Customer Journey Analytics Is a Customer Priority

By Donna Fluss

Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) is an enterprise application that provides a 360-degree view of a customer’s interactions with an organization and evaluates his or her experience every step of the way – from the customer’s perspective. CJA solutions are intended to give enterprises a method for tracking, capturing, and evaluating how their customers feel throughout their journey.

Although CJA solutions identify high-level servicing trends and opportunities for the enterprise, they should also enable companies to understand their customers on an individual basis and help to deliver a consistent, frictionless, and personalized omni-channel experience. These solutions should make it easy, advantageous, and desirable for customers to do business with them.

CJA Defined: Customer journey analytics can be defined as “an analytical solution that captures, measures, analyzes, and evaluates the quality and outcome of the customer experience throughout all phases and interactions for all customer-facing touch points, channels, and activities. This includes IVR and Web self-service, live-agent and back-office interactions, fulfillment or follow-up activities, and all actions initiated by the customer or agent on the customer’s behalf.” This is a broad definition that addresses all aspects of the customer relationship; CJA solutions are intended to help organizations view the customer experience from the customer, member, or constituent perspective.

How CJA Works: Customer journey analytics solutions provide a map that depicts each customer’s interaction with an organization from the first touch to the last. CJA solutions capture, analyze, and deliver findings to managers so they can use the information about a customer to identify areas of opportunity to improve and optimize each contact in order to deliver an outstanding experience.

Customer journey analytics solutions capture customer profile data from the customer relationship management (CRM) system, also known as the customer system of record. A CRM system tracks each customer’s relationship and history with a business. The CRM system is a repository for important information about the customer, including demographics, tenure, lifetime value, preferences, buying behaviors and patterns, and so forth. A CRM suite should be used to track all sales, marketing, and servicing interactions, transactions and activities throughout all channels, and touch points, including, calls, interactive voice response (IVR), emails, chat sessions, short message service (SMS), and social media, as well as the Web, storefronts, branches, back-office, and partners.

Customer journey analytics solutions must be able to address structured and unstructured feedback from all customer-facing applications. Besides the data from the CRM solution, speech and text analytics solutions are an important source of direct customer feedback. Feedback actively collected from customer surveys, as well as passively gleaned from social media posts, should also be incorporated into the analysis. Although contact center quality assurance (QA) programs typically take an internal view of the customer experience, this information should also be fed into the CJA application, as it’s helpful to know if the organization and agent did what they were supposed to do at each touch point. It’s also a good idea to include data from the desktop analytics application to obtain a more complete view of how a customer was treated.

Final Thoughts: The benefits of CJA are great, but the effort required to collect and process the data, as well as the more important task of adapting corporate culture, is substantial and takes many years. CJA solutions can provide the transparency and visibility that allow companies to put their customers’ needs first, facilitating an essential change of perspective and priorities for most organizations.

Donna Fluss is the founder of DMG, a vendor-independent research and consulting firm that analyzes contact center and back-office technology and best practices. Contact her at donna.fluss@dmgconsult.com with any questions you may have and to learn how to make today’s innovative and powerful technologies and best practices work for your organization.

[From Connection Magazine – November/December 2015]

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