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Question:

What’s the difference between customer journey mapping and customer journey analytics?

Answer:

Customer journey mapping provides enterprises with a visual representation of the touchpoints that prospects or customers traverse when interacting with their organization, from the first touch through the last. While customer journey mapping provides valuable insight into the channels and activities experienced by customers, it is one-dimensional, capturing and presenting a “snapshot” regarding a single point in time. Customer journey analytics (CJA) solutions, which frequently include journey mapping as a capability, take it a step further.

Feature-rich CJA applications help enterprises optimize customer journeys by identifying where and why organizations are making it difficult for customers to conduct business, so they can fix the problems. CJA solutions include big-data capabilities that capture, measure, analyze and evaluate the quality and outcome of the customer (or prospect) experience for all customer-facing self-service and agent-assisted interactions, channels and activities. This includes branch/retail, back-office, website, social media, contact center (interactive voice response (IVR), intelligent virtual agent (IVA), web self-service, live agent, phone, email, chat, short message service (SMS), video, etc.) activities, as well as all actions initiated by a customer or an employee on the customer’s behalf.

CJA solutions rapidly collect and mine vast volumes of structured and unstructured data from all customer-facing applications, and search for patterns, trends and correlation to uncover what enterprise managers do not even know to look for. CJA applications help to quantify the significance and impact of issues, and deliver actionable output. CJA solutions can monitor and track customer activities to identify service barriers, company failures, and the impact of company activities (marketing solicitations, outbound activities, self-service and agent-assisted interactions, fulfillment, back-office activities, etc.) on customer behavior. Customer journey analytics solutions can identify when customers take certain actions, and alert an organization about changes in the customer profile, preferences or behavior as a result of an event. This can help companies build effective strategies that engage customers cost effectively throughout their entire lifecycle.