Customer Experience Analysis: Definition, Strategies, & Tools [2023]

In today's hyper-competitive business landscape, the quality of the customer experience can significantly impact a company's bottom line. According to the Harvard Business Review, customers who have the best customer experience spend 140% more than those who endure the worst experiences. This stark difference shows the importance of conducting a thorough customer experience analysis to understand, measure, and enhance customer interactions at every touchpoint. 

What exactly is customer experience analysis and how does it work? This article will review some of the best practices for analyzing your customers’ interactions with your organization and the best tools to help you provide a frictionless customer experience. 

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What is Customer Experience Analysis?

Customer experience analysis is a comprehensive process aimed at evaluating and understanding the interactions between customers and a company's products or services. It involves analyzing various touchpoints, from the initial contact with the brand to the final purchase, and even post-purchase interactions. Touchpoints can include direct contact with your customer service agents or indirect contact with your reputation on social media or word-of-mouth reviews. 

Studying this data enables businesses to gain insights into the quality of customer experience and implement changes that can improve their entire journey.  

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Benefits of Performing Customer Experience Analysis

Here are some key benefits of conducting a thorough customer experience analysis. 

Measuring the Success of Product or Service

Customer experience metrics like  First Contact Resolution (FCR) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) have previously been measured using reactive methods like customer surveys and feedback which only tell you how the customers feel after their experience. However, these methods do not provide the insights needed to link the metrics to the root cause of customer issues so that businesses can identify what to optimize and coach agents on. 

Trying to manually analyze and find correlations between these metrics could take months or years. Fortunately, modern customer experience analysis tools can automatically analyze multiple metrics together in real time. This allows businesses to make targeted improvements on specific metrics and proactively eliminate customer experience issues before they occur.

Understanding the Root Cause of Customer Issues

Delving into customer interactions and identifying patterns of dissatisfaction or complaints enables businesses to pinpoint the underlying factors that contribute to negative experiences. When using the right tools, customer experience analysis can uncover what these problems are costing the business and how solving them can generate more revenue. 

To illustrate the importance of understanding the root cause, let’s imagine an organization uses speech analytics and finds that 34% of customer interactions relate to billing. However, the tool doesn't explain the specific reasons for these billing inquiries. Does it involve bill amounts, online payment glitches, or address changes? 

Understanding the context behind this billing issue is crucial for addressing current concerns and preventing others in the future. Operative Intelligence was developed for this reason. Rather than broadly categorizing issues as "billing," our platform breaks down the percentage and volume of billing-related inquiries based on customers' own words and root cause reasons for contact.

For instance, by extracting insights from existing customer data, Operative Intelligence can deduce if 80% of billing inquiries stem from difficulties changing billing addresses online. This proactive step reduces both the time wasted guessing the problem, and the customer contacts and effort needed for interactions.

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How to Conduct Customer Experience Analysis

Conducting customer experience analysis involves using strategic techniques and analytics tools to collect and evaluate data on customer interactions with products and services. Here are some of the ways to achieve this:

     1. Breakdown Your CX Into Specific Touchpoints

A customer touchpoint is any interaction between customers and your business, spanning areas like your website, social media, customer service, and in-person encounters. Identifying these touchpoints requires understanding the customer journey. 

For instance, in online retail, touchpoints could include:

1. Website visit
2. Product search
3. Product selection
4. Checkout
5. Order confirmation
6. Shipping updates
7. Product delivery 
8. Customer support

Each of these touchpoints provides a granular view of customer interactions, enabling you to identify pain points, make targeted enhancements, and optimize the overall customer experience. 

To further get a comprehensive grasp, it's important to invest time in mapping out every touchpoint specific to your businessl. Once identified, these touchpoints can be systematically categorized into three key phases of the buyer’s journey: pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase.

In the context of online retail, for example, pre-purchase encompasses actions like website visits, product searches, and product selections. The purchase phase focuses on the checkout and order confirmation, while post-purchase captures elements like shipping updates, product delivery, and any necessary customer support. 

     2. Gather & Analyze Customer Experience Data

Collecting relevant data is the backbone of customer experience analysis. This data can include customer feedback, surveys, online reviews, social media comments, and even data from direct customer interactions. However, relying solely on anecdotal feedback and limited samples like customer surveys can lack the objectivity needed to convince higher management. 

Statistically, surveys have a low response rate of around 4% to 12%. Hence, analyzing a few interactions doesn't offer a complete understanding of the customer experience. To drive true organizational change, customer service leaders need refutable data analyzed at scale.

Operative Intelligence analyzes 100% of inbound interactions and identifies the root cause reasons why customers contact support in their own words.  The platform uses artificial intelligence and advanced analytics to accurately capture the sentiment, intent, and emotion behind each customer interaction, providing contact centers with a wealth of actionable insights into customer needs, preferences, and pain points.

     3. Identify Root Causes of Customer Friction

Before you can solve your customers' pain points, figuring out the “why” is equally as important as uncovering the “what.” Tackling “what” your customers are contacting support about only helps you alleviate symptoms. But asking “why” provides the most powerful insight: understanding the root causes leading customers to contact your business. 

For example, customers might let you know that they have issues with your billing system. But why? Is the UI confusing? Is the app too slow? Are there bugs? Are they being billed wrong? Without a platform that can drill down into exactly why the billing system is causing issues for your customers, it’s not clear what changes to make. 

Customer experience analysis tools can help organizations detect the root cause of customer friction on the macro and micro level, from product fixes to even unclear company policies that negatively impact the customer experience. Instead of treating the symptoms (the pain points), companies can develop solutions to address the root cause of the problems so customers never experience them at all.

     4. Bonus: Prioritize Customer Experience Improvements by Volume

High-volume interactions present an opportunity to cut off inefficient processes that lead to long handle times, low first contact resolution, and low customer satisfaction scores. Therefore, prioritizing them ensures that your efforts are directed towards making the most impactful changes. 

Let’s go back to the retail customer journey example. Let’s say a lot of your customers experience difficulty at the pre-purchase stage due to a complicated checkout process. Because the problem originates from the product, all call center agents can do is apologize for the issue and try to help the customer work through it.  If the issues don’t get solved, customers will likely abandon the process and you will lose significant revenue daily. 

Operative Intelligence offers insights here by diving into customer data to uncover the numbers of affected customers, associated costs, and sentiment. The result will be an improved pre-purchase process that earns your business a reputation for being reliable, increases your revenue, and frees your agents from managing the problem. This powerful data enables service leaders to present a convincing argument for organizational change that is likely to gain the attention of decision-makers.  

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Customer Experience Analysis Tools

There are several tools on the market used to perform customer experience analysis. Here’s an overview of some of the most popular ones:

1. Operative Intelligence

Operative Intelligence is a next-gen analytics and intelligence platform for enterprise contact centers and BPOs.  Operative Intelligence automatically transforms a business’ existing contact center data into real-world, actionable insights that conduct customer experience analysis at scale. 

While other call center software concentrate on automating the quality control of the contact center, Operative Intelligence is a unique customer demand intelligence software that analyzes 100% of inbound interactions and uses direct phrases from customer speech to provide clear context and specific actions to contact center leaders. 

It also shares detailed information about the volume, cost, and sentiment of each customer query so contact center managers can determine the exact changes that will have the greatest impact on the customer experience.

Key Features: 

• Provides a centralized hub for all contact center data, eliminating the need for time-consuming data analysis and allowing teams to focus on actionable insights
• Displays agent performance metrics and highlights areas where coaching is needed using easy-to-read dashboards
• Interactive dashboards that facilitate effortless sharing of insights among users and teams
• Identifies customer interactions suitable for contact center automation, formulates a business case for implementation, and monitors the return on investment (ROI)
• Capable of going live and delivering business insights within a mere two weeks, as it needs no extra business resources or model training
• Seamlessly integrates with other business processes and applications
• Identifies contributing factors to long handle times and negative customer sentiment, creating room for targeted improvements
• Evaluates agent and team performance across various query types, including comprehensive assessment of first contact resolution and customer satisfaction

Best for: Customer service analytics 

Unlock actionable customer insights and drive transformative improvements with Operative Intelligence.

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2. Hubspot

HubSpot is a customer relationship management (CRM) solution that provides inbound marketing, sales, and customer service functionalities. It offers a range of tools to facilitate customer engagement and support, including content creation, marketing automation, lead acquisition, CRM management, sales monitoring, and customer assistance. 

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Key Features: 

• Customer portal to facilitate communication between customers and reps 
• Knowledge base for customer self-service 
• Omni-channel messaging platforms 
• VOIP calling and analytics 
• Live chat routing 

‍Best for: Customer relationship management

3. Google Analytics

Google Analytics allows website owners and marketers to gather information about their website performance. It tracks various user interactions, such as page views, clicks, time spent on pages, and user demographics. This data provides insights into user behavior, traffic sources, and the effectiveness of marketing efforts. 

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Key Features: 

• Data collection and management 
• Integrations with other Google products
• Data analysis and visualization 
• Advertising budget ROI analysis 
• Acquisition, engagement, and monetization reports 

‍Best for: Web analytics

3. Hotjar

Hotjar is an analytics tool that provides insights into how visitors interact with web pages. Hotjar combines heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, and user feedback to show a comprehensive view of user engagement. By visually representing user clicks and scrolls, Hotjar enables businesses to identify areas of interest and potential usability issues. 

Key Features: 

• Integrations with productivity apps 
• Conversion rate optimization 
• Dashboard to view user data and identify trends 
• Highlight tool to organize and share user insights 
• Trends tool to visualize metrics and identify patterns  

Best for: Digital experience insights and behavior analytics 

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Improve Your Customer Experience Analysis

Understanding exactly why customers reach out for support is key to reshaping their experience. Customer experience analysis is a multi-faceted approach that helps organizations do just this, empowering them to transition from a reactive, problem management stance to a proactive, problem prevention one. Customers enjoy better experiences, businesses reduce costs in customer services, and agents have more time to focus on value-generating activities.

Operative Intelligence facilitates this opportunity by allowing businesses to automate and scale their CX analysis. The platform: 

• Identifies customer pain points through analysis of 100% of inbound interactions 
• Enables organizations to gain deep insight into the root causes of these paint points at scale, including volume, cost, sentiment, satisfaction, and resolution. 
• Determines the best opportunities for contact center automation, complete with ROI analysis, allowing organizations to prioritize their automation efforts effectively. 
• Empowers businesses to implement targeted improvements by pinpointing the drivers behind increased handle time and negative customer sentiment
• Assesses the effectiveness of agents and teams in terms of resolution and customer satisfaction for all types of queries. 

Stay connected with your customer’s ever-evolving expectations.

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‍Book a demo with Operative Intelligence.