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A Simple Guide to Customer Journey Analytics

  • Kumar Ayush
  • Oct 20, 2021
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What Is Customer Journey Analysis?

 

A customer journey has many dimensions and varying levels of importance. It starts with the customer's initial contact with a company and ends with the satisfaction of that customer's buying decision. 

 

Customer journey models include: The funnel;

 

  • in which customers go through the most critical stages of buying; the event-based model

  • in which customers experience a single, isolated event involving one or more sales opportunities; the point-of-sale model 

  • in which customers purchase a specific product at a specific location and have choices along the way; and the hybrid model  

  • in which there are elements of each of the previous models but also some elements of the customer journey onto which new opportunities can be built. 

 

Each of these perspectives can provide varying approaches to identifying success. You might think that customer journey terminology is overly simple and should not be difficult for your employees to understand. Some complex words can confuse your team.

 

For example, the term downstream can mean that the customer goes from one stage to the next. This can mean that the customer goes from speaking to a representative to talking to a bookkeeper or someone else before speaking to a person in the actual company. 

 

If you want to understand how the customer journey works genuinely, you need people who can clearly explain these term

 

  • Understanding the terminology and taking full advantage of it is vital to understand the value of customer journey data truly. The simple truth is that the more you know the customer journey, the easier it is to plan your product and service. 
  • Understanding the terminology associated with customer journey data helps you achieve this. To that end, you need to ask your customers what they feel makes their experience of your company better. This will give you a unique window into what your customers are thinking about your brand.

 

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Many companies make the mistake assuming that the terminology of customer journey data is too complicated to understand. This is not true. There are many examples of how to understand the language of customer journey data easily. 

 

All you need to do is conduct a little research and realize that the measures are straightforward to understand. This is because every company has something different to offer, and each customer has their own opinion on that offer.

 

This is why you need to pay special attention to what your customers say. Customer journey data is a great way to gain a competitive advantage over your competitors. 

 

When you understand the customer journey, you can use this information to create marketing strategies that will be effective for your business. Remember, your competitors too will provide similar products and services. 

 

However, there will be a significant difference in their approach with their customer's experience. Thus, to gain an advantage over your competitors, you need to make sure that you provide them with an experience unique to your company.

(Related blog: Customer Behavioral Analytics - An Overview)

 

Why Do Major Brands Use Customer Journey Analytics?

 

When talking about CRM software, the one thing that is almost always brought up is Customer Relationship Management or CRM. The term CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, and this management concept has a lot to do with the success of your business. 

 

Many people may not know that CRM isn't solely about software, and it doesn't involve databases. There are several things that you can do with the information that you gain from customer journey analytics. You will gain a lot more than just the ability to see which of your customers are happy and which aren't.

 

Another thing that many companies must do to handle the success that they have with their business is to use tools that incorporate business intelligence

 

Business intelligence can be defined as the collection of information that will allow you to make better decisions with your business. This can be anything from how much money you are spending on each customer to what they buy from you. 

 

There are also several different ways to use the data you gather with customer journey analytics to determine whether or not a particular strategy makes sense or if it would be better if you went with something else.

 

As you can see, business intelligence can help you gain a lot more than just insight into customer behavior. In addition to business intelligence, however, companies must also use a data warehouse to analyze this large amount of information that they receive from customer journey analytics. 

 

A data warehouse is just a massive list of all of the data pertinent to any given aspect of your business. In essence, it allows you to "look at everything" when it comes to customer data, helping you come up with intelligent solutions that can change how you do business moving forward.

 

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Customer Journey Analytics: The Stages

 

There are three stages in a customer journey which include Pre-qualification, Entry, and Delivery. During each phase, the customer moves towards a final stage called Customer Decision Point. 

 

In this stage, the customer has made their buying decision and entered into a buying cycle. It is essential to understand that each location has different requirements, and each stage is equally vital for the final result. 

 

When the customer moves from one step to another, it is equally important to understand and calculate the effect of each customer decision and weigh the pros and cons accordingly. This is where CRM can play an important role and help companies improve their quality of service and thereby maximize the return they get on the investment. 

 

In a customer journey analysis, the data collected during each stage is used to segment customers to make informed decisions about their future purchasing intentions. This enables organizations to make informed decisions about what products or services to sell, price, and with which frequency.

 

Many factors contribute to a good customer journey analysis. The first thing that is studied is the customer profile which consists of different aspects like purchasing history, business characteristics, past purchase decisions, etc. (Here)

 

After this, the factors such as the purchase order cycle, average order size, average order date, order status, shipping history, and so on are studied. The customer profile is analyzed by isolating the factors that affect customer purchasing decisions. This helps to form the foundation of a good customer journey analysis.

 

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Customer Journey Analytics VS Customer Mapping: The Differences

 

To understand what is meant by Customer Journey Analytics vs. Customer Journey Mapping, it's essential to understand what each term means. Customer Journey Analytics is the process of understanding your customer journey, identifying how customers move through your sales cycle, and choosing the most efficient routes for delivering more services to your customers. 

 

Customer Journey Mapping is a tool that helps you see the exact path your customers take from beginning to end throughout your sales process. For instance, using a cookie-based ID system, an individual customer might initially be tracked anonymously using cookies. 

 

Each time they visit from a different computer, the system will identify them as unique users and generate a new record. When they arrive at a sales page, they would have entered their first name, last name, first name, and address and likely have clicked through to other pages on the site to complete their shopping.

 

With the help of an enterprise-level Customer Movement Management (CMR) solution and analytics software like NetIQ, you can see where users like to visit, how long they stay, and how long they move through each page of your site. 

 

Using these solutions together will help you understand where you need to focus your efforts on improving your web presence and increasing conversion rates. When users like to come back to your site, you want them to be encouraged to leave with additional purchases in the future. That is why tracking their behaviors is so important. 

 

With NetIQ, you can now see the path of users in the Net and, through an Enterprise Portal application, measure key performance indicators, such as click-through rate, exit rate, conversion rate, and several sales.

 

There are many benefits associated with implementing an E-commerce strategy that includes Customer Journey Analytics vs. Customer Journey Mapping. The first thing that business intelligence companies must do is recognize their customers. 

 

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Through this process, businesses will be able to measure their return on investment, know what their customers are looking for, and be able to provide an accurate picture of user behavior. 

 

Business intelligence tools such as Net IQ can also help businesses understand where their traffic is coming from, which is essential for planning marketing strategies and developing promotional campaigns. For more information about this topic, contact a business intelligence company today.

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