What’s Next in Experience Analytics?

This blog is also posted on the Contentsquare site.

For the past few years, I’ve been working on something really exciting. In December 2023, Contentsquare officially announced that it had acquired Heap. It has been incredibly rewarding to bring our customers a more complete way to understand the customer experience.

Imagine a world where everybody gets the digital experience they love, seek, and deserve. The only way to create this world is to understand what your customers want and need, so you can build an experience that delivers value and maximizes your business performance. To do this, you need to analyze and understand your customers’ behavior at every step of the customer journey: what they do, how they navigate sessions on your platform, and how they feel about it. Bringing Heap into Contentsquare helps create this unique blend of analytics.

I recently spoke on a webinar with my colleagues Rachel Obstler and Mona Popli about bringing this future to light. (If you missed it, listen here!) We discussed the next trends in UX: AI, hyper-personalized customer journeys, and the importance of translating insights into meaningful experiences.

We started by framing the user experience in terms of dating.

Dating? Yes! Think about it: When you’re dating, there are steps that define where you are at in the process and where you would like to go. You have to put in the effort to meet people, get to know them, build trust, and then make the relationship official. Once you’ve “converted” them and started dating, it’s about building the foundation for a long-lasting relationship.

Contentsquare and Heap help facilitate an analogous process with your customers. Our goal is to help companies meet new prospects or potential customers, develop engagement, and build trust over time – all by understanding and optimizing their digital experience.

Here are some thoughts on the future of this process.

How trends and data intersect

To empower our customers to achieve long-lasting relationships with their customers, we need to stay ahead of the curve in digital experience intelligence and experience design. 2024 is already brimming with exciting trends, from AI to hyper-personalization. But these advancements and innovations bring complexity. Customer expectations are constantly evolving, and so is the volume of data we collect. The need to translate insights into meaningful experiences is both paramount and complex.

Analyzing data helps improve a digital experience – full stop. How? A few examples:

• Understanding your users. This requires less knowing who they are and more about what they do. Digital interactions – the actions users take in your product – provide rich context on what they care about and what they might want.

• Better personalization. Some companies try to boil the ocean with personalization, using AI to provide recommendations, but sometimes it’s better to start simple and prove ROI with simple heuristics. For example, easy personalization categories might be “why you didn’t complete an action” or “first time vs. repeat buyer.”

• Focusing on retention. Businesses don’t last without repeat buyers or users. You may have heard this described as the “leaky bucket” – if you keep filling it with new customers and they don’t return, you don’t have a viable business. So understanding how behaviors correlate with retention is at least as important as understanding which behaviors correlate with conversion.

The Unmissable Data Privacy Pillar

When you dive into personalization and user segmentation, data privacy is a key priority. Recent regulations such as GDPR in the EU and the CCPA in California, as well as increasing customer expectations, make brands prioritize it. It’s not only a risk but also an opportunity: you want digital trust to be at the core of what you do.

You usually want to see what individual users do, but you don’t need to know who they are. From this perspective, it’s critical to anonymize users so that you can track what users do while maintaining their privacy.

Turning Data Into Actionable Insights (Resulting in Better Decisions!)

The best way to democratize data is to ensure that it is:

1. Accessible to all with self-service tools that work for high and low data-maturity users, so anyone can go in and obtain insight, regardless of their background or skill set. This means prioritizing easy UI and out-of-the-box insights while providing more complicated analyses to serve more mature users.

2. Available when you need it. Too many tools sell a nirvana of analysis, but the reality is that it can be a lot of work to capture the data you want to analyze correctly. We’ve seen too many teams struggling with getting the right data (such as with the GA4 migration, where we’ve talked to many organizations that have regressed in their analytics maturity.)

So, What’s Next?

I’ve highlighted some key trends and challenges, but now you may be thinking: how can I tackle or overcome them? My top tips:

1. Obtain the data you need. Our technology allows you to automatically capture the data you want, speeding up time to insight and ensuring you have all the data you need to get to insight, such as chat interfaces and better OOTB (out-of-the-box) reporting. This allows users to get insights faster and set up their business for further success.

2. Bring analytics and experience closer together. Often data is used only to report on how the business is doing. But smart teams use data to shape the actual experience of their users! Data is certainly valuable for high-level strategy. But it’s easy to forget that it’s the day-to-day experience of your product that gets users excited, or makes them so frustrated that they’ll start looking for a different solution.

3. Leaders can create an insights-driven culture. That means setting the expectation that there should be data-backed evidence for investments. That teams are using experimentation to decide if changes are worthwhile. As a leader, you need to lead by example. Your opinion stated offhand in a meeting doesn’t become the roadmap.

Understand the data, equip your teams with a platform that provides tools that proactively surface insights that they need to drive relevant business outcomes, and make recommendations on where to look next. AI helps with this and more. Why did your conversion rate go down? What should you do next?

Experience analytics can’t make product decisions for you, and neither can AI itself, but it can provide you with crucial information that helps you make these decisions faster, or uncover things you wouldn’t have otherwise known to look for.

Want to learn more? Be sure to tune in or sign up now to attend our CX Circle World Tour 2024, where Contentsquare brings together the CX community with the goal of providing a stage for a diverse group of innovators to share their learnings on how brands can level up their CX game.

Contentsquare’s CX Circle World Tour 2024 kicks off in Melbourne, Australia on May 29, with the following key stops:

• London (June 13)

• New York (September 10)

• Paris (November 7)

• And more!