“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 that you should take when analyzing the customer experience – so read on if you want to learn more!
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 of two kinds:
- Direct contact: Interactions initiated by your brand, and includes one-on-one contact with customers. For eg., customer outreach, product demos, email exchanges or service calls.
- Indirect contact: Interactions that needn’t be initiated by your brand – but they do shape a customer’s impression of your business. For eg., brand mentions on social media, word-of-mouth or Google reviews,
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 really 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
Customer experience analysis: A 5-step breakdown
#1. Identify key stakeholders and customer touchpoints
When running a business, it’s important to identify key stakeholders for two reasons:
- To ensure proper communication between everyone who has an interest in the business’s success.
- Identifying stakeholders also helps to create accountability. It ensures that there are processes in place which 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 figure out which channels 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 – provides 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 conversations 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.
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#3. Analyze the data to identify potential areas of improvement
Let’s break it down:
- Create a benchmark of what you want your ideal CX to look like.
- Measure the data against this benchmark.
- Look for recurring patterns because they could indicate areas that need to be improved.
- 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.
- Qualitative responses are hard to analyze. But you can pull out dominant themes and sentiments with wordcloud analysis.
Data analysis is a complex process. But 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 are excelling, 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 just 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.
In order 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 actively manage customer relationships.
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 for planning this process, and helps your teams see their blood, sweat and efforts reflected in solid numbers.
