What is Customer Experience Analytics?

By using the data effectively, businesses can monitor the customer experience and make any improvements or changes that are required to drive and maintain high levels of customer satisfaction, so that the business continues to retain customers and generate new leads.

Another valuable use of CX analytics is to use the data to create marketing campaigns that are more successful. There are many different ways that CX analysis can introduce efficiencies and product enhancements, by collecting customer opinions. For example, a survey could reveal that it is difficult to find a certain product on the company website, so the website development team would be passed this data to enable them to rectify the issue.

How to Analyse Customer Experience

The following steps detail how you can analyse customer experience:

Select the customers to analyse

The first step of conducting CX analysis is to identify your ideal customers that you want to analyse the feedback of. You need to find the customers that will provide the most useful information, the ones who regularly use your products and/or services.

Map your customer journey

An important element of CX analysis is to map out the full customer journey, so you have all of the customer touch points mapped out, from the first time the customer is made aware of the company, to renewing a product or a product return. Basically, every time a customer has any type of contact with the company, this is a touchpoint.

Read more about Touchpoint mapping here.

Collect CX data

There are many options for collecting customer feedback through Voice of the Customer tools such as surveys like the Net Promoter Score, Customer Effort Score and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT).

Other ways to collect data is through analysing comments made by customers on the social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc. Many companies set up social media teams who will continually respond to comments and queries sent via social media. They will also collate all of the data to monitor any patterns or to send feedback onto the relevant teams to resolve an issue.

Another way of collecting valuable data from customers is to monitor online reviews that are left. Feedback sites such as Google Review, TrustPilot, Facebook, Tripadvisor and many others prompt customers to leave reviews when they interact with a company. This includes leaving a rating and also gives customers the opportunity to leave comments about their experience. The CX team should be carefully monitoring all of the platforms that customers are leaving comments about them on.

Competitor analysis

One of the key aspects of running a successful business is understanding what your main competitors are doing and what is working well for them. As well as keeping tabs on any new products or services they launch, checking for pricing changes or any new marketing campaigns, you also need to be monitoring what customers are saying about them.

With there being so much customer data in the public domain, such as on social media channels and online review sites, you can use the information available to understand what your competitors are good at and what they are not so good at. By using this data, you can make changes to your business or you can tailor marketing campaigns to take advantage of the information you have collected.

For example, if you are seeing comments where customers are complaining about a specific touchpoint, which is sometimes called a customer pain point, you can ensure that your company provides a better service in this area. You can also create marketing campaigns that appeal to customers that are not happy with their experience with your competitor and are therefore more likely to switch to a new company for what they need.

Create a CX management plan

Once you have collated all of the data for analysis, you need to filter the most useful data, as if you have too much data, it will take too many resources to properly analyse and use the data constructively. So, determine which data gives you the best opportunity to most easily make changes that will make a positive impact on your business.

Now that you have defined the most valuable data, the next step is to formulate the data into a plan with actions. For example, if there is a series of comments on social media that are all referring to a feature of the product that they do not like, the plan could include conducting deeper customer analysis on the product and deciding whether the product team needs to amend the product.

One of the main objectives of your CX plan is to build a deeper understanding of who your customers are and what they value the most. You should be able to use the data collected to segment your target audience so that you can then customize your marketing campaigns to leverage greater success. So, you would look at what features a certain demographic of customer is looking for and develop marketing content that will grab their attention because it resonates with how they feel or what they need.

CX analytics and planning should not be a one-off exercise or an activity that only takes place once negative feedback has been identified, it is a practice that should be embedded into the company.

By collecting and analysing customer experience data in the most effective way, businesses can introduce continual improvements to the customer experience and can identify problems and implement solutions before the problem becomes bigger.

Customer experience analysis is a powerful business strategy that can help you to stay ahead of your competitors, or to understand how you can offer better services and products than your competitors. Without comprehensive CX analysis, you are mostly assuming what your customers want and need, rather than listening to what they are saying and strengthening the relationship by offering them a more personalised experience.