What is Customer Experience Analysis: A Comprehensive Guide

“If you build it, they will come.” If only that quote still held true! The fact is that the customer experience around your product is as important as the product itself. 

But how can you judge the experience? You need data, and that data comes from a customer experience analysis.

When performed with great care and attention to detail, this type of analysis can help provide vital insights into what works for customers and which areas need improvement. 

This blog post will guide you through five essential steps to analyze the customer experience – so read on if you want to learn more!

• What does a customer experience analysis involve?
• A breakdown of the CX analysis process
• The key attributes of a good customer experience

What is a customer experience analysis?

Customer experience analysis is the process of collecting and analyzing customer feedback from different sources. These sources or touchpoints can be of two kinds:

1. Direct contact: Interactions initiated by your brand include one-on-one contact with customers. For e.g., customer outreach, product demos, email exchanges, or service calls.
2. Indirect contact: Interactions that needn’t be initiated by your brand – but they do shape a customer’s impression of your business. For example, brand mentions on social media, word-of-mouth or Google reviews,

Why is it important to analyze customer experience?

At its core, analyzing customer experience equips businesses to build stronger relationships and drive sustainable growth. Understanding the interactions between customers and businesses is crucial in today’s market landscape. Here’s why measuring customer experience analysis is essential:

1. Tailoring Offerings: It facilitates the alignment of products/services with customer desires.
2. Competitive Differentiation: A stellar customer experience can set a brand apart.
3. Fostering Loyalty: Positive engagements lead to repeat business and referrals.
4. Feedback Utilization: Highlights areas for improvement, driving continual refinement.
5. Revenue Enhancement: Satisfied customers often correlate with increased sales.
6. Protecting Brand Image: Good experiences minimize negative feedback, enhancing reputation.
7. Guiding Strategy: Insights from analysis steer data-informed business decisions.

The goal of customer experience analysis is to understand how your customers interact with, and experience your product or service. When done right, this will lead to:

• Better customer journeys
• Stronger customer retention
• Personalized customer experiences
• Understanding what current and potential customers want from their products and services. 
• Creation of SOPs for issues that are affecting customer satisfaction.

73% of all people see customer experience as a key factor in their purchasing decisions. – PwC, Experience is Everything

Top 5 Strategies for Effective Customer Experience Analysis 

#1. Identify key stakeholders and customer touchpoints 

When running a business, it’s important to identify key stakeholders for two reasons:

1. To ensure proper communication between everyone interested in the business’s success. 
2. Identifying stakeholders also helps to create accountability. It ensures that there are processes in place that allow the right people access to the right information. 

And customer touchpoints? They help you break down customer interactions and their performance by channel. This is much more helpful than a bird’s eye view of your CX and can help you determine which media to optimize. 

You can approach this first step with a customer journey map. In case you are starting from scratch, here are some channels you can start with:

• Onboarding new users
• Trial user feedback surveys
• Service requests and complaints
• Service and support interactions
• Chatbot interactions
• Email interactions

Related: Customer Journey Mapping – Some Helpful Tips from Jim Tincher

#2. Scrape information on customer sentiment

In the next step, gather as much data as you can. There are a variety of tools you can use depending on the specific touchpoint.

• Surveys – especially customer and product feedback surveys – help you ask targeted questions about different areas of the customer experience, from onboarding to account cancellation. They are relatively quick, simple to implement, and easy to navigate on mobile screens.
• Interviews – provide detailed information based on individual experiences. According to Jim Tincher, it’s important to involve your teams in the interview – and the overall process itself. This will help them become a lot more invested in the results.
• Behavioral analytics tools – for analyzing user interactions with your website or app.
• Social media comments. Moreover, all major social media platforms have built-in analytics tools.
• Collecting reviews from customers. Tools like SurveySparrow make it simple to collect and consolidate customer reviews. You can also use our built-in conversation tracking to manage customer responses.
• Customer metrics like NPS, CSAT, or CES. These types of data are a good way to track overall changes in your CX and can be collected through surveys.
• Most CRM tools have a feature for collecting customer feedback. If not, integrations like SurveySparrow make it easy.

Want to craft surveys that truly gauge customer experience? Dive into SurveySparrow and see the magic unfold. Ready to get started? Sign up for a free trial here.

#3. Analyze the data to identify potential areas of improvement

Let’s break it down:

1. Create a benchmark of what you want your ideal CX to look like.
2. Measure the data against this benchmark.
3. Look for recurring patterns because they could indicate areas that need to be improved. 
4. Drill down using demographic (age, gender, etc.) and psychographic (interests, hobbies, etc.) data. This helps you segment customer types and understand which type is dissatisfied with which channel.
5. Qualitative responses are hard to analyze. But you can pull out dominant themes and sentiments with wordcloud analysis.

Data analysis is a complex process. However, we have reporting features that can help you pull a mass of responses into actionable trends quickly.

#4. Develop a customer experience strategy

You can develop an overarching strategy or break it down section by section.

For example, analyzing the data created by daily operations lets your staff know where they excel, where problems exist, and the training required to fix them. 

However, take the time to study the data, and don’t rush to conclusions based on the numbers.

After all, the data indicates that a problem exists, but it may not point to a specific cause. The problem might only be at the customer’s level. Or it can be due to a bigger cause like a product issue, a policy, or the employee’s mindset.

#5. Measure your progress and adjust the strategy accordingly 

It is important to measure the progress of your customer experience analysis and adjust your strategy accordingly. This will help your brand deliver a better customer experience and stay ahead of the competition. 

To do this, you should regularly track customer feedback from all sources available. But don’t stop there – use this data like a tool to manage customer relationships actively. 

Measuring CX: Key attributes of a world-class customer experience

The diagram illustrates that good customer experience is composed of 10 key attributes:

1. Personalization: Tailoring the service or product to meet the customer’s specific needs.
2. Professionalism: Conducting business in a respectful and courteous manner.
3. Responsiveness: Quickly and effectively responding to customer inquiries or complaints.
4. Empathy: Understanding and sharing the feelings of the customer.
5. Ease of Service: Making the customer’s interaction with the business as simple and convenient as possible.
6. Patience: Taking the time to listen to the customer’s concerns and not rushing the service process.
7. Problem Solving: Effectively addressing and resolving the customer’s problems or issues.
8. Positive Attitude: Maintaining a positive and friendly demeanor during customer interactions.
9. Value: Providing a product or service that is worth what the customer is paying.
10. Accuracy: Ensuring the information provided to the customer is correct and reliable.

Wrapping Up

Customer experience analysis might sound complicated. But it’s not once you have the right tools and metrics in place. We hope this guide helps in planning this process and helps your teams see their blood, sweat, and efforts reflected in solid numbers. 

Want to know more about effective customer analysis?