An all-encompassing approach to website and app management with big data and funnel analytics

A few years ago, phrases like “digital transformation” may have appeared to be nothing more than jargon in a burgeoning high-tech sector. Today, digital transformation is a requirement for companies seeking to engage customers with their websites and mobile apps, maximize the conversion potential of sales funnels, and drive up ROI. These overarching concepts are needed to increase customer engagement levels on e-commerce platforms. An effective way to do this – as evidenced by extensive market research – is self-service offerings.

Self-service in the e-commerce realm is about empowering the customer to solve their own inquiries by implementing the right technology. It involves simplifying a range of activities such as calls to action, information dissemination, and navigation between pages and across multiple devices.

The goal of self-service is to reduce customer frustration levels, bottlenecks, and increase customer satisfaction — while also deflecting calls to customer service and reducing contact center costs. A company’s long-term profitability is dependent upon the extent to which it manages to reach these goals. By collecting the big data from funnel journeys through AI-enabled analysis, you can start to see where the funnel is failing and the customer is left dissatisfied.

How to measure online customer experience with session replay

Too many e-commerce sites fail to convert users, and they can’t say why there was shopping cart abandonment, a high bounce rate, or a lack of customer interest. One way to completely eliminate all of these concerns is session replays.

Session replay technology records all aspects of a customer’s journey from inception to abandonment. It indicates where customers landed on the website, which pages they looked at, how long they stayed, and when they were lost in the conversion funnel.

Using this big data for funnel analysis creates a visualization of the customer journey in a macro sense, whereas the individual session reply can provide a viewpoint into a specific journey. By having a movie-like visual of customer journeys, it is easy to pinpoint precisely why visitors abandon their browsing, shopping or interest in a company’s products or services.

It has been said that everyone has 20/20 vision in hindsight. Now, that same thinking has been implemented into creating a website customer experience that tracks customer behavior for the benefit of the company and the customer. Sometimes, it’s not the products or services that a company is offering that are problematic.

The issue is often the website itself – is it allowing for a user-friendly experience? Why are visitors abandoning their shopping carts at specific points in time? Are the calls to action (CTAs) ineffective? Is the shopping process too complicated? Are there too many steps required in the registration process for new users? These types of aspects can easily be evaluated and rectified through session replays.

This type of software is capable of in-depth reporting, data capturing, and big data funnel analysis. And it can be used to great effect with big data analytics. These types of systems offer a 360-degree digital analytics solution to e-commerce platforms. Businesses can then create better landing pages, homepages, check out options, calls to action, customer service functionality and more.

Why a holistic approach is needed for customer experience

The concept of customer experience is perhaps best defined as the overall quality of a consumer’s interactions with a company’s brand, products and services. In a digital sense, this relates to the customer’s interactions with the website through a digital interface – the PC, smartphone, tablet, etc.

Given that every customer is unique in terms of browsing preferences, buying habits and behavior, pet peeves, and budget, it’s important to tailor websites accordingly. While many companies are focused solely on ROI measures; the truth is that multiple factors come into play. Ambiance settings, wait times, loading times, consistency, the nature of touch points, omni-channel support software, and visual consistency are just a few of the many factors that need to be measured in a 360-degree digital analytics solution and all contribute to the big data for funnel analysis.

This article was originally published in February 2018. It was updated on June 2, 2020.