Buyer’s Guide to Customer Experience Analytics

As the volume of data companies collect grows and as artificial intelligence (AI) gets better, analytics is set to become a key differentiator for customer experience management. 

Think about it. Your organization probably already collects data in many of these categories:

• Customer metadata (age, location, etc)
• Product and website usage patterns
• Survey data (Net Promoter Score, customer satisfaction, etc.)

Typically, this data lives in multiple systems and is only looked at by the teams that collect it ( and unfortunately, sometimes not even them!). Due to the sheer volume of tools used and data collected, it has become cumbersome and time-consuming—and sometimes near impossible—to generate useful insights at the pace necessary to stay ahead of the competition.

Enter Natural Language Processing (NLP).

NLP has made customer experience analytics way more accessible. Predictive modeling and real-time data analysis have created huge opportunities for companies to personalize the customer experience. Analytics was once the domain of a few experts, but today the power of analytics is available to a much wider audience. 

Let’s explore how you can use analytics to revolutionize your customer experience.

The Power of Customer Experience Analytics in CX Management

Customer experience has been seen as a differentiator in the market for years. And customer-centric companies have been using surveys to understand customer needs for even longer than that. 

Surveys are great tools because collecting Voice of Customer feedback is a vital part of understanding your customers better. But they’re only one small piece of the customer experience data puzzle.

CX Survey Sample

Your customers and prospects are constantly giving you data: Social media posts, sales calls, product usage patterns, emails, support tickets, product review pages, and so on. All of these data sources are things you can analyze to better understand your customers’ expectations and frustrations. 

It can feel like an overwhelming task, but once you’ve unlocked insights from that data it can revolutionize your business. 

The gap between those two—collecting data and understanding data—is where analytics and insights tools (this is where Lumoa comes into play).  

Unlocking insights from conversations with your customers is step one in unleashing the power of analytics to improve your customer experience. This power comes from being able to generate different types of insights by combining data in ways that manual effort simply couldn’t do.

Analyzing segments against one another 

It’s very likely you sell to more than one customer segment. A segment might be a location, company size, industry, contract value, or something else.

While individual data points are useful, combining data points across all channels and comparing the data against different segments will help you understand better ways to service each segment. You’ll be better positioned to remove friction from each segment’s use case. For instance:

• You may discover that your CSAT is way higher for enterprise customers when you respond in under an hour, but SMB customers are willing to wait longer much longer.
• Your technology segment may be willing to spend more money for additional customizations, whereas other segments aren’t interested.

In some cases, you may even discover segments that you didn’t know existed.

Receiving more precise observations

When metrics fluctuate, it’s often unclear what the root cause was. That makes it tough to know how to address those problems. 

Customer analytics gives you the ability to find the metaphorical needle in your haystack of data faster. By increasing the precision of your observations about your customers, you’re able to apply more effort on solving specific problems (versus spending time and energy on broad or poorly defined problems that are less likely to deliver an ROI).

Increasing value across the customer journey

Including more than just survey data enables you to spot problems across the entire customer journey. With a modern CX analytic tool, you can answer questions like:

• When do potential customers leave your website? 
• When do errors occur in product use? 
• Is your onboarding program setting clients up for success?  

An analytics tool enables you to find the pain points across all of your customer touchpoints, both pre- and post-sale. Once you’ve clearly defined the pain points, you can get super strategic about how you solve for them. 

In summary, analytics unlocks all kinds of abilities that make it far easier for you to iteratively improve your customer experience across the board.

A sample of Hotjar’s exit survey

Revolutionize customer experience

But exactly how are these analytics-driven capabilities revolutionizing customer experience? 

In short, they create an environment where you are able to holistically construct a seamless and holistic experience for your customers, from end-to-end. 

They make it easier for you to deliver a consistent delight.

Driving change from Voice of Customer feedback is a game changer in customer experience management. These powers enable remarkable changes to your customer experience, including:

• Pattern prediction
• Personalization
• Service customization
• Issue remediation and prevention

Pattern prediction

When it comes to serving customers, predicting when things are likely to need action leads to a smoother service delivery. With precise observations across specific segments of customers, analytics helps you recognize patterns and get better at predicting issues. 

For example, recognizing that a specific customer’s sentiment towards your brand is declining can be a predictor of future churn. Picking up on this signal early enables your team to take action to mitigate that churn before it happens. 

Analytics can combine data points from different sources in real-time. For instance, take the volume and sentiment of their support tickets, skipping their most recent business review, and recognizing a drop in product usage. On their own each of these factors is easy to miss or explain away, but taken together they’re a fairly strong sign that the relationship with this customer is unhealthy or at-risk. 

In situations like these, analytics is the red flag that lets you know you need to take action if you want to keep delivering value and retain your customer. 

Lumoa’s Topic impacts and Trending insights showing a drill down on what’s causing negative feedback regarding Updates

Personalization

Your customers want a personalized experience. They want to feel as if you know them and are catering to their needs. 

Analytics can help create this feeling 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. Or you can 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 helping users be more effective at their work. 

Personalizing the message at the user level adds more value than a generic knowledge article or irrelevant marketing content. These personalized touches build trust and confidence that you understand your customers’ needs and business objectives.

Service customization

What if your products and services guided your customers at every step? 

Analytics help create that experience by identifying the behaviors that lead to a positive sentiment. Learning how your customers behave and what they like (or dislike) helps you deliver products and services which they love. 

Simple product changes—like suggesting more useful settings based on the type of customer or tool tips that remind customers of things that can help them achieve their goals faster—can have a big impact on your customer satisfaction. 

Analytics can also help you to customize workflows. 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 analytics shows your healthcare customers find more value from key features, you can adjust your onboarding process to highlight the things they’re likely to use most. 

While some of these changes may seem minor, having the customer knowledge to tweak products and processes creates a far more frictionless experience.

Issue remediation and prevention

When something does go wrong, analytics enable you to create better solutions. 

For example:

• Which help center articles are not working?
• What use cases need to be automated?
• Where can products be changed or in-product guidance be added?  

All of these can be answered through effective customer analytics. When an issue occurs and you can accurately drill down to discover the root source of the problem, you’ll be better positioned to both fix the issue and prevent similar issues in the future. 

Leverage analytics to create the best customer experience

The advancements in text analytics and NLP technology have made it possible for CX teams across the world to drastically improve their understanding of their customers.

Customer experience has been considered a differentiator for years—but it’s been hard to execute on CX improvement opportunities because of siloed and unstructured data. Thankfully, these days are behind us! 

Modern feedback analytics tools—like Lumoa—mean you’re no longer blocked by the amount of data or tools used across your organization. It’s now easy to integrate tools and understand what your end-to-end customer journey looks like. 

Learn more about how you can unlock insights from your customer conversations in this on-demand webinar.