What to ask when transforming CX with analytics

Consumers now more than ever expect a great customer experience (CX). Delivering top-notch CX is a key business priority to drive revenue, brand loyalty, and secure future growth. However, almost half of businesses believe their CX doesn’t live up to customer standards, and less than a quarter are ‘extremely satisfied’ with their ability to utilise customer data to deliver a tailored experience.  

To deliver exceptional CX, organisations must be able to understand their customer journeys with real-time 360 degree analytics across all channels and silos of data. Despite rapid growth of mobile and cloud use, organisations continue to apply legacy approaches to gathering CX intelligence.  Many businesses do not realise they can capitalise on real-time CX interactions without overhauling their entire infrastructure. Instead, they resort to leveraging legacy visualisation tools that were built to provide static business intelligence (BI) from static data that makes in the moment decision making challenging. 

Today, the best customer interactions require orchestration across marketing, product, and customer service teams to deliver quality customer experience. That means there has to be data collaboration with live data to deliver the right personalisation to grow and retain customers. No code analytics is key to cross team data collaboration. 

Adapting to these challenges requires CX teams to enhance their data analytics, while maximising the full potential of their existing investments. When exploring customer journey analytics (CJA) tools, CX professionals need to consider data as a form of continuous intelligence and not waste time using legacy BI solutions that require heavy data massaging or the extraction, transformation and loading of data from multiple sources into static dashboards. To help guide their search, they should consider these five questions:

1. Will this solution allow me to unite disparate data sets in near real-time?

Many business departments need access to consumer data including marketing, customer service, and product departments. While these pieces of the consumer data puzzle can offer highly informative insights to CX professionals, they are usually inaccessible or unusable until collated and analysed long after the customer interactions have taken place. Due to the data being stored and structured differently in each department, businesses must typically invest considerable budget, time, and manual labour to simply put the puzzle together. 

As a result, many businesses never build a complete picture of the customer journey, leaving data wasted and customers under-served. But, CX teams can mitigate this challenge with analytics tools that solve the puzzle for them by unifying all data under a single pane of glass to analyse, regardless of data sources or formats.  

2. Can I build a timely, unique and personalised journey for each of my customers?

With every consumer comes a multitude of touchpoints and intentions, with each path to purchase taking a varying amount of time, all of which offers businesses more data points to leverage.

Legacy tools struggle to digest and process such high volumes of data and are often limited to static snapshots of customer journeys. For CX teams looking to build a more dynamic view across channels, they require real-time, dynamic journey maps that can portray interactions with specific buyer personas as they happen. 

Using real-time analytics and continuous intelligence, CX professionals can create a live, granular map of buyers’ paths to purchase. They can also leverage this data for audience segmentation, defining key personas by the time taken to complete their journeys, their unique behaviours, and other important insights. The ability to do this in real time enables CX teams to make agile, informed, and impactful optimisations to individual consumer journeys. 

3. How will I be able to measure the performance of CX?

Determining the outcomes of CX is critical for forward planning and efficiency, but the rapidly changing nature of consumer behaviour and growing number of channels they engage with makes it difficult to attribute results to specific touchpoints. Without a solid understanding of CX performance, decision makers find it challenging to enhance their strategies and justify the resources required to improve them.    

CX professionals therefore need to monitor KPIs in real time and have the ability to select which metrics best reflect their business objectives or drive better personalisation with live interactions. For example, if teams want to prove their CX optimisations are generating revenue, they should be measuring acquisition, retention, and purchase value, to name a few. Adopting analytics solutions that can help teams compare performance before and after they make refinements enables them to deliver ongoing success, as well as adapt CX as business goals evolve. 

4. Can I tell a story with my data?

Numbers alone aren’t enough to turn insight into action. They also aren’t enough to convey the impact of CX to individuals who aren’t specialised in analytics themselves. This is where 

no code analytics which provides fast, actionable intelligence from interactive visualisations to enable speedy decision making comes in. Whether marketers want to identify audience expectations or stakeholders want a view of progress and performance, these visualisations are pivotal to unlocking deeper understandings of audience segments and their interactions with the business, allowing for dynamic decision making. 

5. Can I gain a view of user inactivity?

Knowing why a consumer doesn’t do something is as useful as knowing why they do, but only if the signals can be observed and immediate action is taken as a result. For instance, estimates suggest that in the UK over £20bn worth of goods are abandoned at checkout. Although some buyers may need further time for consideration prior to purchase, many never return to complete their transaction. 

Identifying missed opportunities allows decision makers to determine whether CX has an influence on this inactivity by pinpointing drop off points, and adjusting to boost conversion and customer retention. Establishing points of inactivity in real time is crucial to understand where consumers may be experiencing friction. Could the payment method be streamlined, for example? Or should additional rewards be included at the checkout stage to encourage purchases? CX professionals should be able to carry out optimisations and compare customer activity before and after to address the reason why leads don’t convert. 

The tools that CX professionals use today need to match contemporary user behaviour. This means taking into account the myriad touchpoints, influences, and key moments of decision – or indecision.

It is in these moments that continuous customer journey analytics can make or break CX for businesses. To maximise the value of consumer data, CX teams need solutions that deliver a real-time, dynamic view of buyer behaviours and intentions–and the ability to identify barriers during the path to purchase. This real-time data must be accessible to teams across the business, in the form of digestible graphics, something visualisation tools have not been built for. From uniting data sets and understanding consumers to measuring CX impact on businesses’ bottom lines, advanced CJA tools support each stage of a CX strategy and enable complete optimisation. Using continuous intelligence is the only way to truly keep up with consumer journeys today; journeys that are, in themselves, complex, and continuously changing.