Understanding The Customer Journey

Analytics have shown businesses all sorts of new information about their customers and their behavior. But there’s a danger in analytics. If you depend too much on impersonal data then you can lose the voice of the customer (VOC) in the noise.

In this Promotable talk, Christopher Bevel, Director of Marketing with the University of Illinois at Chicago, discusses how to reclaim VOC and give it its proper place among your analytics. Analytics can tell you what is going on, but it is VOC that tells you why it is happening straight from the source.

VOC brings your data to life by giving it a story. If we depend too much on analytics to tell the story, we turn our customers, human beings, into machines or characters in a video game. We’ll start to think that if we do action A, we’ll automatically get result B every time.

But people aren’t like that. Analytics alone don’t explain the customer journey and humans rely on emotions and intuition to drive decisions along with their logical thinking. You can’t get a holistic view of what is going on with your data without this information.

In this talk, Bevel reveals why you need different skillsets for combining quantitative and qualitative data and guides the viewer through several examples of combining analytics and VOC to inform business strategy and improve customer experiences. He also explains the importance of creating quality customer experiences and how incorporating VOC into your analytics will help you better see the motivations and perceptions of your audience.

Among the takeaways from this class are:

• Analytics alone don’t explain the customer journey.
• Emotions and intuition drive decisions, as well as logic.
• Experiences are the new product and businesses need to deliver them.
• Only the VOC can tell you why a customer does something. All other metrics build on that why.
• How merging VOC and metrics allow you to do data storytelling.

With this information and several case studies (starting around 21:16), you can create better brand experiences and raise customer satisfaction and revenue. If you like what you’ve learned, check out Promotable’s other guest speakers and past topics by clicking here.