What if there was one thing that could help you understand the buyers completely? And no- it’s not mind-reading. All you need is customer journey mapping.

The past few years have proved overwhelming for businesses and customers. Given the rapid changes digital transformation has prompted, marketplace patterns and demands have taken a 180-degree turn.

And there’s been one significant casualty: customer experience (CX).

Every marketing campaign is curated to capture prospective buyers, but the bull’s eye is the experience. It’s oftentimes the main selling point.

But the gaps are more vivid than ever before due to digitization.

Digital transformations proved to be both a bane and a boon for businesses. On one hand, these help businesses optimize customer interaction. On the other hand, it’s a means for customers to hold companies accountable.

The cracks in customer experiences are all too visible, and many business leaders are aware of why they exist in the first place.

It’s the lack of customer understanding.

Modelling a solution or a marketing message based on a customer base isn’t complex. It’s the questions that precede it. On what basis is an offering personalized? Are there any prerequisites for a ‘resonating’ message?

Data could help answer these particular types of marketing queries, especially when it comes to understanding or engaging a potential customer.

And technology has granted marketers crucial access to it. Not only has modern tech become an avenue to gauge clean and accurate data, but afforded the means to leverage it smartly.

But most businesses fail to do so successfully. The frequent error they make is misaligning data-powered solutions with customer-focused ones.

This is why customer journey mapping is paramount.

According to HBR, a customer journey map is:

“A diagram that illustrates the steps your customer(s) go through in engaging with your company, whether it be a product, an online experience, a retail experience, a service, or any combination.”

Think about this: The nucleus of marketing is storytelling. Across B2B marketing, stories are propagated through data, but most strategies prioritize alignment with tech infrastructure. It’s the customers who should occupy the front seat, not only as data points but as humans infused with diverse emotions.

A customer-centric approach is more about building confidence that they, the customers, are making the right choice. What do they think as they engage with the brand, partners, employees, and products?

A conventional framework would work through the following components:

• Actions/Behavior: What actions is the customer undertaking to move to the next stage?
• Underlying motivations: Why does the customer care enough to go on to the next step? What emotions are they feeling, and if it’s inclined towards delight or frustration?
• Uncertainties: What prevents the customer from moving on to the next step?
• Obstacles: Do any external factors stand in the way of progressing further – cost or structural process?

The customer journey, however, is not linear.

Owing to digital transformation, customer journeys haven’t retained their linearity. Instead, it’s become unpredictable, non-linear, and complex.

Imagine the difference. One customer goes through extensive research and convincing, while the other jumps directly from awareness to purchase due to a strong recommendation.

To pierce the cacophony of noise, marketers are meeting prospective buyers at multiple touchpoints. They have more opportunities to influence the consumers. And consumers themselves wade through distinct paths as they progress down the multitouch marketing funnel.

No two customer journeys are similar.

But, outlining a “typical” customer journey offers insight into the current interaction points and a potential roadmap. From breaking down organizational silos, the map administers customer-centric communication, from sales to logistics. It’s not just advantageous for marketing but also influences cross-departmental functions.

Modern marketers have drastically come to understand the complexity of the buyer’s journey.

It’s not about what’s on paper but about reading between the lines. Customer journey mapping doesn’t always require a storyboard, but visualizing each stage is a good way to begin.

But customer journey maps have to be comprehensive.

A customer’s journey isn’t merely a business offering a product, and a consumer buys it. It’s way more nuanced and intricate.

Every touchpoint the consumer interacts with, even competitors, impacts how they perceive a brand.

“Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care,” says the customer service expert, Daniel Richardson.

And this is quite true- 80% of customers don’t just value the offering but also the experience.

Marketing teams make a severe mistake in understanding the customer- they think the customer fits in a tidy little box. This force-fitting has marred the efficacy of marketing strategies and misconstrued the messaging.

However, through customer journey mapping, effective marketers have outlined a more flexible approach.

Customer journey maps consider that each consumer behavior isn’t confined to just one funnel stage. These behaviors are often overlapping and affect multiple stages.

For a 360-degree customer journey mapping, specific ingredients have to have a central space in the recipe, or it’s insipid. These are:

1. What is the user’s story? The historical and behavioral data will reveal this, so build a user persona for all the accounts.
2. A journey could extend from days to years, so what’s the timeline chosen for this specific map?
3. Highlight the active touchpoints and channels to gauge what the customers are actually doing.
4. Figure out if any external stimuli influence how the customers feel about the brand.
5. Find out how your customers feel and think at every touchpoint and build an empathy map of relevant emotions.
6. Regroup categories and aspects that affect each other and influence customer experience together.
7. Sketch the journey through a timeline, video, or any other diagram style. The point is pinning down the motion of the customers through the journey, irrespective of the canvas.
8. Leverage the journey map. What’s the use of the file remaining on your hard drive? Understand why the mapping was significant in the first place and use it to modify customer experiences.
9. Define relevant KPIs, and as you modify the touchpoints and channels, update the metrics. This will potentially help mark the road for the business’s potential growth.

It’s sort of a story crafted by marketers on where the customers are in their journey. This outlines a ‘day-in-the-life’ approach to customer journey mapping.

It accounts for every little interaction and influence the customers would have felt or had – from their own to stakeholders and employees.

Journey mapping means stepping into the customers’ shoes.

The core purpose behind this tactic is – these maps help modulate the marketing funnel through the customer’s perspective.

Brands understand at what point in the journey customers desire what sort of experience and how. It’s about gauging which specific interaction delights or frustrates them and why.

Spotlighting this starts with leaning towards more customer listening.

As customer needs and patterns constantly evolve, marketing is experimenting with multiple innovative software, especially AI-driven ones. But more than jumping on the AI bandwagon, adapting to customer needs should be given more heed. Many preach, but few have actually incorporated this strategy into their core marketing functions.

Building customer journey maps is the fundamental step. Although tech plays an integral role here, it’s a customer-first and technology-second approach.

It provides a view of the necessary balance between customer situation, intent, and objective, and how it aligns with the organization’s goals.

From a marketer’s perspective, data is a true reflection of this.

It pinpoints where the customers are in the funnel and offers a 360-degree view of their progression.

Even if paired with the most advanced technology, any approach is ineffective unless rooted in customer understanding.

It’s paramount for a compelling CX.

Journey maps are the best methodology to translate marketers’ empathy into a structured and comprehensive design. It’ll not only accommodate users’ needs but also remove as many pain points as possible.

Each brand understands how significant customers are to them. They develop digital and physical communication channels to offer panoramic experiences.

What they are missing out on is, rather than perceiving the customer journey as a whole, looking at it as an amalgamation of atoms (journey points).

A good CX can bring you closer to your brand advocates. How can data analytics help you deliver a seamless experience?

Customer experience is what connects your brand to your customers. It is a bridge between brands and their brand advocates that can be defined as the way a consumer perceives your brand. Every interaction your customer has with your brand has the potential to either weaken or strengthen the bond and having an optimized website or a good SDR is just the starting point for providing a positive customer experience.

Good CX involves building relationships by understanding what people want, need, and value. The complete experience includes pre-purchase associations with the brand (via marketing or awareness), the process of researching and making the purchase (either in-store or online), and post-purchase interactions (regarding service, repairs, extras, and more). The goal is to build meaningful connections between the brand and the customer.

Now that we know how customer experience affects our brand, let us understand how data analytics can help us optimize it.

What is data analytics for customer experience?

Analyzing data from customer interactions can give you a lot of valuable insights. You can get a clear idea of customer satisfaction, loyalty, and other metrics that reflect how your customers interact with your product.

You can also utilize data analytics to improve customer experience and overall improve customer satisfaction — thus increasing customer retention in the long term.

Importance of using data analytics for customer experience

Customer experience analytics is obligatory for companies that want to prioritize their customers. It lets companies understand their customers’ journeys, helping them to personalize experiences to meet individual tastes. By interpreting customer behavior, businesses can target their offerings better.

Also, customer experience analytics helps specify pain points in the customer journey. It motivates businesses to proactively resolve issues, resulting in higher customer satisfaction and less customer churn. Predictive analytics also plays a role in strategic planning by foretelling future customer behavior.

Customer experience analytics is a vital factor in driving customer loyalty, growing conversion rates, and enabling business growth.

Steps for analyzing customer data with customer experience analytics

Here’s the 5-step technique you can follow to get the best results of your customer experience analytics:

1. Decide your goal
2. Compile customer data
3. Visualize collected data
4. Select an analytics process
5. Employ the insights

Let’s take a closer look at each of these measures below!

Decide your goal

Before you even begin to collect data or look at customer experience analytics, you must first extrapolate what you’re trying to identify. You must set SMART goals to ensure that you understand the data points that reflect customer needs and business goals.

Collect customer data

When analyzing customer experience data, you will typically consider two main types of feedback: direct and indirect.

Direct customer feedback

Direct customer feedback consists of metrics like:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
• Customer Effort Score (CES)
• Voice of the Customer (VoC)

These are the CX analytics that most product marketers think about as they offer a direct understandings of customer behavior. Direct customer feedback could also comprise responses you receive on social media or comments from feedback surveys.

Indirect customer feedback – Rather than monitoring behavior, indirect customer feedback is influenced by customer behavior. This includes metrics like:

• Average Handle Time (AHT)
• Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
• Average spend
• Customer churn rate
• Customer renewal rate

Whenever you calculate the LTV, you get an indirect look at how delighted customers are with your product (since they wouldn’t continue paying for a flawed solution, much less upgrade their subscription).
Other ways to accumulate indirect customer feedback include social listening, customer review monitoring, and analyzing voice chat transcripts.

These data points may not be as direct as NPS or CSAT scores, but they’ll help you drill down on the business outcomes that result from the customer experience.

Visualize collected data with different dashboards.

Once you have gathered data on customer satisfaction scores, lifetime value, and churn rates, then it is time to visualize everything using different dashboards.

Choose an analytics method and analyze customer data.

There are various data analytics solutions and procedures that you can use to filter through your customer analytics insights. Each process has pros and cons, so you must be acquainted with the options available to you.
A few different analytics processes to consider include:

Descriptive analytics

Descriptive analytics uses real-time and historical data to spot trends and the relationships between certain metrics.

Diagnostic analytics

Diagnostic analytics uses data to understand why certain events occurred, whether a rise in churn rates, a reduction in lifetime value, or other shifts in the makeup of your SaaS business.

Predictive analytics

Predictive analytics uses models and algorithms to forecast future performance or the probability of certain outcomes.

Prescriptive analytics

Prescriptive analytics uses data to figure out what the best course of action is and make decisions based on multiple factors.

Which one you go with will ultimately depend on the data you collect, which insights you expect to gather, and the business outcomes you are trying to achieve. For instance, predictive analytics is often adequate for businesses attempting to decrease risk or lower costs.

Use the insights to improve customer experience.

Finally, it is time to use your conclusions to improve the customer experience. Remember, collecting and analyzing data is only beneficial if you utilize those insights to make everlasting, favorable changes to your product.

Collecting customer journey analytics but never making changes to the onboarding process or customer engagement strategy would be a total waste of time. As such, you should proactively fix negative patterns you recognize and double down on the features that get new customers in the door.

Conclusion

CX is quintessential to sustaining customers, and various industries are placing importance on data analytics to better comprehend customer behavior, preferences, and needs. You can use this information to create better products and services. Data analytics can help you improve the customer experience by reducing friction, personalizing the journey, and adapting your marketing based on the needs of your users. So, if you thought data analytics was required only for those marketing campaigns, it is time to rethink your strategies!

Humans weren’t built for the hyperconnected, always-on culture we live in today.

The tech-addled world has gotten most of us spending our days distracted- making it impossible to pay undivided attention to any task at hand. And your customers aren’t any different.

With almost every aspect of our lives shifting online, it feels like it’s time for a break. In the tech space, most people are excited to get back to in-person events and tradeshows to form meaningful connections in ways humans have always known, not just digitally. Aren’t we all tired of this hyper-connected world that keeps pulling us in all possible directions?

How it impacts the customer

Information Overload

There is increased access to information and convenient communications, but it hasn’t improved the quality of our lives as previously anticipated. Such deluge often results in frustration, indecision, anxiety, and dwindling attention.

Digital Disconnect and Repercussions

The Internet is now the constant overhang that pervades our lives in more ways than we realize. There’s a massive disconnect that no one wants to address, and yes, it has enormous repercussions on customer behavior.

Audience Saturation

Customers feel inundated with digital experiences that all look like the same version of the same thing. Marketers must create at an elite level to give their audience something refreshing to look at because your audience has tuned out the mediocre stuff.

Revenue Impact

Companies that manage to address the feelings of tech overwhelm in their customers and minimize friction would enjoy higher revenue growth than their counterparts that don’t.

Too much screen time

Beyond Attention: Real Engagement

Massive volumes wouldn’t help your marketing game anymore. Keeping your customer engaged is the only way forward. Now it’s not about keeping them glued to their screens but more about finding creative ways to engage them without worsening the digital fatigue.

The Human Touch

Marketers need to give a human touch to customer interactions. Sending irrelevant marketing messages at the wrong time is a surefire way to drive your customers away.

Data vs Relevance

The modern sales and marketing imperative is to turn customer interactions into conversations that matter. Marketers have amassed large volumes of data but fail to personalize it and make it relevant to their target market. Customers, on the other hand, are tired of marketing messages that all talk about the same thing.

Break the Pattern

It’s time to stop vying for your customers’ attention how everyone else is; be more human. Now this might sound counter-intuitive, but marketers need to step away from the screen for a bit and find out-of-the-box ways to communicate with their audience and create truly engaging experiences.

We can’t be innovative with our marketing if we are in a rut; the same way of doing things and hoping for different results.

The Editor’s Note

Your customers’ experiences with digital technologies shifted during the pandemic, and the spike of it is making it change again. It’s not about being atavistic but about being more human. People’s desires to digitally disconnect are increasing; make sure it’s not your brand they feel a need to disconnect from!

Don’t design lacklustre digital experiences; design for joy.