What is the most important factor in growing revenue and improving customer retention? The customer experience is certainly a priority. Although you may have the best products, excellent margins and persuasive marketing, the experience that your customers have could make or break current and future sales. The faster you can gather and analyze customer insights, the better experience you can provide for them. Real-time customer experience analytics go beyond mind-numbing surveys - they help you identify their pain points and improve their experience immediately.

What Is the Customer Experience?

The customer experience includes every interaction that a customer has with a business. It doesn’t matter how brief the relationship is or whether the interaction resulted in a business outcome.

Some examples of when customer experience is important:

• Calling into a customer service center and dealing with automated menus, routing, and client services personnel
• Viewing an ad on a social media timeline, including any calls to action or comments associated with the ad
• Paying a bill using an automated system
• Navigating the website efficiently, finding what you want and going through the sales and conversion process
• Managing returns
• Finding what you need in a store

It’s essential for businesses to consider all stages of the customer journey. What do potential customers see before they work with you? How do they feel about the sales experience? Are they happy with the quality of your product or service? Does the company’s post-purchase customer service offer additional benefits?

The customer experience is a bit different than customer service. Customer service is generally what the business offers when the client experiences problems. The customer experience is the combination of everything that the customer has had to go through to work with your company.

Why Are Real-Time Customer Analytics Important?

More than 50% of customers are loyal to specific brands even if buying from them means going out of their way. A strong customer experience can help you meet the following goals:

• Customer retention
• Customer loyalty
• Customer lifetime value
  

To stand out in the marketplace, the customer experience that you offer must be stellar. The customer has the power. They can do their research, read reviews and check out your offerings from the comfort of their home or smartphone. If they’re not happy with what they see, they can easily move on and find plenty of your competitors with similar offerings.

Tracking the Customer Experience: Then and Now

A decade ago, the customer experience analytics landscape looked very different. Smartphone use was still in its infancy. The customer experience centered on website performance. It often involved piecing together bits of information and getting feedback from surveys. The data was limited, and the processing time was too long.

A great deal of tech innovation has occurred since then, however. Analytics tools have become more comprehensive and more automated. You can use these tools to track your customer’s journey through all customer touchpoints. What items capture their attention? How do they use different channels? What is tripping them up? What combination of channels do customers use to most effectively achieve their outcome? What prevents them from doing so?

Real-Time Customer Experience Statistics and Benefits

Being able to track metrics in real time helps companies orchestrate their business strategy instead of simply responding to problems. Some specific benefits of using real-time customer analytics include:

• Capturing actual instead of perceived data – Surveys aren’t the most sophisticated data collection tools. Customers may feel apathetic while filling out a survey, preventing them from giving you accurate or comprehensive details. A customer may not report that they had trouble finding the sizing information for the clothes that they were shopping for. Real-time analytics let you see that they did hit a snag in the process, however.
• Instantly help customers – If you see that a client is experiencing an issue, you can often remedy it in real-time. A chat box can open up to offer assistance. You can route the individual to the proper customer service channels if you know where they are in their journey.
• Personalize the sale – Real-time analytics allow you to adjust your marketing and sales strategy instantly. Depending on the data that you receive, you might offer an upsell or a discount.
• Stay on top of trends – Marketing and sales trends in your industry may be tempting to follow. By using real-time customer analytics, you can better gauge whether your newest strategies are working.

Should You Invest in a Real-Time Customer Experience Solution?

If you’re not using real-time analytics to shape the customer journey, you may be one-upped by your competitors. Some statistics that may make you rethink your need for real-time customer analytics technology are as follows:

• 70% of companies have increased their spending on real-time customer analytics solutions in the past 12 months.
• 44% of businesses are seeing connections between increased revenue and customer acquisition as a result of adopting real-time customer analytics measures.
• 83% of businesses believe that the ability to interpret analytics into actionable insights at the perfect time is important, but only 22% are successful at doing this.
  

The consensus is that real-time customer analytics are important. Many businesses are putting time, money and effort into refining their customer experience using real-time data.

Real-time analytics doesn’t replace historical data. You need both; they work together to give you a complete sense of the customer’s journey with your company.

Also, you must be able to capture analytics across all of your customer-facing channels. Don’t limit yourself to capturing website data and ignoring the rest of your clients’ experiences.

Joulica offers analytics across multiple platforms. Moreover, Joulica technology transforms the data into useful insights that you can implement in your workflows. Now you can do more than track, measure and monitor the customer experience. You can take straightforward action, choreographing the client journey to optimize engagement, nurture relationships, predict problems and develop effective solutions for growth.