Today’s marketers are pressured to deepen their analytical capabilities in order to successfully compete in today’s Big Data economy. As such, I thought I would explore what’s known as “journey” analytics—that is, driving “insights into action” to deliver a better customer experience. Hopefully by now you buy into the premise and volumes of supporting data that demonstrates that how you treat your customers across the full lifecycle of interactions, from initial inquiry through repurchase, has major consequences on your company’s overall growth and profitability.
Within tthe customer experience (CX) field, there are two operative words that anchor our quest to deliver customer delight and company differentiation: journey and experience. A journey is the set and sequence of events that depicts the customer-to-company relationship, as seen through the eyes of the customer, from inquiring to purchasing to onboarding to consuming to repurchasing. This, in turn, produces emotions that characterize the customer experience. The experience then produces a memory that ultimately becomes the basis of both customer outcomes (brand supporter or detractor) and business outcomes (buy more/again, stay longer, or defect).
Journey analytics is all about interpreting customer input—be it structured (surveys) or unstructured (Facebook posts)—to enable you to improve those operational processes that most impact customers’ perception of the experience. If properly constructed, a journey data repository allows managers to drill down from the aggregated Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) data to customer level in order to better understand root causes and predict potential consequences of alternative actions.
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Paul Cole is president of Los Angeles-based customer experience software provider InQuba North America.