The customer experience (CX) plays a major role in the growth and success of a company as suggested by many studies. In fact, it has been found that companies who are better at CX generate higher profits than companies lagging in terms of CX. Most businesses prevailing today are focusing on the improvement of the customer experience, but sadly it’s a task that everyone can’t master. In fact, most companies that are currently acting as the CX leaders are also facing difficulties in finding a quantitative relationship between customer behavior and the outcome of the business. They mostly have to rely on their intuition and qualitative data to make decisions for improving the customer experience.
Quantifying Customer Experience (CX) Seems to be Highly Daunting
A recent study conducted by the Harvard Business School concluded that almost half of the companies participating in the study agreed that it is extremely difficult and challenging to establish a quantitative relation between the customer experience and the business outcome. Even the leading companies find the task of quantifying CX difficult.
It is really hard for businesses to deliver excellent customer experience as it’s difficult to quantify the CX. However, there is a way that can possibly quantify customer experience considerably. The method involves observation and analysis of the interaction of individual customers with the brand across different channels over a certain period of time.
One of the key things that businesses should consider while accomplishing the task of delivering personalized Customer Experience (CX) is to upgrade themselves to advanced analytics. To be precise, the analytics should render a real-time analysis of customer behaviour. Still, the major problems that blockade real-time approach are the integration issues and data overload.
Several businesses have started using customer experience surveys like call centre reports to collect customer feedback. Additionally, there is another platform utilizing individual metrics known as Net Promoter Score (NPS) which is specifically dedicated to the measurement of customer experience. There is no doubt that as platforms like NPS gets better, the chances of success pertaining to the Customer Experience (CX) enhancement increases. However, it is important to realize that it is not possible to control certain factors that can yield the betterment of a specific metric.
Role of Customer Journey Analytics
There is a common tradition among various businesses, which is to consider only certain touch points for improving customer experience. However, this approach is highly unreliable as often times it yields ambiguous results such as a customer is found to be happy with his/her experience at a distinct point and become totally dissatisfied over the long run.
From a business point of view, customer journeys play a vital role in the enhancement of customer experience. By observing the journey of a customer, it becomes possible to find the specific problems that customer is going through and steps can be taken to bring the positive change. Thus, focusing on customer journeys is more important than individual touch points.
A study conducted by McKinsey revealed that customer satisfaction is mostly related to the performance on journeys rather than the touch points. Furthermore, the customer journey also found to have strong relations with the business outcomes including revenue and repeat purchase.
How Journey Analytics Provides the Much-Needed Quantitative Information
Journey analytics tends to extract quantitative information in a variety of ways. As a result, businesses have elevated opportunities to enhance the experience of their customers. Following are the main highlights of journey analytics:
- Quantifying Most Important Factors
One of the prime advantages of using customer journey analytics is that it allows businesses to get information on the factors that act as key driving forces for customer satisfaction. It is a feature that traditional analytics fails to provide. Moreover, it is also possible to analyze the customers that are most satisfied with the services of business across different channels over a certain period of time. Consequently, it can help in the extraction of quantitative key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be utilized to improve customer satisfaction.
Case Studies
Case Study 1
The financial service providing company known as United Services Automobile Association (USAA) thrives to offer insurance services to both active and ex-US military personnel. The firm is well known for analyzing its customers’ journeys to elevate their experience.
During a customer journey analysis, USAA found that most military personnel and their families do not prefer paying physical visits to a branch or have a talk over the phone. As a result, this led them to conclude that they need to emphasize the development of online services for improving the customer experience. Subsequently, they developed and incorporated a virtual assistant in their mobile app so customers can interact in a way that is more suitable for them. The company also introduced the MyAccount feature through which customers can easily get all the information related to the insurance products and services they have opted for. An analysis conducted later on revealed that many of USSA customers are conscious about the channels through which they are approaching USAA’s services and prefers visiting their website over the app. Later, the finance company introduced its virtual assistant to their website too, which many customers appreciated.
The efforts of USAA clarify that by having a clear knowledge of customer needs and by quantifying them, it is possible to boost the overall customer experience.
- Identifying the effect of Bad Customer Experiences
Journey analytics concentrates on forecasting the outcome of bad customer experience. If we look at the business world, it is quite evident that even a small bad experience can result in the business to lose a significant number of its customers. Therefore, it is important for every business to know the quantitative impact of obstacles in customer experience.
Considering the journey analytics, it makes the use of predictive analysis in conjunction with machine learning codes to predict the customers that are most likely to stop using a business’s product/service due to a bad experience. As a result, the business might have a chance to react proactively and put in efforts to retain such customers. In case, the business fails to regain a customer, it still can use the information to prevent further churn or churns in the future.
Case Study 2
The customer experience program ran by the American airlines JetBlue, revealed that most travelers agree that the stage of check-in is the worst thing when it comes to traveling by air. Seeing this as a customer experience obstacle, the JetBlue utilized their technological resources to find out a solution, which was the automated bag drop system. The integration of this system results in the whole check-in process to become significantly less time-consuming.
JetBlue is among the airlines that seek to elevate the experience of the customers on a frequent basis. The company has implemented an automated system that checks for certain eligible customers 24 hours prior to the flight, book a seat on the basis of previous selections and send the boarding pass to that customer. The basic intent behind this feature is to eliminate the customer’s need to visit the website/app of the airline to book a flight.
- Prioritizing Improvements based on Customer Experience and Associated Costs
As customers have become the key focus of most businesses, each business is trying to provide the best customer experience. However, every action for the improvement of customer experience means added expenses and businesses needs to make careful decisions whether the efforts they are going to make are worth the money and time or not. So, it is very important for a business to keep a balance between the expectations of customers and the associated costs.
There is a relationship between customer experience and financial returns, which is intricate. Without having a good understanding of these relations, businesses can often find themselves in a situation where they have to bear losses because of the costs exceeding the revenue generated. Moreover, it is also a fact that the returns on customer experience investments fluctuate from industry to industry. The journey analytics plays an important part in assessing whether it’s worth fulfilling a customer expectation or not.
Case Study 3
By making the use of journey analytics, a leading company in the telecom sector identified the important areas of their online self-help system that needs improvement. During the analysis, the company discovered the paths that were directing customers from the main channels to the customer service center. Additionally, the channel that was getting the majority of the calls and had the highest failure rate was also recognized.
With the help of analytics, the company even further looked down into the problem and searched the failure points and areas that needed improvements. As a result, instead of making improvements to the whole system, particular areas were identified that required serious consideration in order to enhance the overall customer experience.
- Differentiating From the Others
Another main feature of using journey analytics is that it can help businesses to improve customer experiences in such a way that the business can differentiate itself from the competition. The article published by McKinsey highlighted that a customer journey having six or more calls are in dire need of enhancement in terms of customer satisfaction. The changes made to tackle pain points not only help in saving cost for innovation but also help businesses to differentiate themselves among others.
Case Study 4
An eyewear company known as Warby Parker utilized the customer experience strategy to get massive success and competitive advantage. They offer hyper-personalization to their customers, which is the combination of online shopping and face-to-face customer experience. Through this service, a customer can upload his/her prescription online and then visit a physical showroom to select the frame for the eyewear.
The company started a try-on initiative, which involved mailing 5 free frames to the customers and let customers try them out for the next 5 days.
Conclusion
Journey analytics is becoming more and more popular among both businesses and customer experience professionals. The main reason behind the enhanced popularity of journey analytics is its ability to link customer experiences to quantitative metrics. As a result, businesses can identify and track changes that are required for enhancing the overall customer experience.
If you would like to learn more about Journey Analytics or improving your customer experience get in touch with the team at 4DP.