Tracking and monitoring your customer journey analytics should always remain a priority, no matter how busy you get. As you build out your custom journeys and execute your marketing strategy, this dedication to your data will help you keep a competitive edge as you can pivot, or reconfigure campaigns that may not be performing optimally.

Customer journey analytics are being ranked as the second-highest customer experience (CX)-related investment priority by top organizations, according to a 2021 survey. As more and more businesses recognize just how impactful customer journey analytics can be, now is the time to build on your own knowledge.

In this article, we will be focussing on the true benefits customer journey analytics can bring to your company, the real-world use cases, and how to use Ortto’s analytics tool to find what you're looking for.

Customer journey analytics definition

It's the process of tracking, measuring and monitoring customer behavior across the different touchpoints of the journey workflow, over a period of time. The analytics received will provide you with insights into the impact of customer behavior on key business outcomes. You can then use these insights to better optimize and improve your customer's experience.

From every customer action taken, there are a few key notifiers that must be collected in order to report on a complete journey, these are:

• When did the user take the action? There must be a timestamp associated with the specific action.

• What is the user doing in this action? Did they view a specific landing page, use a feature, or subscribe to a newsletter?

• What is their unique identifier? All users must have a unique identifier in order to tie the action with the right user.

Collecting all these points of data will ensure quick customer journey analysis and faster insights into user behavior, across all touchpoints.

Customer journey analytics benefits

The benefits of customer journey analytics will be extended to both your team, and your customers' experience. Let’s take a look.

Create the ultimate personalized experience

Throughout your prospect’s or customer’s journey, you are collecting valuable pieces of data that show you their needs, pain points and preferences. This set of journey analytics can be used to offer solutions to their problems, and personalize their experience by sending them the right message at the right time..

Gain a better understanding of prospects and customers

Customer journey analytics allows you to turn customer data points into marketing tactics that will resonate with your audience. As you are monitoring and analyzing your customer data, you get a greater understanding of what makes your customers tick. This is the insight needed to make better data-driven business to prove your worth as a marketer.

Create a collaborative team

Your entire team has access to real-time insights into customer behavior with customer journey analytics. This organizational alignment will result in improving the customer experience, a far more collaborative team who are all on the same page and have a higher level of control over the customer journey.

Remove friction points

Track and monitor all your customer journeys to gain a detailed view of how your customers are interacting with your company. In the journeys that are not performing, zoom in to see where customers are not engaging or, worse, churning.

Once this is pinpointed you can remove the barriers and refine the process so your customers’ experience improves greatly.

This can also help improve customer service support, as the data collected will provide insight into where further training for the support agents, an increase in content resources or a strategic pivot is needed.

Increase ROI

Using a platform like Ortto will unify your data and give you one source of truth so you can measure complete journeys. Your first-party data, data integrations or any external third-party data sources can all be collected and collated into one CDP.

This gives you the competitive advantage of being able to see a completed picture of the channels and messaging that are working and engaging the most valuable customers. This sort of insight means you can allocate your marketing budget accordingly to those areas deemed the most successful and focus on activities that drive ROI.

Predict customer behavior

Customer journey analytics give you the tools to better forecast and predict customer behavior. This is achieved by the historical data already gained through user interactions, and previous actions taken at various touchpoints.

Optimize in real-time

The data collected across your customer journey touchpoints will allow you to evaluate the performance of the channel or your marketing strategy as a whole. Whether you have just started a campaign and want results in real time, or prefer a monthly check in to see the success or failings, customer journey analytics can do it all. You will be able to obtain insights like: the best channels for engagement or conversion, what customer journeys are likely to end in churn, or even the ideal moment to engage customers during their journey.

Customer journey analytics use cases

Customer journey analytics track data in real time, allowing you to analyze customer behavior as the customer interacts with your website or product. Working agiley, you can build user journeys based on the actions taken and even look for further opportunities to make improvements to the customer experience.

Customer journey analytics will give you the extra level of detail needed to make better marketing decisions. There are endless customer journey analytics examples available showing how they boost marketing strategies, below we share three key examples that can be implemented today.

Discover opportunities to upsell

Utilize your customer journey analytics to look for upselling opportunities within your customers experience. Identify your target customers then use data to identify the right offer and implement a personalized, omnichannel campaign nudging the customer to the upsell conversion.

Let’s use an airline company as an example. Skyhigh airline wants to know which upsell offer is more likely to result in a flight upgrade. Customers enter the journey once they purchase a plane ticket and, from here, an A/B test is set up to discover the effectiveness of two different upsell offers. For example, once you’ve upgraded you receive more loyalty points, more flexibility with your booking, or a VIP pass into the members lounge within the airport.

Once your dedicated time period for the test is over you can view the conversion rates and find which upsell offer is more desired by the customers.

Reduce volume of users contacting customer support

Customer journey analytics can help you free up the time of your customer support agents so they can focus on big ticket items. Let’s use the onboarding journey in our example as it is one of the most pivotal journeys in order to show off your product, ensure the user sees value in your product and make the whole process (including any customer support) to be as streamlined as possible.

Use customer journey analytics to view any friction points customers are facing by taking a look at how many support tickets are logged through the onboarding process. Keeping an eye on these metrics will ensure customers are not encountering too many issues along the way or will help you spot the most common themes.

Once you have access to this information, you can get ahead of the customers' questions by changing your messaging or content hierarchy within the onboarding process. Creating additional content that answers these common questions in the form of blog posts or how-to videos or creating an additional pop-up, email, or chatbot. These will all help alleviate your support team from common questions, as well as create a better onboarding customer experience.

Know exactly where your revenue is coming from

Companies can view and zoom in on who their successful customers are plus be able to clarify which specific touchpoints are important to their success through the use of attribution reports included within customer journey analytics.

Ortto has specific attribution report templates to help you view this sort of data analysis, without having to be a data scientist yourself. Revenue attribution reports show you the exact revenue, orders and MRR being contributed to every customer interaction.

Combining these types of reports on a dashboard will allow you to see which actions, emails, and interactions are moving the needle in the right direction. Or it can lead to knowing what platform features are more meaningful and likely to cause conversion or upsell.

How to use customer journey analytics in Ortto

The biggest question to ask yourself before getting started and building your reports in Ortto, is understanding what information you want to showcase. Then finding the style of report that will suit it best.

Ortto has an array of report and dashboard templates to choose from, plus additional templates to suit your data source. For example, Shopify or BigCommerce integrations allow for report types based around attributed revenue, average order value or abandoned cart.

Or if you prefer to build your own dashboard or report then starting from scratch is the way to go. With 11 different types of reports there will be something in there for everyone, including:

• Funnel - Measure people who perform a set of activities.

• Pie chart - Compare activities and their attributes.

• Line graph - Plot activities or attributes over time.

• Area chart - Plot activities or attributes over time.

• Metric - Focus on a single activity or attribute value.

• Geo chart - Plot activities by their location on a map.

• Cohort - Measure a group who complete an activity over time.

• Column chart - Plot activities or attributes over time.

• Table - View and compare activities and their attributes.

• Ledger - Display a ledger of activities as they happen.

This is where understanding what data you want to showcase comes into play, for example: If you’re wanting to show one key metric like “what is the open rate for my upsell email campaign this month”, then a simple metric style report will work best. This type of report can also show and compare the metric (e.g. to last month, or a KPI)

Customer journey analytics 3 step process

We want to give you the tools needed to get the most out of your customer journey analytics, empowering every team member across the company to make better, more data-driven business decisions and optimizing the customer experience along the way.

We’ve outlined the actions you need to take to start using customer journey analytics and leveraging them for success.

1. Collect data and map the customer journey

It all starts with data and mapping your customer journey. When mapping, ensure you've identified the key pain points your customers face and your journey helps to solve these.

There are a few things to keep in mind when aggregating data. The customer journey analytics tool you choose should be able to collect data from numerous sources (removing any data business silos), keep it updated and accurate and collate the collected data to act as source of truth.

Using a customer data platform like Ortto means you can consolidate all your data - CRM, website analytics, customer support, billing services - into one central point. All your data will be kept up-to-date in real-time, allowing you to create a comprehensive customer journey that responds when customers take actions.

2. Analyze customer behavior and data

Once your customer journeys have been mapped out and your data is collected, it’s now time to link specific interactions to particular customer behaviors for example emails opened, new trials and signups, or a custom activity like ‘created a task’.

In this stage you are mapping out the interactions to track in any stage of the customer journey. This is an important step, as it helps you identify the type of reports to create and include on a dashboard.

For example you’ve created an SaaS onboarding customer journey, where the customer behaviors that show onboarding success include things like, email open rate (on the welcome email and onboarding flow), the customer action of first logging in, inviting a team member, completed sign up, and number of support tickets produced.

These can all be created as reports in Ortto and added to your new ‘onboarding dashboard’ so you can grab a quick analysis of how the journey is performing.

3. Take data-driven action

Everything is falling in line. This last step comes down to you, as a marketer, to monitor, track and draw insights from your analytics. The valuable insights you’ll gain from this can be applied to your campaigns in a far more data-led strategy. Any modifications made can then show you, in real-time, the cause and effect of the change in case further adjustments to the journey need to be made.

Customer journey analyticstools

It’s best to look around for the customer journey analytics software that will best deliver the results you are after. There are a few things to keep in mind when looking for the right tool, including:

• Does it provide a complete picture of a customer's online behavior?

• Is it intuitive and easy to use?

• Does the software welcome other data sources?

• Is it within budget?

• Does it comply with current security and privacy regulations?

Ortto can provide all this and so much more. Ortto can make sense of your data, motivating your team and helping you grow your business. It is able to bring in customer, firmographic, behavioral and transactional data together from various data sources so you can see a complete and unified picture of your customers.

This is your one stop shop. A customer data platform, marketing automation tools, and analytics are all brought together, so you’ll spend less time exporting and importing data, and more time tracking metrics that matter most to your business. Resulting in making better decisions across the entire customer journey.

Final word

Customer journey analytics is the tool you need to master. Once mastered, you can gain the insights needed to fix customer experiences, improve retention, decrease customer churn, and even explore new revenue opportunities.

Now with a solid knowledge base of customer journey analytics it’s time to login to Ortto and unlock your essential customer data to make better business decisions.