Customer Journey Analytics: Analyze and View the Customer Journey over Time and across Devices

June 26, 2015

Last month at the IBM Amplify 2015 conference, we unveiled IBM Journey Analytics. With a planned release later this year, Journey Analytics is the first solution to visualize and analyze the paths customers take, over time and across channels. We have and continue to listen to our clients, and from this collaboration we know providing a better way to form a comprehensive, common view of the customer journey over time and across devices fills a real need, leading to crucial insights. But, even with that knowledge, we were overwhelmed by the positive feedback and excitement we received at the conference.

 At Amplify, I had the privilege of co-presenting a session about Journey Analytics with the program director for the product, Michael Leavitt; product manager, Amanda Chan, and my product marketing manager colleague, Sameer Khan. Here is our presentation:

[Note: Had this Slideshare link to the presentation embedded here.]

For those of you who couldn’t join us in San Diego, I wanted to write a few blog posts to share the excitement around this upcoming solution with so much promise. Today, I’ll address why having a solution that provides insight into the complete customer journey is so important. In the coming weeks, I’ll share how customer journey analytics can lead to better experiences for your customers and boost your business results.

Understanding the complete customer journey

Today’s typical digital consumer is engaged, empowered, owns four devices and consumes 60 hours of digital content per week.¹ With the explosion of smart phone and tablet usage, an experience with your company is just a tap away. You have to be ready. And mobile and social media engagement has not only increased the volume of interactions, but the frequency as well.

With that in mind, it’s no surprise that the majority of customer interactions now happen during multi-event, multi-channel journeys.² To truly understand your customers and provide the high-quality, consistent experience they expect at every touchpoint, you need to understand how your customers interact with your brand across a potentially complex mixture of interactions, regardless of channel. 

With so much information at our fingertips, we’ve all become researchers and many of us have become critics as well. While a complex and expensive purchase, such as a car, will lead to more interactions and a longer journey, even relatively straightforward decisions will likely involve some level of research, often on multiple devices and sometimes over the course of several days.

During our Amplify breakout session, Amanda shared a personal example about planning for her father-in-law’s annual weekend visit. Going out for a nice Saturday dinner has become somewhat of a tradition for her family. She then stepped through how the seemingly simple process of choosing a restaurant for the occasion can lead to multiple mobile, tablet and desktop sessions where she uses Yelp and other websites to read reviews, bookmark options, make a reservation, look-up directions or even share pictures and write a review of their dining experience. In the past, understanding Amanda’s experience and actions across time and platforms may have looked like several independent sessions, each leading to an abandonment. However, with Journey Analytics, all of her activity would be displayed within the context of a single journey where it would become apparent her interactions were all part of planning a night out with her family.

This increased customer contact we’re experiencing today is a double-edged sword. It presents unprecedented opportunities to connect on a personal level with your customers and create a lasting, long-term dialog and relationship that builds loyalty. On the other hand, it also presents many more opportunities to disappoint.

That’s because consumers are not only more connected, they’re also more demanding. They expect a high-quality, relevant, consistent experience on every device, at every touchpoint and at any time of day or night. And, if you drop the ball just once, they now have the megaphone of social media to inform their entire network of your failings.

But, the fact remains, customer interactions rarely occur independently from each other or in channel silos. IBM Journey Analytics enables you to connect the various interactions your customers make with your brand and understand their behavior in context, taking into account where they are in the process, or journey, as well as what channels they are using along the way.

Continue on to the next part in my series where I discuss why designing superior, customer-centric experiences is critical and why journey analysis should play a key role. View the video below and visit our webpage to learn more about IBM Journey Analytics.

Sources:

(1)   Nielsen, The U.S. Digital Consumer Report

(2)   McKinsey 2013 | Customer Journey