Experience analytics

Data and analytics drive your customer experience (CX) and journey designs across all your digital touchpoints to create meaningful engagements with your customers. Experience analytics (sometimes used interchangeably with CX analytics) are the metrics that help you optimize all of your digital experiences. 

What is experience analytics?

Experience analytics is the process you use to collect, analyze and utilize customer-specific data for improved journeys and experiences when they are buying your products or using your services. 

Instead of just tracking data regarding burn, churn and conversions, experience analytics drills down into the entire customer journey. You collect data at different touchpoints, monitor behavior across your channels and use the information to make intelligent design decisions for each digital interaction. 

Experience analytics go beyond simple CX considerations by quantifying the entire Digital Customer Experience (DCX) and generating valuable feedback daily. Experience analytics focuses on different points in the customer journey and optimizes those experiences to drive conversions, reduce friction points and grow revenues. 

How does experience analytics work?

Today's consumers want uniform journeys that cover all digital touchpoints, making these experiences a key differentiator in the competitive online market. For each visitor to your website or app, you need to provide a seamless experience by anticipating needs and delivering content that creates individual connections. 

Customer journey design remains a challenge for many organizations regardless of the industry or sector involved. SaaS and ecommerce companies need to ensure they collect the right data, establish KPIs and monitor the metrics of their digital experiences to remain competitive. Customer experience analytics identify the information required to inform every iteration of your updated customer journey map. 

What role does experience analytics play in user journey design?

User journey mapping provides a complete overview of the entire user flow for each defined experience available on your website and app. Once you have a framework for each digital touchpoint available in your user journeys, you can define specific metrics to analyze user behavior, identify friction points and find areas where opportunities for optimization may exist.  

The types of data you may collect include:

• Open rates

  Used in email marketing to track the success of your campaigns

• Click-through rates

  To determine if your content resonates with visitors

• Traffic

  Knowing who your potential customers are by understanding how many visitors you attract to your website, app or another digital channel

• Heatmaps

  Provides you with a graphical representation of how visitors interact with the different elements available on your website

• Voice of the customer

  Direct feedback from customers provide you with a better understanding of the parts of the journey that cause frustration or resonates with different visitors

Each journey map will have different data points that further optimize your customer experience across all available touchpoints. Once you have actionable data from your current journeys, you can use multivariate or A/B/n testing to try out new designs and gather customer feedback. Different deployment methods allow you to deliver different experiences to a subset of visitors using segmentation that enables you to first test out any new journeys. 

Experience optimization (EXO) is an ongoing process where your digital services continue to evolve with your customer's expectations. 

Benefits of using experience analytics

Growing sophistication in consumer preferences and an increasingly competitive online market makes improving digital experiences an essential part of maintaining revenues for today's organizations. Customers are looking for greater convenience from personalized journeys that aren't invasive but remain intuitive. 

A greater percentage of consumers are willing to share positive experiences on social media and other platforms than those who complain about a negative one. Brands that compete in saturated markets can use experience analytics as a key differentiator when considerations like price are no longer the primary decision-making factor for consumers. 

Customers want experiences that add value to the journey. Analytics help organizations understand the customer's motivations, feelings and overall satisfaction. Experience analytics enable organizations to continuously refine and optimize journeys to maintain growth and increase revenues. 

Experience analytics best practices

Tracking your customer's journey and monitoring responses to each element is the first step to optimizing your digital services and growing revenues. When designing your analytics and experience framework's metrics, you'll need to:

• Decide which data points apply to different portions of the journey and select the right tools to collect the metrics.
• Translate the data into new journey maps and user experience designs that aim to increase conversion rates.
• Test your hypothesis with A/B designs for different experiences to find the areas that users respond to and deploy those elements to everyone.
• Continue collecting more data to eliminate any friction points in future journey maps and evolve your experiences along with changes in user behavior.

Experience analytics process

Journey maps describe each interaction between you and your customers across all your available digital channels. The experience analytics you gather help you redraw journey maps, test different iterations of designs and reduce friction to grow revenues and deliver superior experiences. Following these steps will help you establish an experience analysis framework that optimizes your customer journeys:

1. Define your ideal customer -- You'll need to know who your most valuable customer personas are and what motivates them to make a purchase or sign up for a service.
2. Map the journey you think they need -- By identifying the different touchpoints during the journey, you can design journey maps to inform your website or app designs.
3. Collect feedback -- You can either release new journeys and generate experience analytics or test your journey designs to segmented customers before releasing it.
4. Compare journeys to competitors -- To retain the competitive edge, you should also compare your journeys and analytics with competitors to see where they are succeeding and if you are falling behind.
5. Continue to monitor your experiences -- Evaluating the experience analytics you currently collect, and the success of your journey optimization efforts will allow you to continue improving as consumer habits change.

Developing great, optimized digital journeys

Optimizely One provides you with all the experience analytics tools needed to redesign your online journeys. By combining all of the tools you need in one platform, you can implement continuous Optimization-as-a-Service for all your digital assets, touchpoints, designs and content delivery processes.