customer analytics

To meet your customer experience (CX) goals, you first need to understand the current state of your customer journey. But gaining the level of understanding necessary is easier said than done. The customer journey is made up of countless moments—even a CX program with boundless resources wouldn’t be able to examine them all! The key is, then, to focus on the moments with the greatest impact on your customers, be they positive or negative. And that’s where customer experience analytics come in.

What Are Customer Experience Analytics?

Many of you may be familiar with the basics of CX analytics, but for those of you who could use a primer, we’ve got you! 

Customer experience analytics concern the strategic process of discovering, collecting, and analyzing customer data in order to obtain the intelligence businesses need to inform the decisions they make. 

Whether this customer data is solicited (through email or SMS surveys or in-app/online intercepts) or unsolicited (via review sites or social media), the right customer experience analytics can pick up on opportunities for improvement throughout the customer journey.

Identifying Moments of Impact with Customer Experience Analytics

There are various vendors that offer customer experience analytics (you can check out a third party analyst ranking here), but today, we are going to talk about a specific solution: Touchpoint Impact Mapping.

Touchpoint Impact Mapping is a unique analytical approach that brings the emotional state of the customer journey to life at every touchpoint. This approach is based on behavioral sciences’ “Peak-End Rule,” which states that our perception of our experience with anything—a brand, a person, a place, etc.—is largely shaped by intense positive or negative moments within that experience. 

This approach, unique to Pearl-Plaza’s Strategic Insights Team, discards traditional survey metrics, analyzing only customers’ comments for frequency and emotional intensity. This analysis highlights the “peaks” across an experience in a visual map which pinpoints areas of experience excellence that should be celebrated, as well as touchpoints that should be improved.

Not only does it show brands where to focus their efforts, but Touchpoint Impact Mapping also clarifies what about those touchpoints elicited such emotional intensity from the customer. For instance, if the onboarding process was identified as an emotional low, customer experience analytics would reveal that customers found the process confusing. To improve the experience in this area, the brand could publish an FAQ article, rewrite directions, or include additional context on the webpage.

Want to Learn More About Touchpoint Impact Mapping?

If you’re in the market for customer experience analytics that can help you focus your resources on the moments that truly matter, you can learn more about Touchpoint Impact Mapping from Pearl-Plaza’s Senior Insight Design Specialist Dan Jones in this video:

Want to see a Touchpoint Impact Map in action? Contact our team to demo our unique solution!