Customer Experience (CX) is always your company's main product, regardless of what it offers. Customer experience is what draws customers, determines what and how often they purchase and significantly affects customer loyalty and lifetime value.
As Annette Franz, Founder, and CEO at CX Journey Inc in her guest post says, “Those steps – centralize, analyze, synthesize/contextualize, socialize, strategize, and operationalise – are handy, but most companies get hung up on the first step. And if they know where their data is and have pulled it all into a data lake, or if they’ve gotten as much data together as they believe they can for now, they then get stuck on the next step, analyze.”
Here is a comprehensive CX analytics guide that answers all your analytics-related doubts to get started with customer analytics undertakings without fail.
What is Customer Experience Analytics?
Customer experience analytics is an organized approach to collecting and analyzing customer data. It turns raw data into valuable customer insights that drive business processes systematically. You can optimize the strategies devised to bring in more customers by scrutinizing customer requirements.
Keeping up with customer wants is of utmost importance to hold a top position in the respective industry. Customer experience analytics act as a helping hand for you to comprehend pain points and work on them fix issues your consumers face.
Top executives can take impactful measures with CX analytics to improve the CX program. Also, acting on the outputs of CX analytics assists your brand in fulfilling customer service goals faster, strengthening the customer-brand bond. You can smoothen the customer journey and deliver a best-in-class customer experience.
Read More: How Customer Experience Analytics Helps To Revisit Customer Personas.
Why is Customer Data Important in Customer Experience Analytics?
"When it comes to data and analytics, brands should take the time to set up the proper data sets and track the right key performance indicators (KPIs) that drive the success of their business. They also need the talent, whether internal or a third-party partner, to take that data and tell a story with it. Data can identify pain points, customer journeys, conversion rates, and more. Talk to the retailers you are selling to and get more information from them. Partner with retailers to get the analytics on interactions with your products from the consumer standpoint." says Kaela Kucera, Ecommerce Manager at Pierce Manufacturing, in Clootrack's 102 CX Expert report.
The primary source of customer data is the customers themselves. The analytics provide precise conclusions and let you know the next step you must take in order to achieve your target. The processed data reflect what outcomes customers expect by using the solution. Your brand can pick up the exact difficulties consumers face and furnish them with a top-notch solution.
Brands get the most out of the data by employing it for analytics to monitor metrics and follow a strategic path to growth. Constantly refining customer metrics with the help of data and analytics increases customer trust as brands often outperform customer anticipations.
The very first action you need to take to start the CX analytics process is to gather customer data. Let's jump right into it!
How is Data Collected For Customer Experience Analytics?
i) Identify Goals
Starting with an objective assists you in keeping the CX processes aligned, resulting in the achievement of customer success. You must be clear with the goal with which you want to collect and analyze the customer data. The aim could be anything, from identifying customer trends to increasing conversions. Fixate the purposes, and it will become easier and much clearer for you to carry out the analytics process till the end.
ii) Determine Data Source
There are several direct and indirect methods to gather data. Direct data collection methods include interviews, feedback forms, NPS surveys, chatbots, and many more. Indirect data collection method includes social media, web traffic patterns, customer service employees' feedback, and many more. Choose all possible channels and modes from which you can collect data so that you do not miss any particulars customers would prefer to have in regard to brand offerings.
iii) Assemble Data For Analysis
Manually pulling customer data from a variety of channels is counterproductive and time-taking. In addition to that, the formats of data on different platforms vary, making it unstructured and inadequate for processing. The best option is to collaborate with customer experience analytics platforms like Clootrack that provide a unified view by assembling and processing customer data to provide the finest customer-based solutions in real time.
How to Analyze Customer Data for Customer Experience Analytics?
Continuing the above-given process, after the collection of data in one place, these are the steps you need to follow to get the consolidated CX-based outputs:-
1) Data Processing
The gathered data needs to be processed and brought in a structured format to make the analysis easy. The analysis process of structured data quickly pulls the insights when processed through the technologies like AI and ML.
2) Data Cleaning
The organized data may contain errors or duplicates, or miss information. The data cleaning process cleans data and prevents the production of inaccurate results caused by such data issues.
3) Data Analysis
There are several types and methods of data analysis that you can follow depending on the goals you set and the outputs you want. Descriptive, Diagnostic, Exploratory, Predictive, and several analysis methods add value to your CX program according to the business requirements.
4) Data Interpretation
You can interpret the analyzed data effortlessly with data visualization. Tables, charts, and other visual elements in one place make it uncomplicated for internal stakeholders to diagnose consumer necessities and work towards fulfilling their needs.
Why is Customer Experience Analytics Important?
In this 21st century, customers have far more different issues than the ones that existed a decade ago. Consumers are more conscious of the solutions they receive. On top of that, today's digitally-aware customers know that they need to make an informed decision before investing as they have a lot of choices in the market. In such a scenario, it becomes crucial for your brand to stand out from the crowd. And here where is customer experience analytics becomes an important entity to consider.
Below you can learn about the 3 best practices where CX analytics plays a major role and demonstrates its importance:-
1) Empowers With Customer Insights
CX analytics remove the efforts of figuring out what can delight a customer. You can immediately chase the outcomes produced by insights to get results quicker.
Also, assumptions regarding customer demands can only lead to the wastage of resources. How? Imagine you input employees' time, funds, and similar necessary resources into a guessed project. Surely, the project will miserably fail and if it works, it will soon become ineffective because it will not be backed by data and analytics.
Merely working on what your customers 'Might' like will never get you to the point you want to reach. Driving CX agendas with data and analytics prevent resource wastage and increase your Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score.
2) Encourages Customer-Centricity
At the organizational level, leaders can keep employees informed about the CX objectives to promote a customer-centric attitude with CX analytics. Analytics suggests the most credible customer-driven strategies to follow.
As upshots of CX analytics are totally customer-based, companies following it promote to enforce customer-oriented approaches in the organization. By sharing the CX reports with different departments, brands can prompt them to provide flawless services at every touchpoint.
The ideal step your brand can take with the assistance of an analytics report is to create a single CX vision to be followed that brings clarity to staff members regarding their aim and responsibilities, taking customer demands into consideration. These practices boost brand credibility and perception.
3) Discover Improvement Opportunities
With CX analytics, your brand can look for extra chances where improvements are possible. The aim of clasping and executing opportunities should be to lessen the effort made by customers to perform any activity related to your brand.
Each brand has different needs and requirements, so using CX insight, your brand can analyze and pick any specific capability and enhance it further with customer feedback.
You can also experiment with different inferences you obtain from CX analytics and find your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) that supports you to become the leader in your targeted market segment. The end result of pursuing customer experience analytics is an increase in the quantity and quality of leads, leading to the growth of your business.
How to Enhance Customer Experience with Customer Experience Analytics?
In this decade, customer experience is a huge differentiator. Brands are competing on the basis of CX to get to the top. And to keep up the CX game on and on track, companies are relying on customer experience analytics. CX analytics revamps already existing CX initiatives and supports the new ones to provide customers with the best customer experience.
Here are the top 4 facets illustrating how brands can use customer experience analytics to deliver a better CX:-
1) Personalize Experiences
According to Salesforce's fifth edition of the report State of the Connected Customer, 56% of customers expect all offers to be personalized.
Here are a few ways you can use customer experience analytics to provide a personalized experience:-
- Make customized recommendations of your product and services to your customers.
- Plan and execute a program that focuses on providing personalized care to customers' concerns without ruining the customer experience.
- Custom-tailor your offering by adding or removing elements from your solution packages according to individual needs.
- Run targeted ads and marketing campaigns to preserve customers' attention toward your solution.
2) Optimize Business Operations
Data-driven strategies based on CX analytics become the backbone of customer-related operations. Analytics help you to optimize business operations, such as planning, development, maintenance, and delivery of products or services.
Follow the given pieces of advice to get full advantage from analytics for customer-based operations:-
- Use analytics to recognize your strengths and brainstorm how to take them to the next level by identifying what more you can add that will please your customers.
- CX analytics also showcases your weak points. Work on them to never lose even a single customer to your competition.
- Identify the potential roadblocks through analytics and tweak internal strategies and operational structure to remove them.
3) Enhance Customer-Facing Activities
Hubspot research suggests that 93% of customers are likely to become repeat customers of companies providing excellent customer service.
Customer-facing activities are ones that create the first impression on customers and are as important as back-end activities that you must not ignore. Below are some tips to utilize CX analytics to enhance direct dealing activities with customers:-
- With customer experience analytics, you can scrutinize your performance at different customer contact points. Enhance your customer service performance to make customers happy and drive a well-planned word-of-mouth marketing strategy.
- Get into the customers' shoes with CX analytics and work through the lens of the customer to increase their loyalty by providing the reliable solution they ask for in feedback.
- Identify customer behavior patterns with respect to each characteristic of your different business units and align your undertaking accordingly to enrich customer experience.
4) Identify Customer Trends
CX analytics unveils the latest shifts happening in the consumer market with which most customers get carried away. Acting on the real-time results from analytics becomes a plus point for your brand, as early access to what a customer currently wants will highlight your brand.
Below given are a few more benefits of using CX analytics to identify and work on current customer movements:-
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Keeping up with consumer trends with customer experience analytics builds your authority in the market space.
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Customer perception of your brand enhances as you can pose as quick solution providers with your up-to-date solutions.
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Consistently working on transformations that satisfy customer increases the across-the-board efficiencies and eases future enactments for the brand, adding to business expansion opportunities.
How to Get the ROI of Customer Experience Analytics?
Follow the 3 tips given below to ensure you get the desired ROI for your CX analytics operations:-
1) Track Operational Direction
Make sure your CX analytics processes and results are working towards the growth of the company. Track end-to-end operations of your brand that use analytics for the progress by monitoring your analytics functions. Here are a few questions for you to answer if or not your CX analytics operations are moving in the right direction:-
- Has the involvement of CX analytics in different organizational programs resulted in overall business growth?
- Is the customer experience analytics framework strong enough to support future CX programs?
- Are CX analytics strategies and procedures solving problems that the company aimed to solve?
- How can we improve CX analytics operations to increase the economic growth rate?
Answering these questions will help you track the operational directions of your company operations involving customer experience analytics.
2) Improve CX Tech Stack
The process of customer experience analytics is nothing without technology and tools. An old set of tools and technology equipment will not allow you to thrive and bring returns. With technological advancements in the customer-serving sector, you must keep your tech stack updated to maintain relevancy and authority in the industry. Here are a few tips for you to improve your CX tech stack:-
- Take actions based on the requirements of CX operation. Look for the best-suited tools that would serve the company's needs. (Tip:- Do not simply go for technologies your competitors use. Instead, look for technologies that would assist your company in bringing expected outcomes.)
- Never stop your research and study regarding the CX tools and technology. Look for what new technology recently launched in the market and if or not it can be an asset to your company.
- Test your CX tech stack. Make sure it helps you to solve customer issues.
- Before choosing any tool, do look if it is adaptable or not. With regular changes in the market and for the company expansion, your CX tech stack must be flexible enough to modify according to requirements.
3) Involve Skilled Employees
Your tech and CX teams (teams directly involved with the CX analytics processes) must know their responsibilities and be able to fulfill them to ensure promising returns from CX analytics. Employees who lack skills might delay the process or bring wrong outputs. Follow the below-given tips to guarantee the involvement of skilled employees in your CX analytics processes:-
- Check the employees' performance on a regular basis and motivate them to stay focused. With iterations of performance review, decide whom to rely on for a particular CX-based task.
- Set the guidelines to help employees perform better and monitor who regularly follows to pick the best.
- Encourage employees to keep upskilling and stay updated to increase work efficiency.
- Conduct meetings and training sessions frequently to share information on analytics trends and future CX projects that involve customer experience analytics.
What is an Example of Customer Experience Analytics?
Let’s understand with the help of a case study.
Clootrack’s analysis of 128K customer reviews of 19 popular QSR brands has brought out many exciting customer insights and trends in the industry. Knowing customer expectations and their real experience with a brand is not very easy, and working upon assumptions can’t give you overnight success. Today, data-driven customer experience insights are the right way to know the real customer experience and expectations.
In Data-Driven Customer Experience Insights From the QSR (Quick Service Restaurants) Industry report, Clootrack reveals the top five category drivers that influence customer decisions and choices:-
1) Convenience
2) Food Quality
3) Overall Experience
4) App Interface
5) Staff Behavior
Clootrack's QSR report indicates the factors customers prefer to have or want to operate well while interacting with a QSR. From convenience to staff behavior, QSR brands can focus on brushing up on all the top five factors that customers look forward to receiving.
At the same time, these insights disclose the top 5 concerns customers have in the QSR Industry:-
The report contains the ins and outs of the QSR industry regarding customers and their expectations. These insights make CX analytics a crucial entity for QSR brands that want to connect better with customers to provide them most suitable products and services.
Related:- Three Ways Customer Experience Insights Solve Rapid Product Innovation Challenges.
Who Benefits From Customer Experience Analytics?
The following roles benefit most from customer experience analytics:-
1) C-suite Executives:- The foremost thing CX analytics help C-suite executives with is to make calculated decisions that favor the organization. Top executives take measures based on insights that ensure streamlining the internal processes with business goals, promoting customer-centricity within the organization, bringing quick and relevant results, and fetching maximum value for customers.
2) CX Marketers:- CX and other marketing professionals promote their brands by following strategies backed by CX analytics reports. Marketers plan and manage custom-tailored promotional campaigns across different customer communication channels to get effectual customer outcomes using actionable insights. Additionally, the marketing team delivers a comforting experience throughout the customer journey with customer analytics.
3) Product Heads:- Customer experience analytics has the power to get detailed insights about the attributes of a product for the product heads. From packaging to feature issues, it encircles every aspect that comes in the way of product development and enhancements. Not only issues, but it also uncovers the exceptional parts of the product that product heads leverage to increase the customer base.
4) Brand Managers:- Brand managers use customer analytics to intensify their branding efforts. The analytics report displays the position of the brand in the industry with respect to customer services, product features, and several other aspects that directly affect the brand image. The brand managers analyze the performance and accordingly direct the operations that fine-tune the brand perception.
5) Market Researchers:- CX analytics reveals the customer trends that convey the continuous shifts in consumer behavior, perception, opinion, and attitude. Market researchers get all-inclusive insights on products and services from the customers' point of view, which help them arrive at definitive conclusions. The market research reports supported by CX analytics become the go-to solution for researchers to help companies to create and direct CX strategies.
What Are the Attributes Your CX Analytics Tool Needs?
Consider the below-given attributes of the CX analytics tools to know what to look for while picking the right tool:-
1) Dependable:- The CX analytics tool you pick should produce accurate results, which means the predictions and customer-driven results shown in the CX reports should be on point.
2) Timely:- Your customer analytics tool should provide you with the latest insights every time you use it. Timely outcomes can help you the most out of it as you can quickly catch up with customer trends.
3) Scalable:- You never know when you will require more analytical resources suddenly to serve your customer with the best solution. Your analytics tools must allow you to scale up or down according to business wants.
4) Actionable:- CX analytics tools must deliver actionable insights so internal stakeholders can receive in-depth knowledge about the area you are deciding to target, either from a competitive or improvement perspective.
5) Granular:- Your customer experience analytics tools should be robust enough to cover small details. It must help you see the precise facts that may be the potential cause of invisible issues.
6) Cost-effective:- The analytics tool must be under your budget to not hurt other business operations. You can analyze the CX operational demands and pick a cost-effective CX analytics tool.
7) Effortless:- What's the point of the CX analytics tool where you have to make manual efforts to get results? Choose the analytics tool that requires less manual work and adds to automation in your organization.
To Wrap Up
Customer experience analytics fosters a customer-first mindset in your organization, as with what analytics yields, you solely focus on enhancing customer experience. Following what analytics reports show, you can start working on functions that operate in favor of your customers and company. Determining customer pain points, trends, strengths, and weaknesses of your company and competitors, opportunities, profitable actions, and all such things become super easy with CX analytics.
From the definition to the attributes of the CX analytics tool, this comprehensive guide to customer experience analytics has covered all the basics of analytics. But do you want to know how to make thoughtful investments in CX analytics or how customer experience analytics influence ROI?
Read this:- Customer Experience Analytics to Provide Top-notch CX That Brings Desired ROI.