Customer Journey Analytics: A Framework For Implementing
You Can't Improve What You Don't Measure
Startups initially rely on customer calls and qualitative work to better understand how users are experiencing and navigating their products. But as your business, customer base, and acquisition spend grow, you need a unified view of your customer journey.
A unified view of your customer journey means being able to stitch together all the interactions your customers have with your company. It's one central view of all your customer behavior.
Here are some reasons why setting up customer journey analytics to get that unified view becomes more important as you grow:
- You need to focus your product development on the correct problems. Prioritizing expensive engineering teams to work on the wrong things can cost you a quarter or more of progress.
- You need to make sure your marketing spend stays efficient. Scaling acquisition costs with a leaky funnel starts to burn the cash you need to survive.
- A big part of your business success relies on having strong customer loyalty and increasing customer lifetime value. You will need to know how to engage and retain your customers.
And to get this unified view, you'll have to build a customer analytics infrastructure.
We connected with Mapolo Buessing, Director of Product at Osmind, so he could share the framework he's used to set up a customer analytics infrastructure at multiple startups. If you want more on this topic you can watch Mapolo talk about it in our recorded conversation with him here or from a recent How to Measure Product Success panel discussion.
Overcoming Objections From Within Your Organization to Setting Up Customer Journey Analytics
It's not uncommon to encounter internal friction when advocating to set up customer journey analytics.
You might hear that you can already get this data from scripts or SQL queries against your database. The problem is that this creates a high barrier of entry for business users like marketing, product, and CS teams. You have to get to a place where business users can generate reports without asking an engineer or knowing SQL.
Cost is another common objection. You'll have to invest money to build your analytics infrastructure. Starting small is an obvious way to control costs as you prove the value of having this holistic view of your customer journey. But the more significant reason this investment will save you money in the long run, is that you're going to increase the probability of focusing engineering resources and marketing efforts on the right thing instead of running into expensive dead ends.
Understanding what your company's employees want is the best way to overcome pushback for building your customer analytics infrastructure. What questions do they have about your customers? Build your analytics infrastructure to solve that.
Here's what that exercise would look like:
Step 1: Ask your team to compile questions they have about the product.
Step 2: Find a critical step important to your business and ask questions about it. Maybe this is a purchase or another significant event in your customer journey. It will highlight the need for data.
Step 3: Start small. Demonstrate value quickly with a proof of concept.
Getting Started
Once you have internal buy-in to implement the customer analytics infrastructure, you'll want to ensure it's a success. Showing early value reinforces the need to continue to invest in it.
Create clear questions
What questions does your team want answers to, and why do they care about them? For example, marketing might be concerned with conversion and retention by acquisition channel to ensure the company invests in the right place. You'll be able to create dashboards and reports for each stakeholder, so they can easily access the data they care about the most.
Choosing the tools
Customer Data Platform
Implementing a customer data platform early helps provide that unified view of the customer journey you're after. That's because a customer data platform pulls together every customer interaction and the associated properties into one combined view. So if your customers convert from a specific ad channel, visit from different devices, and interact with in-product messages, your customer data platform will stitch that together into one holistic view.
The downside of a customer data platform is that it takes a lot of engineering resources to configure all the individual customer interactions (often called "Events"). It only takes a sprint or two to realize that product and UI changes mean engineering has to go back and set up more customer events. It's an ongoing cycle.
For teams looking to eliminate the engineering costs required to code all those customer events, a customer data platform like Freshpaint empowers business users who don't write code to configure them easily.
Product Analytics
When evaluating and reporting on the customer interaction data your customer data platform is capturing, a product analytics tool like Mixpanel is a must. A product analytics tool allows you to:
- Cohort customers by their properties and actions
- Set up funnels to analyze drop-off points
- Link acquisition channels with retention graphs
- Set up user flows to evaluate specific customer journeys
- Create dashboards and reports for your business users
Engagement & Messaging
Not only will your analysis influence product direction, but it will also influence when and how you communicate with your customers. Messaging tools like Customer.io help you re-engage and convert customers. And they work better when you understand where the drop-off points are or when the best time to try to convert a customer might be.
Once again, a customer data platform like Freshpaint can deliver your customer events and properties to a tool like Customer.io so that you can create effective messaging workflows.
Defining Events & Properties
When naming and creating definitions for your customer actions, the best advice here is to choose a naming convention and be consistent with it. This will help avoid confusion and keep everyone on the same page about the definition of each action. There's no reason to go crazy here. Just try to keep it simple.
This goes beyond events, though, because questions are always going to get more granular:
- How many days until a new user takes the action I care about most?
- How do I view this data by account?
- How do I view by company type?
Be sure to take some time to consider the underlying properties for each event you want to capture.
Roll It Out
Now that you are ready to launch with your team, the key will be to keep the stakeholders at your company engaged. Here are some suggestions on how to do that:
- You know the questions different team members care about, so create dashboards and invite respective stakeholders.
- For the executive team, you can automate notifications to see the KPI dashboard every Monday morning.
- Be a marketer - constantly talk about and share the metrics and findings. The more vocal you are about the results and the learnings, the more valuable customer analytics will be within your organization.
Everyone On Your Team Needs Access To Data
A holistic view of your customer journey is critical to your company's growth. But unleashing the full potential comes when you make data available to everyone in your organization, not just those who can run SQL queries.
If you're interested in seeing how Freshpaint can help you create a unified view of your customer journey that empowers your business users, you can create a free account here.
