The ability to understand a customer journey is key to being able to unlock the secret to improving their experience of your company. A customer journey is a string of interactions that a customer must make in order to make the most of your services. The simplest example of this is in a shop – a customer must first find your shop, locate the product on the shelves, pay for it, and leave. If they journey is smooth, they will come back. If it isn’t, you may lose their custom for good.
When you think about your business, and the number of paths that a customer could take to get to the end of their journey, it is clear that understanding the paths that they walk is more important than ever. Finding out which paths are most problematic to customers will help to identify areas in which your company can improve, and this is a huge challenge faced by the department who deal with big data and analytics.
What kind of data is collected?
There are many different types of data that could be collected that, when analysed, could help a company to truly understand the customer journey, and help them to consider what could be done to improve this. Your company will already have a huge amount of data at its disposal – it isn’t always about sending out a questionnaire in the hope that enough people will respond.
For example, you probably have a lot of demographic information about your customers, including where they’re from, their occupations, their gender, marital status, amongst other things. If you have any kind of online provision such as a website, you will be able to see how many visitors you get in comparison to sales, the point at which potential customers lose interest, and how many customers come back to you once they have visited the first time.
What are the issues with big data?
By far the biggest issue is the fact that you have so much data available to you that it can be incredibly difficult to know which data to focus on, and what you should do with it once you have found a trend. A lot of the data collected will show you nothing at all, but within all of that data will be something that can be incredibly helpful – and the challenge is trying to separate one from the other in a way that leaves you with something that tells a story about customer journeys.
How to implement change as a result of trends found
Simply having the data available to you is not going to be enough to improve your company, and you always need to ensure that you act upon anything that you find. Firstly, you need to ensure that you are working as a team with other individuals within your company. For example, the person who finds trends in the data probably won’t have the skillset required to decide what should be done with the data to make improvements on the customer journey – and somebody else with this knowledge should then be at hand to take a look at the trends that have been identified.
Another key piece of advice is that you should never ignore what seems to be a small problem. For example, if you find that there is a mistake on your website you may not think that it is major enough to matter, but it can be frustrating for a customer, and can have a real impact on their customer journey, which means that it should be dealt with as soon as possible.
Continuity is key
In an ever-changing industry, just knowing about trends and then making a change is never enough. You will need to perform continuous analysis to make sure that you are making improvements, and that you are very much moving in the right direction. For example, if you find that your conversion rate drops if a customer is finding your website from a particular page, the aim should be to improve this – and you should take a look regularly to see whether this is the case. If it is not, then you will need to rethink your approach, and consider further changes that could be made instead.
No matter what kind of trends you identify, you should always make sure that you are focusing on your customer, and their journey with you as a company. The more seamless the customer journey, the better chance you have of retaining their custom in the future, and therefore improving your company reputation, and because of this it is important that you are using all data and analytics methods available to you to identify trends that are relevant, and to help you point your company towards changes that could be made.