So you’ve got lots of data about your customers. Now what? One potentially impactful application emerging for big data is customer journey analytics, or just “journey analytics,” as Forrester likes to call it.
Forrester analysts Tina Moffett and Joana van den Brink-Quintanilha are generally credited with coining the term “journey analytics” in late 2014 or 2015. As an offshoot of customer journey mapping, journey analytics “helps companies combine quantitative and qualitative data to optimize customer interactions and predict future behaviors,” they write.
McKinsey and Company has also jumped into the journey analytics fray. “Journey Analytics combines big data technology, advanced analytics, and functional expertise to help companies perfect their customer journeys,” the company says on its website.
Today, journey analytics has blossomed into its own product category, with Forrester recognizing no fewer than 42 vendors creating tools that tackle various parts of the problem, including data fusion, journey design, journey testing and optimization, and journey automation.
Gartner has also jumped into the journey analytics game. In his “Customer Journey Analytics: A Manifesto,” Gartner analyst Martin Kihn calls for “a new approach to measuring and improving the way we talk to our people” (i.e. customers).
“It’s time to assemble an analytical system that recognizes the reality of digital life,” Kihn writes. “One that combines the best of customer identity resolution, channel and media measurement, static and time-series methods, and text analytics–time to create a single version of the truth at the individual level, across marketing and media, to estimate the impact of our efforts on the things we are trying to do.”
As the CEO of UserMind, which works the journey orchestration end of the spectrum, Michel Feaster understands how important it is that customers have a good user experience in the new digital age.
“Customer data is the future. It’s going to be the most important thing for businesses to own and understand,” she tells Datanami. “Companies that are great at customer experience are going to win and are going to take business away from companies that are bad at customer experience.”
That sounds like a simple explanation. Who doesn’t want to offer an awesome experience to their customers, whether they’re signing up for a new account from a smart phone, calling up to change a beneficiary on a 401(k) plan, or going online to submit a claim to their insurance company for a stolen car?
The paths we take to interacting with these systems of engagement may seem unique to us, as consumers who are requesting a product or a service.
