaving your app entirely. By viewing their customer journey, you can learn valuable insight about why customers “bounce.” Are they failing to find the information they’re looking for? Are they encountering too many errors? Or did they reach the conversion stage, only to abandon it at the last minute because they discovered something they didn’t like: expensive shipping, limited payment methods, a confusing privacy policy?

Understanding every customer journey through your mobile app

Whatever your customer journey map questions, the intuitive visualization provided by the Mobilebox dashboards in Glassbox can help you understand how your customers engage with your mobile platforms. These solutions integrate well with leading analytics providers (such as Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics) to provide you a 360° view of every customer journey.

Read our Ultimate Guide to Optimizing Mobile Apps to learn more about how customer experience analytics can help you understand the user journey in your mobile app.