Collecting & analyzing digital experience data

As technology is evolving, customers’ expectations are also rising. A good customer experience can differentiate your brand from others. According to some statistics, brands providing excellent customer experience generate 5.7% more revenue than those not focusing much on CX. If we neglect these stats for a moment, every business owner understands that a good customer experience is essential for success. Now the question is how to improve customer experience? For that, you need to collect customer experience data. You might ask how to collect data? In this article, we’ll discuss how to collect and analyze digital experience data.

Before going into the details of different data collection and analyzing methods, let us tell you one thing. Data collection isn’t rocket science. The main thing is analyzing that data and implementing changes. So, without any further ado, let’s start and find different ways to collect digital experience data.

6 effective ways to collect digital experience data 

One of the simplest and most effective used strategies is to get direct feedback from customers. There are lots of other ways for digital experience data collection as well. So, let’s discuss them briefly.

1. Customer Surveys 

Do you know qualitative data can help you make your customer experience project successful? Qualitative data helps you get customer opinions about your brand. Moreover, it will give you an idea of how customers feel about your service and brand. Now you might ask how to get qualitative data?

You can create an effective customer survey to get this data. These surveys can help you get personal feedback from customers. There are various ways to get a response to surveys; for example, you can ask them to share their response at the checkout process. Moreover, if you have their emails, ask them to fill out a survey.

There is no need to ask generic questions like how was your experience with the brand etc. If you’re noticing high cart abandonment, ask questions about the checkout processes. By asking questions, you can optimize the checkout process. Sometimes, customers leave your website due to slow speed or more loading time. If you get such a response in surveys, improve the loading speed of the website.

2. Get customer ratings

It’s a relatively quick method than the one mentioned above. Ask your customers to rate your brand and products. Here you can check three key metrics.

• Customer satisfaction with your brand

• How likely would the customer to recommend your product or service?

• Effort customers have to make throughout their journey with your brand?

You can assign scores to each of these metrics, for example, from 1-5 or 1-10. Higher scores mean a positive rating, and lower scores mean a lower rating. You can use these ratings to improve your digital touch-points.

3. Give confidence and opportunity to customers

Collecting digital experience data isn’t as easy as it looks. Therefore, you need to provide every opportunity to your customers to get their feedback. If you want to get their feedback through surveys, ensure that surveys are distributed across all channels, such as telephonic service, online checkout process, in-person service, and online customer service channels. This way, customers will share their experiences through the channel that suits them.

4. Don’t forget social listening

Nowadays, people like to share their experiences via social media channels. So if customers had a good or bad experience with your brand, they’ll either approach you or post reviews on social media. But social listening is a powerful tool for collecting digital experience data.

Various social media monitoring tools are available for social listening, and you can combine them with automated customer communication management. It’s the best way to improve the customer experience.

5. Use analytics and cookies

Do you know you can get data about customers’ online behavior through cookies and analytics? Moreover, they can help you understand how customers interact with your online platforms. In this way, you can get data about possible friction points and customer journeys with your brand.

Nowadays, you can do mouse tracking and track heat points to get insights into the user experience. So, use cookies and analytics to understand how customers interact with your brand.

6. Continuously monitor customer support trends 

It’s the last but another effective way of collecting digital experience data. When customers face problems, they talk to customer support. You can analyze the recurring issues, and you can either tweak a product or make your digital touch-points more accessible. Add explainer videos to your website or optimize instructions.

So, you can collect digital experience data by using the methods mentioned above. In the next part, we’ll discuss how to analyze digital experience data to improve customer experience.

How to analyze digital experience data

It doesn’t matter whether you have a large company or a small business; you need to collect and analyze digital experience data to take a competitive edge over the competitors. In the earlier part, we collected data by using different techniques. Here we’ll discuss how to analyze it and how to use insights to improve customer experience strategy.

Now you have all data in hand; it’s time to address their complaints. Moreover, it’s important to fix issues that created the problem in the first place.

Tools for analyzing digital experience data 

There are various tools to analyze digital experience data, such as heat maps, session replay, and form analytics. All these tools are featured-rich, and they help companies pinpoint bad experiences of customers on your website or app. These tools are mandatory for application and website optimization. We’ll not discuss them in detail, but we’ll give you an overview of what they do.

1. Heat maps to analyze user behavior

It gives you visuals of on-page user behavior on the app and website. Heat maps are of various types, such as attribution, scroll, attention, and behavior. Moreover, each type provides different levels of insight. Heat maps don’t only give you insights into a few people, but they aggregate millions of user behavior and provide meaningful insights into users’ journey with your website or app. More importantly, they can also help you measure app and web experiences.

Some perks of heat maps:

• You can simply track, analyze, and compare similar pages.
• Help you pinpoint problematic areas so that you can fix them.
• Allows you to analyze high volumes of user behaviors at once.
• Different heat maps types can help you narrow user experience investigations.
• It provides insights into user journey differences between different touch-points and devices so that you can make changes accordingly.

Now, let’s move to the next tool.

2. Session replay to watch back user sessions

It’s a technology that helps digital teams to watch back how users interact with the company’s website or app. It’s an essential tool because it helps teams understand what problems are frustrating users? Many company leaders find it helpful in measuring and analyzing online experiences.

Core benefits of session replay:

• Provides a first-hand view of user journey with app or website
• Allow you to perform an in-depth investigation of specific user issues
• Reveals what’s causing a decrease in engagement
• It can be used to promote targeted investigations

Let’s discuss the final tool.

3. Form analytics to pinpoint issues

As the name indicates, it tracks and measures the outcome of the form-based submission page. It reveals how users interact with the form, what frustrates them, and reasons for abandonment. It has been observed that 50% of people start filing form, but only 1/3rd of them completes them. So, sites and apps with checkout processes, content downloads, and landing pages must use this form analytics tool.

Benefits of form analytics:

• It helps you find out the best and worst-performing forms
• Help you find issues behind abandonment and lack of conversion<
• Comprehensive data and segmentation help you diagnose and fix problems immediately

So, these are the tools for analyzing digital experience data.

More tips and tools for analyzing digital experience data

Excel, Google Sheets, business intelligence tools, and Airtable are excellent for analyzing massive data. You can add quantitative data to these tools, and they’ll create charts, graphs, and comprehensive visuals. All these tools are simple, easy to use, and effective. There are some complex methods for data analysis as well.

Complex methods use machine learning and AI to structure data. But the best thing about these modern tools is that they’re equipped with the latest technology, can analyze data in minutes, and provide powerful insights. For example, they can help classify data into positive, negative, and neutral if you want to perform sentiment analysis. This sentiment analysis helps you extract powerful insights from qualitative data.

Final words

As the competition is increasing and people prefer online purchases, companies need to work on collecting and analyzing digital experience data. This data can help them make timely decisions and address customers’ issues. So, we have shared some valuable methods for collecting and analyzing digital experience data. You can try them to improve your customer experience strategy.