How to Leverage Customer Experience Analytics

When you work with customer insights, you have a lot of data available from various sources: Starting from demographic data, how they behave on your website, feedback they shared on social media and, of course, survey data like Net Promoter scores (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSat), etc. It can feel overwhelming to deal with all of that.  

Even worse, this information is often siloed between different departments, requiring a lot of manual work to go through the data points, and even then, the results may not be accurate due to human error. But when done right, customer experience analytics (CXA) brings together all of these data points to identify patterns and to understand:  

• What do your customers think about your company, your services and products?  

• What issues do they experience throughout the customer journey?  

• What leads to customer churn, and how can you increase customer retention?  

With the introduction of AI to customer experience analytics tools, it’s now possible to analyse data in real-time. You can easily identify issues and address them before they escalate.

In this blog post, you will learn what customer experience analytics are and how you can leverage the data to grow your business.  

What is customer experience analytics?  

Customer experience analytics (CXA) is the process of collecting and analyzing customer data. Companies receive both direct and indirect feedback from their customers. Direct feedback includes, e.g. customer responses on social media, public reviews or your NPS. Indirect feedback are indirect signs of how your customers feel about you, such as average spending, customer lifetime value or the number of support tickets.  

The goal of customer experience analytics is to understand your customers: their behaviour, their needs and their pain points. Customer experience analytics can help you make data-driven decisions, improve customer satisfaction, and increase customer retention. The ultimate goal is that your customers have a personalised and smooth customer experience.   

Why should you use customer experience analytics?  

Most companies know that customer experience is one of the most important, if not the most important deciding factor for their customers: In a study by Gartner, over 80% of organisations expected to compete mainly based on CX.  

But there is an even more obvious answer to why you want to spend time on customer experience analytics: Because it will increase your profits. Customer-centric brands report profits that are 60 percent higher than those that fail to focus on CX. Customer experience analytics are key in understanding your customers and improving customer experience with a data-driven approach.  

Explore Ellevio’s success story → Ellevio Customer Case

How to leverage customer experience analytics  

Now that we’re clear on the what and why, let’s dig deeper into how you can use customer experience analytics in your company.  

Identify trends and patterns to improve the customer journey  

When you use a customer experience analytics tool, it is easy to identify behaviours that drive positive sentiment. What makes your customers happy? What do they appreciate? What do they want to see more of? When you understand the answers to these questions, you can deliver a better customer experience.  

Even small changes in the customer journey can significantly boost customer satisfaction. For example, if analytics shows your enterprise customers are particularly sensitive to being passed around between multiple support agents, you can update your ticket routing so that inbound tickets from that segment are automatically escalated to a tier 2 agent.   

If the analytics show that your customers tend to struggle with a certain tool in your software, you can have a quick pop-up that explains how the tool works before they have to reach out and ask about it.  

Create better services and products  

If you want to deliver better products and services, you want to understand how your customers behave and what they like or dislike. For example, suppose your customer experience tool highlights that many customers are searching for “red sneakers”, but you currently do not have that color available. In that case, you can prioritise adding that colour to production.  

Similarly, if there is an increase in customer tickets requesting a certain feature, you can push it forward in the product map. Remember to work closely with product management on these data sets, so they can see that your recommendations are data-driven.  

Increase customer retention rates  

Retaining customers can significantly increase your revenue: A study by Harvard Business School reported that increasing customer retention rates by 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95%. 

If you want to avoid customer churning, you have to understand the reasons that would make them leave. You don’t want to look at the data when they have already stopped purchasing from your business. With customer experience analytics, you can see trends that indicate that customers are unhappy and can figure out the issues behind it before they leave.  

Personalise experiences for your customers  

Your customers expect a personalised experience that makes them feel like you know them and you look out for their needs. Analytics can help create a sense of personalization. It can happen through small things, like automatically routing tickets based on their category, ensuring the right expert is always there to help.

You can also create custom marketing messages by segment that speak directly to the user and reference the things your analytics show they care about most. You can use product usage data to create tailored messages that help users be more effective at their work.  

These personalised messages and efforts make users feel more valued than generic content. This way, you can build trust and show that you understand what your customers want.  

Predict patterns and identify segments 

Data analytics are all about patterns. Most marketers and CX experts have built segments based on demographic data to improve the experience for each user and offer tailored messaging. But when you go through your customer data, you can also find patterns of behaviour that indicate a customer segment.  

For example, certain customers may use your service seasonally. You can think about how you can upsell them in between seasons or make sure to remind them of your services when the season comes, when they last used your product.  

You might be missing out on these insights if you only base segments on demographics or assumed audience behaviors. 

Increase the customer lifetime value  

One of the easiest ways to increase revenue is by growing your customer lifetime value. Customers who have already bought from you are much more likely to buy again. A great chance to upsell.  

You can search the data on which customers have purchased prior and which items would fit their customer profile. For example, customers who have bought oven mittens might also be interested in pans or bowls.  

Increasing customer lifetime value is not just about upselling and repurchasing. You also want your customers to get excellent customer service. Customers are 2.4 times more likely to stick with a brand when their problems are solved quickly. With the support of real-time CX analytics, you can be instantly alerted when clients are unhappy or when there is an increase in complaints and offer them support as soon as possible.  

How can you implement customer experience analytics?  

When you first start working with customer experience analytics, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data, and it’s absolutely worth uncovering. We collected a few best practices to make it easier for you to analyse data and turn them into actionable insights.  

1. Decide on your goals and what you want to measure  

Before you start even looking at data, you want to define clearly which key objectives you want to achieve. Some examples of common goals are:  

• Improve customer lifetime value  

• Reduce customer churn  

• Increase Customer Satisfaction  

Once you are clear on your objectives, you have to identify how you will measure them and what the KPIs are. When it comes to customer satisfaction, you may want to measure CSAT or Net Promoter Score (NPS). If your goal is to increase customer lifetime value, you will want to regularly check your CLV.  

Make sure that these goals are also aligned with your overall business objectives, especially if you have yearly or quarterly goals as a company. This way, you can also use the data to showcase how your department is supporting these larger business objectives.  

2. Collect data from various sources  

Customer data can come from a lot of channels. There are comments on social media, answers to surveys or chats with your customer service agents. You want to collect as much data as possible on your customers to get a more in-depth overview of your customer sentiment. Instead of having siloed insights per department and platform, you have a holistic overview of how your customers feel.  

Customer experience analytics tools like Netigate make it easy to bring together all data in one platform and make it easy to analyse it in one place.  

3. Use AI-powered analytics and real-time processing  

Data analysis used to be complex, and you had to be a data expert or coder to find the answers. But tools like Netigate offer AI-supported analytics. You can just ask the AI questions about your customer data, and it will go through data points to find answers.  

For example, if your customers appear to be unhappy with a product, you can ask the AI what most users are complaining about when it comes to the product. Equipped with that information, you can then improve the product accordingly.  

Watch the webinar on how you can use the voice of your customers to improve their experience

4. Turn your data-driven insights into actions  

Data is only as good as the insights we take from it. Once you have gained insights, it’s time to take action. Collaboration between different teams will come into play here. With tools like Netigate, you can easily just tag people and assign tasks to them. Share specific steps on how to rectify an issue that can help another department understand the problem.  

Customer experience analytics also allows you to show other departments or the C-level why you want to make certain decisions to improve CX. You have the data to showcase what can be improved and how.  

Some common actions you might want to take after going through your customer experience analytics are:  

• Automate customer flows and create personalised email marketing campaigns. 

• Train your customer service agents with the knowledge gained from analytics.  

• Develop products and features according to customer feedback & wishes.  

5. Repeat the process and plan for the future  

Customer experience analytics is not something you look at once and have your answer. Your customers’ needs and behavior change over time, so analyzing the data needs to be an ongoing process.  

You should regularly review the data, gain insights and discuss them in frequent meetings with your team and other stakeholders. Modern tools like Netigate even offer predictive analytics to anticipate future customer needs to stay ahead of the competition.  

Common challenges in customer experience analytics – and how to fix them  

Data integration & data silos  

Your customer data is often scattered among different channels and platforms. While you might be using one tool for your CRM, you have another one for your surveys, and a third one for your social media analytics. When you use a centralised customer data platform, you can access all data from these different sources via integrations or APIs.  

Centralised customer data platforms also help break down silos between the departments and encourage more cross-department collaboration. Without a centralised tool, marketing looks at social media data while customer service analyses NPS or CSAT. With one centralised tool, all departments can assess how customers feel about your company, gain a holistic overview of customer sentiment and easily assign tasks to other team members.  

Privacy concerns  

Many customers are concerned about how their data is collected and used by businesses, especially in more privacy-concerned countries like Germany , which has some of the strictest data privacy laws in the world. With strict regulations like GDPR in the EU, businesses have to make sure that customer data is handled responsibly.  

For Netigate, data protection and security are our top priorities. We fully comply with the required legal standards. Our servers are located within the EU, and our survey tool is fully GDPR-compliant. 

Resource allocation & Measuring ROI  

When you work with customer experience, you have to make decisions on how you want to spend your resources and what gets prioritised. Oftentimes, you have to convince other team members how focusing on customer experience analytics actually has an effect on ROI. CX initiatives tend to have long-term benefits that are harder to quantify.  

If you followed the steps in “How you can implement customer experience analytics”, you have already identified KPIs that are meaningful to business objectives. You can use these KPIs to showcase how they are affected by keeping track of them before and after you implement CX initiatives.  

You can also think about an A/B test to measure the impact of certain actions you made based on CX analytics insights. Ultimately, you want to link your CX metrics to financial results, so that it is easier to demonstrate value to stakeholders like the C-suite or your manager.  

Start using customer experience analytics in your business

Customer experience analytics are more than just a lot of data. When used correctly, it’s a powerful tool to understand your customers, anticipate trends and enhance customer experience. CX analytics enables you to improve products and services and create personalised automations that increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

With a centralised customer experience tool like Netigate, you can get AI-powered insights, access real-time analytics, and easily assign tasks to team members. Find out how you can start by booking a demo with us!