Q&A: Fospha's Sam Carter on how to own your customer journey with data analytics

The increased availability of data and analytics to track the customer journey has opened up entire new worlds for marketers.

The increased availability of data and analytics to track the customer journey has opened up entire new worlds for marketers.

Thanks to data and analytics tools, marketers can get a granular insight into customer behavior and benefit from a detailed breakdown of their interactions, allowing them to identify pain points and solve areas of friction to smooth the conversion process.

ClickZ caught up with Fospha’s Sales and Marketing Director, Sam Carter, to ask him about what he thinks will be the focus for data analytics over the coming year, what companies want from their data, and how they can use it to get on top of the customer journey.

Content produced in association with Fospha.

Q: What do you think will be the main focus for data analytics in 2017?

Since November last year, regardless of the industry – retail, travel or financial services – one thing has remained at the forefront of focus for 2017: optimizing the customer journey.

This involves consolidating all of your multi-channel, multi-device data in one place to provide you with an overview of how people are progressing through their end-to-end journey, including the granular details of how much they cost to acquire versus their potential lifetime value.

In today’s complex, multi-session, multi-device world, an informed data driven approach to attribution is becoming a necessity. To do this you need to understand the customer journey across all of your marketing channels (both online and offline), and the costs and revenues attributed to them. If you measure a channel’s performance by only attributing value on a first or last click basis, you risk missing detail on the role channels play in complex multi-session, multi-device visits.

However, only having a funnel overview is no longer sufficient. Companies are now focusing on the granular detail required to drill down into a single customer view, in order to understand why their customers are leaving.

We do this by monitoring visitor-level information, rather than visit only, making your customer data more accurate across multiple customer interactions over time.

This granular view, in the latest version of Fospha’s Customer Journey Optimization tool, allows you to understand the precise economics of your end-to-end customer journey and drill down and understand why your customers are leaving so you can take immediate action to increase conversion and reduce customer churn.

Q: What do companies want from their data?

Companies expect clear visualizations, measurable improvements and shareable insights. However, as with the ever changing customer expectations, companies now expect more from their data analytics: they expect to be able to act on them.

Regardless of a company’s maturity stage, all businesses are short of time; they don’t want to wait on IT. That’s why Fospha’s tools close the loop between insights and actions, by triggering real-time interventions to target exact pain points in the journey. This means you can bypass IT backlogs and take immediate action to drive conversion and reduce drop-outs with intent-driven interventions.

For instance, we found that £500k of loans were dropping out each week because of one form field, triggering a real-time intervention when people arrived on this field helped increase revenue by 40%.

It’s this combination of insights and taking action that will become even more important in 2017.

Q: What insights are companies looking for?

Companies are zooming into their customer journey in order to better understand how they can cater for their customers. They need an in-depth understanding of their customer behavior and customer intent in order to be reactive and later become proactive in their customer offering.

To do this, companies need to understand how their customers are moving through their journey, where they are engaging, where they are encountering problems and where they are dropping out. Most importantly, they need to drill down to understand why these actions are happening. Is there a problem with Apple device payments? Or is your look up field not working on tablet?

By understanding why people are leaving their journey, you are able to take the appropriate action to measurably improve your customer experience and consequently gain a competitive advantage.

Companies also need to be analyzing their most successful customer journey paths along with journeys that need more work, so as to justify marketing spend or understand how it can successfully be redistributed.

Consequently, these expectations are pushing customer journey platforms to evolve and strengthen their offerings.

Q: What’s the best advice for someone struggling to get on top of their data? 

Once you’ve centralized your data, share it! It’s important that everyone in your business has a window into company performance so that the appropriate teams can either fix marketing spend, or intervene in real-time at the right moment in the customer journey to re-engage customers and drive conversions.

Finally, know your customers better than they know themselves. To do this, as previously mentioned, you need to understand their entire end-to-end journey, this means constantly monitoring and analyzing their actions.

All of this enables you to become proactive with customer engagement, making their journey as frictionless as possible, increasing satisfaction and minimizing customer churn.

 

This article was produced in association with Fospha, a data intelligence platform that enables you to understand the economics of your end-to-end customer journey. Get in touch to find out how they could help you optimize your customer journey.

Views expressed in this article are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect ClickZ’s opinions. 

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