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A complete guide to customer journey analytics.
13 min read Customer journey analytics can help you to nail down exactly why your customers behave the way they do and tie your customer experience efforts to financial outcomes. Learn how to use customer journey analytics for improved CX with our ultimate guide.
What is customer journey analytics?
Customer Journey Analytics is the process of understanding the impact of every interaction a customer has with your business.
Often, customer journey analytics starts with a customer journey map , which is presented as a graph, flow chart, or other visual that documents each stage of the relationship between a customer and a brand.
However, instead of just charting their customer journey on a map, customer journey analytics takes a further step to analyze what effect each interaction has on your customers’ decisions.
Further information is overlaid to help analyze how each interaction drives customers toward the end goal.
Customer journey analytics can include analysis of:
- Customer needs
- Emotional highs and lows
- Key metrics per step in the journey
- Customer satisfaction scores , customer effort scores , and other survey results
Customer journey analytics can help you to direct your customers’ attention and resolve any pain points that stop them from taking desired actions. It helps you to augment your customer experience and develop a customer journey that not only gets customers to where you want them to go, but helps them connect to the journey itself.
Free course: Customer journey management & improvement
Customer journey analytics vs. customer journey mapping
Many brands have a broad sense of their customer journey but haven’t optimized it by creating a comprehensive customer journey map or analyzing what affects their customers’ experience.
Customer journey analytics and customer journey mapping are complementary but different processes. Here are the main ways in which they are distinct, and how they work together.
What is customer journey mapping?
Customer journey mapping is the process of laying out the end-to-end journey in a clear way. Creating a map of every touchpoint your customer will experience means you can see what steps your customers take to reach the end goal of a purchase, signup, or other action.
Often, journey maps are documented at the process level. For example, an insurance provider would map the claims process, and a bank would document the new account process.
Some common components of customer journey maps include:
- The process being evaluated
- The stages of the journey
- Critical customer interactions and touchpoints
- Representative customer quotes
- Key customer expectations
- Metrics like satisfaction score, mention volume, NPS
- Trends in topics related to this part of the journey
Our ultimate guide to customer journey mapping can help you to draft your first customer journey map or optimize one you have already.
How do you use customer journey analytics with customer journey mapping?
As we’ve already explained, customer journey analytics is the process of gathering as much information as you can from every part of the journey and analyzing the journey for pain points and successes.
Understanding which parts of the journey function as planned and which obstacles are in the way of your customers’ progress means you can take action to ensure they complete their journey as you intend.
Benefits of customer journey analytics
There are several benefits to completing customer journey analytics. From better understanding your customers’ behavior to a better ROI for your customer experience , customer journey analytics gives you better insights and a more informed strategy for improvement.
Your brand becomes more customer-centric
Understanding the customer journey allows your company to be more customer-centric . It allows you to closely evaluate the activities, expectations, thoughts, and feelings of your customers . You learn what they like and dislike, how to move them through your buying cycle, and how to satisfy and retain them . When journey mapping is complemented with customer journey analytics it helps you understand the priority for your customer experience initiatives.
Your business becomes more unified
In addition, with the right focus, customer journey mapping and customer journey analytics break down internal silos. They empower you to streamline services across departments. Not only that, but they help to align everyone by providing a common understanding of the customer experience. Employees get greater visibility into what happens upstream and downstream of their interactions with customers, letting everybody provide a more consistent, high-quality experience.
You can find track issues as they happen
With a sophisticated customer journey analytics platform, you can pinpoint issues in real-time. You can test new approaches and see their influence on your customer experience and bottom line with analytics that update as quickly as you need them.
You see direct and indirect feedback in one place
Explicit feedback – for example, the information you gather through surveys – is easier to pinpoint to specific interactions customers have with your brand. The customer has an experience and directly after, you request input.
Implicit feedback is more complex to understand. This type of data might include operational data such as sales numbers, or it might cover social mentions, what your customers say on the phone to your care center, third-party reviews, and more.
Understanding how your audience thinks, feels, and acts in response to customer interactions without directly asking them might seem impossible, but with tools such as conversation analytics , you’re able to link your customer journey to this type of customer data.
An example of using customer journey analytics
Customer journey analytics can be used to understand the impact of sub-journeys limited to single processes – such as opening a new account – or the entire digital customer journey .
Below is an example of how you can use customer journey analytics to chart the success of each journey.
Resolving a customer satisfaction issue for a specific sub-journey
Let’s take a printer business that provides hardware to its customers. The brand has realized that the repair sub-journey is currently leading to low Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and a higher cost to serve per customer.
The journey
First, the brand needs to chart the customer journey. It looks like the below:
- A customer has an issue with their printing device
- They call the customer care center to schedule a repair
- The service agents arrive at their place of residence
- The repair is made
However, there are other ways this journey might unfold. For example:
- The service agents arrive at their place of residence but the customer is not present
- The repair cannot occur, so the customer has to call again to reschedule the repair
- The repair is made at a later date when the customer is present
The analysis
Overlaying the NPS scores on this latter journey, the company realizes that the NPS score drops when the customer has to reschedule the repair. Asking the customer to go through the same process once again to rebook their appointment is causing customers to feel less satisfied with their experience.
Using natural language processing (NLU), the team can also see that there is a more negative sentiment expressed in the open text question they have added to the NPS survey. With the additional calls to the care center, the cost to serve each customer also increases.
The resulting action
The brand decides it’s best to provide other means to customers to book their appointments at a time to suit them. Offering customers a self-service booking system that they can access via their mobile on an app or through the website gives the customers more control over when their appointment occurs. Adding a facility to reschedule any booked appointments for a more convenient time and accentuating this with push or text notifications when the repair team is on their way can help to see if this reduces the instances of missed repairs and reduces the impact on the customer care center .
With customer journey analytics in place, the brand team can see if this improves NPS scores at the same points in the customer journey, and measure in financial terms the impact of actions taken for improved customer experience .
How to use customer journey analytics
Customer journey analytics provides the insight you need to successfully manage your customer’s journey. From lowering customer churn to helping you predict customer behavior, putting a customer journey analytics solution in place will help you to leverage your customer behavioral data for financial success.
But how do you start using customer journey analytics? Below is the outline of the actions you’ll need to take.
1. Map your customer journeys and aggregate data
First, you need to create a customer journey and aggregate the customer data that you already have. Good customer journey analytics tools will be able to do this for you, cutting down the time your team needs to spend sourcing data from third-party locations, customer service chat logs, and survey results.
Competent customer journey analytics software will also be able to track data in real-time, allowing you to build a comprehensive map that reacts to current customer behavior . It should also be able to draw data from numerous sources, helping you to break down traditional business silos and understanding customer interactions from all business angles: sales, marketing, and more.
Learn the five competencies for customer journey mapping
2. Analyze your customer behavior and data
Once you have your customer journeys mapped out and your data collected, you can link specific interactions to particular customer behavior, survey results, social media comments , and more. You’ll need a customer journey analytics solution to be able to link all of this data together in an efficient way.
3. Take action informed by data-led insights
Customer journey analytics provides you with the ability to see cause and effect, as well as providing you with concrete steps to change specific interactions or the entire customer journey. When customers react badly to specific processes or interactions, you can test how changes in your customer journeys affect their future decisions.
Not only that, but you can coordinate your teams across your business to work on customer satisfaction with their experience, based on the data you’ve analyzed. For example, if customers are led to purchase through your marketing but aren’t happy with their purchase, they will deal with your marketing , sales, and customer care teams. Understanding what specifically caused a problem for them means you can inform each team of actions they can take to improve.
How customer journey analytics can improve your customer experience
Brands often hit a wall when trying to measure customer experience . Charting your customers’ often nebulous sentiment and which actions have an impact on customer experience can be difficult without the right tools to hand.
Understanding the return on investment for specific actions taken for customer experience is difficult for a number of reasons:
- Data is siloed or overwhelming
- Business departments work separately with a lack of oversight
- Actions aren’t based on data
- There isn’t a way to track the impact of actions on customer experience
Qualtrics Customer Journey Optimizer allows you to see the value of customer journeys with rich data analysis, provided through conversational analytics . With natural language understanding, Qualtrics is able to provide you unrivaled insights into customer emotions, sentiment, and more to paint a complete picture of friction points and their rationale. Powered by feedback from multiple areas of your business, you are able to create a plan of action with a tangible effect on your customer experience and business outcomes.
With a deeper understanding of customer behavior, your brand is able to not only understand the return on investment of your actions but develop a customer experience that delivers results. Extending your customer lifetime value , increasing customer satisfaction, and reducing customer churn becomes easier when you understand the triggers for the behavior.
Related resources
Customer Journey
How to Create a Customer Journey Map 21 min read
B2b customer journey 13 min read, customer interactions 11 min read, consumer decision journey 14 min read, customer journey orchestration 12 min read, customer journey management 14 min read, customer journey stages 12 min read, request demo.
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Customer Journey Analytics: Definition, Tools, & Examples
Learn how customer journey analytics helps you measure the ROI on your customer experience initiatives. Use it to boost revenue, reduce churn, and improve CX.
Customer journey analytics (CJA) is the process of analyzing the entire customer journey through customer data points, then strategizing ways to improve the overall customer experience (CX) . Customer journey analytics is a holistic process that makes customer journeys measurable and helps you identify insights and actions to delight and retain your customers.
Key takeaways
- Customer journey analytics is the process of examining critical data pertaining to user journeys to make informed decisions on improving the customer experience.
- Some of the benefits of customer journey analytics include the ability to measure the ROI on CX initiatives and improve the customer experience through the insights it provides, as well as reduce churn and boost revenue.
- Measuring customer journeys is a process that involves creating user journey maps, determining and collecting data pertaining to those journeys, and defining success metrics and milestones along the way.
What is customer journey analytics (CJA)?
Customer journey analytics is the gathering and analyzing of data that pertains to customer behavior to improve the customer experience. Analysis happens over multiple customer touchpoints and channels over a period of time and measures the impact of behavior on business outcomes.
While gathering customer data, you can collect all user actions in one central database with an associated timestamp. Information is collected through a unique identifier on what the user is doing and who the user is.
Using this information, it’s possible to map out customer journeys and then analyze the customer engagement levels for each journey to understand what’s going well and where customers might be getting stuck. The analysis helps to optimize these customer journeys and also measures the performance of your CX initiatives.
Example insights from customer journey analytics
Customer journey analytics provides deep insights to improve the customer experience. Some examples include:
- Customer journey analytics makes it possible to analyze the path customers take to resolve customer queries. Some insights derived from this analysis might include what types of issues can be resolved by self-service channels and which ones need human interference. This information makes it possible to optimize self-service channels, improve the operational efficiency of resolving customer queries, and enable customer support staff to focus on more complex customer issues.
- For ecommerce companies, customer journey analytics makes it possible to view the steps a customer takes while completing a purchase, which can help identify any barriers to completing the transaction. You might find, for example, that a common frustration while completing a purchase is having to create a user account. You can then use this insight to A/B test a guest checkout option and see if it removes the friction.
- Customer journey analytics can help you identify channel-specific insights to improve the customer experience. For example, you might find that users on your mobile app drop off at a higher rate than users on your website. This insight could indicate that you need to rethink parts of your mobile experience.
Benefits of customer journey analytics
There are several benefits of customer journey analytics, including:
Measuring the ROI on CX initiatives
In a CX survey, 20% of respondents said that measuring customer experience initiatives was one of the key challenges being faced by organizations in the U.S. Customer journey analytics solves this problem by making it possible to measure the ROI on CX initiatives.
Product managers and CX designers can use customer journey analytics to connect data and numbers to customer journeys. For instance, CJA can compare the revenue generated from two user journeys to figure out which user journey leads to more revenue for the business, making it possible to shift to the journey that’s most beneficial.
Customer journey analytics makes it possible to understand how the customer interacts with the product, how their behavior changes when modifications are made to the customer journey, and how your product metrics are impacted because of this changed user behavior.
Improving the customer experience
By visualizing user journeys built by customer journey analytics tools, it’s possible to identify bottlenecks people might face in your product, minimize them, and make smart product suggestions based on their past behavior.
For example, with customer journey analytics, it’s possible to diagnose that users of an ecommerce app fail to make a purchase during the last step of the transaction, especially when using the app for the second time. They might be getting stuck since they don’t remember what they bought the last time, so CJA makes it possible to autosuggest items based on what the customer purchased on their last visit. Reminding customers about their past transactions can improve the overall shopping experience by helping users purchase with ease.
Customer journey analytics tracks data in real time. This enables you to analyze customer behavior while the customer interacts with your website or product, build user journeys around that behavior, then find opportunities to make improvements to the customer experience.
Reducing customer churn
Since customer journey analytics helps predict customer behavior based on their past actions, it can also identify customers at risk of leaving the product or website, enabling you to take action to retain at-risk customers.
Upon identifying at-risk customers, it’s possible to use CJA to personalize interactions with them and help them feel more positive about the brand, so they’ll change their minds about leaving. In a CX study, 58% of respondents stated that their organization had seen significant increases in customer retention as a result of using customer analytics.
Boosting revenue
By helping you identify the customer journeys that result in a purchase, it’s possible to boost revenue using customer journey analytics. You can further optimize these journeys by reaching out to customers in real time with relevant communication like upsell and cross-sell offers.
CJA can also help identify your best-performing channels by monitoring customer behavior across different touchpoints. So if your website is performing better than your app, you can focus on optimizing the revenue from your website while making improvements to your mobile app.
Steps for measuring customer journeys
Step 1: create or capture user journey maps.
Before you start measuring a customer journey, it’s important to first create a user journey map. You can create this journey map using prototyping tools or Post-it Notes based on the actions users take. For example, if you want to measure the journey of playing a song on a music app like Spotify, you need to create the entire journey map so you can visualize it.
In this example, the user journey might consist of the following steps: going to the Spotify website, downloading the app, creating a login, searching for a song, and then playing the song. You’d need to write these steps out in the form of a “journey” or use a tool that captures these user actions and creates the journey maps for you.
The goal, in this example, is to play a song on the app. And the journey to that goal consists of several steps along the way. You need to view the journey across different channels since, at the end of the day, your user is trying to accomplish a goal and it doesn’t matter whether they do it via your mobile app or your website.
Step 2: Determine the data you need to collect at each step of the customer journey
To measure a customer journey, you need to define the critical data points you need to measure for that journey. For instance, in our Spotify example, here are some data points that might be relevant to help quantify the journey:
- Number of attempts to download the app
- Time it takes to download the Spotify app
- Time it takes to create a user login
- Number of attempts to play a song
Collecting all of the data in one centralized place makes it easy to access it and pick the relevant bits of data needed along with their timestamps. The data required will depend on the journey you decide to measure.
For every part of the customer journey, there’s an action that your brand wants the user to complete. Every journey has a goal, and there are milestones to achieving that goal. It’s important to define both the goal and the milestones along the way, so you know what to measure and what success looks like.
With the example of playing a song on Spotify, some success metrics or milestones would be:
- Downloading the Spotify app
- Creating a user login
- Playing the first song
- Subscribing to the Spotify service
- Sharing the first playlist
- Renewing the subscription
Think of milestones as critically important steps in the process of achieving a goal. Make a list of these steps, so you can have clearly defined milestones.
Step 3: Analyze the customer data
The next step is to identify your data sources and capture behavioral customer data across the customer journey. Once you’ve collected data, you can start analyzing it and measuring key metrics along critical flows of the journey. You’ll be able to gauge where customers are spending their time, what’s causing them frustration, and which behaviors lead to revenue-generating outcomes. Using this information, you’ll be able to measure the customer journey effectively and figure out how to improve it.
Customer journey analytics tools
Using the Journeys feature on Amplitude , it’s possible to discover what’s making users convert or drop off. With Journeys, you can:
- View step-by-step breakdowns of the paths taken by converted and dropped-off users.
- Uncover the paths most likely to accelerate conversion.
- Identify what your users do if they don’t convert.
- Understand the friction points in your customer experience and develop a strategy to fix them.
By defining the start and endpoints of the journey, the Journeys feature within Amplitude helps you see what percentage of paths converted and what percentage dropped off.
- What are the biggest challenges currently being faced by your organization in terms of customer experience? Statista
- Performance enhancements resulting from the use of customer analytics in the United States as of March 2018 . Statista
See what customer journey analytics looks like in our self-service demo , or get started with journeys using your own data in a free Amplitude account .
About the Author
More best practices.
Measure The Customer Journey To Manage The Customer Experience
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