Digital experience analytics is the secret sauce in customer experience
Customer experience is at the top of executives’ minds, especially in the era of Covid-19. Loyalty is as good as customers’ experience of your brand, and customers reward those that meet and exceed their needs. Unfamiliar to many, digital experience analytics, is a critical solution area to ensure that when customers engage with your brand digitally all systems support the experience you intend to deliver. Gartner explains how digital experience analytics delivers this in recent research.
Digital is a critical part of CX
We know that customer experience (CX) is critical. We know that it leads the agenda of CEOs as they plan technology investments. According to the 2020 Gartner Customer Experience Innovation survey, “a total of 91% of organizations told us that CX was one of, or the primary goal of their digital business transformation efforts”1. What is new is the onset of pandemic planning, and its immediate acceleration of the pace of digital transformation. Suddenly, larger swaths of everyone’s customer base are relying on a fully digital experience. The significance of a positive or negative experience on web and mobile has grown exponentially.
A total of 32% of survey respondents say that improving the CX is a primary goal of their digital transformation program, 59% say that CX improvement is among other goals, 8% say it is not a goal but its program has been modified as a result and 1% say it is not a goal/no impact on their CX program.1
Customers have high expectations and fickle opinions. Regardless of the strength of the product and services a company offers, the digital experience will leave an overriding impression. Weak solutions could result in the loss of customer after customer after customer. Smart leaders know this. In the digital environment, your solution is interacting with more customers more often, and can result in more losses than ever. The lesson: Digital engagement must be flawless.
The digital experience analytics tech landscape according to Gartner
In Gartner’s Market Guide for Web, Product and Digital Experience Analytics2, published May 27, 2020, authors Melissa Davis, Jason Wong, and Brent Stewart explain how companies can use technology to improve the effectiveness of their digital strategies. It defines three spaces: web analytics, product analytics, and digital experience analytics. Each of these areas plays an important role in the customer’s digital experience.
“Web analytics tools are specialized analytic applications used to understand and improve the CX, visitor acquisition, and actions taken across web and mobile channels,” and “the core processes of web analytics involve collecting, monitoring and analyzing customers’ behavior on desktops, mobile sites and mobile apps.”
“Product analytics tools provide insights to improve the UX of primarily mobile apps, prioritize feature enhancement, measure adoption and track licensing compliance.”
“Digital experience analytics tools often complement web analytics tools and diagnostic insights for improving the digital CX.”
The authors go on to recommend “data and analytics leaders modernizing analytics, business intelligence (BI) and data science solutions should: diagnose issues and improve the digital CX by complementing traditional web analytics with a digital experience analytics tool. This will deliver diagnostic insights into visitor activity.”
In the Hype Cycle for Customer Experience Analytics 20203, published July 13, Gartner explores the position of specific technologies and where they fit on the phases of the Hype Cycle.
In the digital experience analytics section of the report, analyst Melissa Davis advises data and analytics leaders to:
“Evaluate digital experience analytics tools as part of an overall digital analytics strategy for tracking, measuring and improving the customer experience across the entire customer journey, across devices and across interactions with brands. The growth of digital strategies and need for strengthened digital commerce sites increases the need for an optimized digital customer experience.”
Digital experience analytics with Glassbox
Digital experience analytics tools are often confused with web analytics. But these tools go beyond understanding the number of page views, unique visits and conversion rates. They go beyond the technical issues identified by product analytics. Digital experience analytics tools not only tell what customers did, but details why they did it. It gets to the root of customer perceptions.
Glassbox provides digital experience analytics that help diagnose and improve the effectiveness of a website or mobile application through deep, AI-powered analysis. Glassbox solutions capture, visualize, and analyze the specific aspects of the digital experience that work or don’t work.
You’ll find lots of answers to questions like:
- Which design elements are attracting clicks?
- How many rows of products do visitors scroll down to see?
- How do customers interact with banners, forms, or CTAs?
- When and why do they abandon a transaction?
Glassbox shows companies what needs to improve, what improvements are the highest priority, and what is the real and measurable impact of each improvement. With that knowledge, you can improve the customer experience across the entire digital experience. By eliminating points of frustration, struggle, and abandonment, customers will judge a company by the products and services they offer—not the digital impediments they encountered.
Digital experience analytics provides the secret sauce needed to give customers an experience that will differentiate your company and your brand. It’s a powerful opportunity to delight customers and ensure your business thrives no matter the macro environment.
1Gartner, “Survey Analysis: Customer Experience Maturity and Investment Priorities, 2020,” Ed Thompson, Varun Agarwal, Melissa Davis, July 28, 2020
2Gartner, “Market Guide for Web, Product and Digital Experience Analytics,” Melissa Davis, Jason Wong, Brent Stewart, May 27, 2020
3 Gartner, “Hype Cycle for Customer Experience Analytics, 2020,” David Norrie, Gareth Herschel, Melissa Davis, July 31, 2020
