What makes a great customer relationship? Oddly enough, the same thing that makes a great personal relationship—care and respect. When people feel that you make an effort to know them, care about their preferences, and respect their wishes, they like you! Whether you are a person or a brand.
The difference is that in personal communication, we can ask directly, listen, and remember what people care about. When it comes to customer relationships, brands have to rely on other things: customer website activity, in-app interactions, or in-store behavior; churn rates; and surveys like CSAT and NPS.
That’s where customer experience analytics comes in. It takes all the data on customer interactions with a business and helps us understand the person behind the metrics, so that we can have a better relationship with them.
In this article, we’ll explore what customer experience analytics is, the benefits it brings, what data you can track, and how to make sense of it. We’ll also share how we at FlippingBook help companies improve their customer experience through trackable sales and marketing documents.
Key Takeaways
- Customer experience is more impactful than the number of features a product has or the variety of products your store provides. In fact, 80% of consumers tend to switch to a competitor because of poor CX.
- Customer behavior analytics uses various data types, including direct customer feedback, website and in-product behavior, psychographic data, retention, and churn.
- Customer experience is much more than your NPS score: it has the power to boost sales, reduce churn, give you a competitive edge, and open up new opportunities for product development.
What Is Customer Experience Analytics?
Put simply, customer experience analytics is the process of collecting and analyzing data on buyers interactions with the business at different touchpoints. It aims to answer questions such as:
- How smooth is the sales process?
- Is it easy to start using a service?
- Is the website easy to navigate or make a purchase on?
- How can we reduce user drop-offs?
Understanding CX data helps brands improve experience across all stages of the customer journey, boosting loyalty, reducing churn, and discovering new business growth opportunities.
What Data Does Customer Experience Analytics Study?
As we’ve stated, getting to know your customers is trickier than getting to know new people, but there are plenty of ways you can gather valuable data.
- Customer Feedback: Surveys (like NPS and CSAT), reviews, support tickets, chatbot performance, and social media comments.
- Engagement Metrics: Browsing history, time spent on pages, email open rates.
- Retention & Churn Data: How long customers stay, repeat purchases, and why they leave.
- Purchase Behavior: What products/services customers buy, when, how often, and in what combinations.
- Demographic & Psychographic Data: Age, location, values and attitudes, and other preferences that influence customer decisions.
When carefully collected and studied, this data can uncover hidden patterns in customer behavior, allowing you to deliver a more satisfying experience to your audience.
Why Is Customer Experience Analytics Important?
Because just having a perfect product isn’t enough to turn visitors into fans. When people find the website confusing, customer support slow and inefficient, or brand messaging inconsistent, they won’t buy from the company even if the product does exactly what they need. According to Zippia, 89% of consumers have switched to competitors because of a poor customer experience.
And vice versa: when the customer experience is great, the product may be just okay—and still loved and sought after.
The best example of this is the iPhone. Is it the most powerful, customizable, or affordable product on the market? Not at all. Not at all.
Source: Apple.com
And yet, thanks to an intuitive user interface, minimal learning curve, sleek design, quick support, and consistent brand messaging, people love it! All these little things turn a phone into an experience—a frictionless, enjoyable journey that millions of people are happy to go on.
Would you like your product or service to get a cult following, too? Then you need to invest in customer experience analytics.
However, CX analytics provides benefits besides helping to build a loyal customer base.
Lower Customer Churn
Happy customers = loyal customers. But to make your buyers happy, first, you need to understand what makes them unhappy.
Here’s an example. In 2020, with an instant shift to remote work and cloud-based solutions, Fivetran, an automated data integration company, grew at record speed. Good news, no doubt, but this growth put Fivetran’s customer support team in a tight spot, and as a result, customer retention became a real issue.
Thanks to customer experience analytics, Fivetran quickly identified the main pain points, reorganized the customer support team, and reduced churn by 25% while improving its NPS and CSAT.
Innovation and Development Opportunities
No matter how amazing your product designers are, hearing what your customers need directly from them is a fantastic way to pack even more value into your product.
The feedback may come in the form of feature requests but also via complaints, support tickets, pre-sale discussions, or NPS surveys. That’s why a holistic approach to collecting and analyzing data is important.
Experience Personalization
Behavioral data gives you a clearer picture of your customers’ purchase patterns and needs. Combined with psychographic data, it tells you who your buyers are, so you can better segment them and tailor product offerings based on their preferences. And—who knows?—you might discover a new audience or use case, expanding your reach and increasing the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
Increased Bottom Line
Happy customers spend more and are willing to pay a premium for great experiences, as proven by Apple and Starbucks. So, even within your existing customer base, you can find upselling opportunities and boost conversion rates.
Competitive Edge
Gone are the days when USPs (unique selling points) alone guaranteed lifelong brand relationships. Lowering your prices is probably not the best idea either—especially in this economic climate. So, if you want to win over clients, you need to provide the best customer experience and constantly tweak and improve it to stay ahead of your competitors.
Need proof? Gartner has found that 80% of organizations expect to compete mainly based on CX.
Stronger Alignment Across Teams
Having strong CX data ensures that product, marketing, and sales teams are on the same page, helping them make smarter decisions faster. Moreover, these decisions can drive real improvements in customer experience and sales. This, in turn, boosts employee morale and productivity. Isn’t that great?
How To Perform Customer Experience Analysis?
To make the most of your customer data analytics, you need to follow these steps:
1. Define your CX goals
Making customers happier than they are at the moment is a noble cause, but you’ll get better results if you focus your efforts on one or two specific objectives. For example, you can aim to reduce customer churn or improve lead conversion.
2. Map the customer journey
A customer journey map is a visual representation of every step a customer takes when interacting with your brand, from discovering your product to buying it to using it. Customer journey analytics will help you see where customers experience frustration or delight and pinpoint friction points. To create a well-thought-out map, you’ll need to identify:
- Key touchpoints (e.g., website visit, product trial, customer support, purchase),
- Drop-off points where customers abandon their journey.
3. Identify key CX metrics and KPIs
Once you have defined your objectives and looked at possible friction points, it’s important to decide what metrics you will track to measure success. In the realm of customer behavior analytics, the usual indicators are:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measures customer loyalty based on the likelihood of recommending your brand.
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Shows overall satisfaction with a product or service.
- Customer Effort Score (CES): Assesses how easy or difficult it is for customers to interact with your brand.
- Churn Rate: Percentage of customers who stop using your service over time.
- Retention Rate: Percentage of customers who continue using your service.
Having a specific KPI in mind will help you understand how your actions influence customer experience and whether you are moving in the right direction.
4. Collect customer data
It’s finally time to collect a data corpus for further analysis. To select the data you’ll need, look at the touchpoints where you want to optimize your customer experience.
For example, if you get amazing product feedback but churn remains high, looking at support or sales interactions is a good idea. However, if people drop off a month after they’ve signed up, you might want to look at the product onboarding process instead.
5. Analyze the CX data
Now, for the hard part: you need to actually comb through the data you’ve gathered, uncover patterns, make predictions, and come up with strategies for improving the customer experience.
On top of statistical methods, you can use text analysis tools like Lexalytics and IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding or AI-driven sentiment analysis tools like Brandwatch or Sprinklr to evaluate customer feedback and identify patterns and trends.
6. Act on your customer experience analysis
A mistake many companies make is gathering important information and then not taking any action. If you want things to change, the result of your analysis should come in the form of an actionable strategy. Depending on your goals and the insights you uncover, here are some options you may consider:
- Refine customer support: Shorten response time and enhance chatbot/human agent effectiveness.
- Personalize interactions: Tailor recommendations, emails, and offers based on your customers’ preferences.
- Enhance product design: Streamline the in-app experience and improve the onboarding process.
- Optimize marketing strategies: Adjust messaging based on your customers’ psychographic data to better match the brand image to clients’ expectations.
7. Monitor and iterate
Customer experience is an ongoing process. To stay on top of it, you need to do regular check-ups with your customers, whether via NPS surveys or through sentiment tools. Only then will you be able to evolve your product and keep your customers loyal to your brand.
How FlippingBook Helps Improve Customer Experience Through Interactive Documents
Documents—whether marketing brochures, sales presentations, or training guides—are an important part of the customer experience. Their accessibility, visual appeal, and ease of navigation directly impact customer engagement with your content.
Sadly, with the global shift to online documentation, we ditched glossy, high-quality print materials in favor of plain, clunky PDFs. As a result, many promotional and educational materials lost their engagement power.
We at FlippingBook strive to solve this issue by transforming PDFs into interactive digital documents via an intuitive online platform. With FlippingBook, any PDF brochure or catalog can look like this:
Turning your PDF into a flipbook like this one lets you share it as a link instead of an email attachment, so your clients can access it anywhere, anytime.
Plus, you can enhance your brochures, ebooks, and reports with interactive elements—videos, pop-up images, built-in surveys, and GIFs. This variety of content boosts your document’s engagement potential, so your clients are more likely to stay in your document until the end.
💡 Want to deliver the best experience with your documents?
Try FlippingBook →Bonus Tip: More Tools for Expert Customer Experience Analytics
Don’t know where to start with customer experience analysis? Here are 3 essential tools that will help you gather and make sense of your data.
#1 Qualtrics XM
This platform is great for tracking customer feedback across multiple touchpoints. It uses AI and Natural Language Processing to analyze data and turn it into insights, which is invaluable if you are just starting your CX journey.
- Collects and analyzes NPS, CSAT, and CES scores.
- Uses AI-powered sentiment analysis on feedback.
- Helps businesses predict churn and improve CX.
#2 Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
Google Analytics 4 is by no means easy to master, but it’s a powerful, reliable tool that will tell you everything you need to know once you get the hang of it. Plus, it’s the best option for tracking your website traffic and mapping a clear customer journey.
- Tracks user behavior, session duration, and conversion paths.
- Provides actionable insights into the customer journey and pain points.
- Integrates with other CX tools for deeper analysis.
#3 Medallia
Medallia works by collecting customer feedback from multiple sources such as surveys, social media, emails, and support interactions. It then uses AI-powered sentiment analysis and predictive analytics to identify trends, detect issues, and measure customer satisfaction in real time. Businesses can use these insights to take immediate action, improve customer experiences, and reduce churn.
- Gathers feedback from multiple channels.
- Detects trends and issues via predictive analytics.
Final Thoughts
We hope our article has shed some light on how customer experience analytics can help you grow your business, win over clients, gain a competitive advantage, and reduce churn.
CX analytics is as challenging as it is rewarding. You’ll need the right skills, the right tools, and a deep understanding of customer behavior to make it work. But once you see the first results—in the form of improved customer feedback and sales growth—all your efforts will pay off.