How to Analyze the Customer Journey: Practical Techniques & Tools

The customer journey is all the interactions a user has with your product from the moment they sign up. And learning how to analyze the customer journey will help you to ensure product growth and positive business outcomes.

In this article, we’ll cover the definition of customer journey analytics, discuss ways to analyze the customer journey, and review customer journey analytics tools.

TL;DR

Customer journey analysis examines customer interactions with a brand to identify areas for improving and increasing customer satisfaction.
Customer journey maps will highlight any customer touchpoints that create friction.
Creating paths for your user flows will help you see which ones are performing better so you can imitate them.
Conduct path analysis to see how customers behave with your product and if they are completing their goals.
Set goals via custom events to see how users progress towards any incomplete goals.
Plot the trend of events to identify common paths on the customer journey.
Use cohort analysis to determine the time it takes for a customer to leave your product.
Use feature tags and heatmaps to see how users interact with features at different journey stages.
Review session recordings to understand the reason customers drop off.
Use funnel analysis to improve the stage where customers are churning the most.
Use surveys at different customer journey points to collect feedback and find friction points that need improving.
Userpilot can give you the tools for customer journey analytics to monitor feature engagement, create custom events, track user behavior data, and analyze user feedback without writing a single line of code. To see how it works, book the demo.

What is customer journey analysis?

Customer journey analytics is the mapping and analyzing of user journeys to identify areas for improvement and measure CX performance – all vital parts of the customer journey management program.

It provides a way of bringing your customer journey map to life by collecting user data and highlighting the multiple channels they take, so you can understand the customer journey, predict customer behavior, and optimize the journey stages.

11 ways to analyze the customer journey

There are multiple approaches for customer journey analysis, each offering actionable insights to enhance the customer’s experience and drive improvement in various ways.

1. Identify friction points with customer journey mapping

Customer journey mapping helps to visually represent all customer touchpoints and identify areas that require attention.

By analyzing the map, you can streamline customer journeys by removing unnecessary touchpoints and addressing friction points.

Customer journey mapping also allows you to understand customers’ goals at each stage of their journey, which ultimately helps you create an onboarding experience that will align with their expectations.

Customer journey template from Canva.

2. Analyze the drop-off rates of different customer journeys

Create different paths a customer can take through their journey so you can see which ones have fewer drop-offs.

You can then analyze the results and either take inspiration from the better-performing paths to improve ones with high drop-offs or remove them completely.

With a customer journey analytics solution like Userpilot, you can instantly identify the drop-off rate between different journey stages and get details about which customers abandoned.

Drop-off rates in Userpilot‘s funnel analysis.

3. Observe how users progress in your product from different starting points

By matching the starting points of your product with different segments’ JTBDs and performing path analysis, you can understand how customers move through your product.

You can also identify any areas that go unnoticed or present challenges. You can then take these identified areas and improve the customer experience.

For instance, if customers struggle with secondary onboarding, a checklist can help them move to the next stage of the user journey more smoothly.

Customer path analysis in Userpilot.

4. Set goals for specific user milestones and see how different segments achieve them

Set goals for different user segments as part of customer journey analytics to help you monitor user performance and identify uncompleted goals.

Understanding user needs and behaviors at various stages allows you to refine your strategies, provide targeted support, and optimize the customer experience to complete key milestones for each segment successfully.

You can use custom events to set goals for your customers, like completed onboarding. Then, monitor how many users complete this milestone.

Using custom events for goal-setting in Userpilot.

5. Dig deep into customer behavior to identify positive and negative trends

You can plot trends over a particular timeframe to understand your customer behavior.

You can then identify trends and use them for mapping out your customer journey to avoid negative trends and foster positive ones.

Trend analysis in Userpilot.

6. Use cohort analysis to measure customer churn

Cohort analysis helps to learn the average time when a customer loses interest and leaves your product.

Depending on the cohort analysis conducted (behavioral or acquisition), it can answer important questions for customer journey analytics, such as:

How long do customers typically use your product before churning?
What specific user segments (e.g., by persona, demographic, plan) experience higher churn rates?

This will help you identify when churn is prevalent to tailor strategies to target segments that are keen on churning.

Cohort retention analysis in Userpilot.

7. Monitor feature usage with feature tags and heatmaps

Monitoring usage through feature tags and heatmaps provides valuable information about customer behavior and helps identify the most utilized features and those that go unnoticed.

By tagging different UI elements and tracking user interactions such as clicks, scrolls, and hovers, you can collect customer data on how they engage with specific features within your application.

By analyzing heatmaps, you can visually observe the highest and lowest levels of feature engagement. You can then focus more on features that resonate and address those that receive less attention.

Heatmap analysis in Userpilot.

8. Use session recordings to understand drop-offs

Session recordings allow you to witness customer interactions and identify the reasons behind drop-offs.

It allows you to identify usability issues, or confusing elements hindering customers from completing their intended actions.

A screenshot showing session recordings to understand drop-offs

Using session recordings to understand user drop-offs.

9. Identify where users convert

Funnel analysis is a powerful method to identify where customers convert and drop off within the customer journey.

Set up custom events to monitor user interactions, and track their progress through different steps to identify specific areas that cause friction or lead to drop-offs.

Userpilot funnel analysis.

10. Collect feedback to identify friction points

Collecting customer feedback at different touchpoints can help to identify friction points and gain insights into the customer experience at each stage of the customer journey.

You can pinpoint areas needing improvement by paying attention to common themes or recurring issues mentioned in the survey results.

In-app survey created in Userpilot.

11. Take a look at survey analytics to see how user sentiment changes over time

By examining Net Promoter Score (NPS) responses and survey results throughout the entire customer journey, you can identify any friction points that may impact customer satisfaction.

You can monitor NPS responses and survey results over time, providing insights into how customer sentiment evolves throughout their journey.

Identifying drop-offs or friction points allows you to take targeted actions to address and resolve them.

By focusing on areas that receive lower scores or negative feedback, you can implement improvements to enhance the customer experience and increase overall satisfaction.

Userpilot survey analytics

The best customer journey analytics tools

You can use a tool for leveraging customer journey analytics and gaining valuable insights. Here are three of the best.

Userpilot for advanced analytics and tracking capabilities

Userpilot is a product adoption platform with features that help you perform customer journey analysis and act on your insights.

It empowers you to effortlessly gather valuable user feedback, monitor customer behavioral data at the different stages of the customer journey, and find any friction points you can improve.

Some of the key features of Userpilot are:

Advanced customer segmentation: You can create segments from customer data such as user attributes, business data, and custom events. These advanced segments help to target distinct user groups with personalized experiences to aid them in their goals.

Segmentation in Userpilot.

Customer feedback analytics: Userpilot allows you to create surveys such as NPS and CSAT to collect customer feedback to inform product improvements.
User behavior analytics: You can monitor user actions to see how customers interact with your product.
Feature tag analytics: You can monitor user interactions with specific UI elements such as clicks, text inputs, and hovers, providing valuable insights into different parts of the customer journey.
Custom events analytics: Custom events let you conveniently group and track distinct actions as one. You can set up specific actions at certain stages of the customer journey.
Heatmaps analytics: Heatmaps let you see which features or UI elements are the most popular in your product.
Funnel analytics: You can create a dedicated sequence of multiple actions, providing valuable insights into the drop-off rate at each stage.
Paths analytics: You can observe user paths from different starting points and view their behavior through your product.
Trends analytics: View trends of events over a specific timeframe.
A/B testing: Set up different flows to see which ones perform the best.

A/B testing in Userpilot.

Hotjar for session recordings

Hotjar allows you to capture and record the activities of your website users, including clicks, scrolls, and mouse movements making for a great customer journey analytics tool.

Hotjar’s session recordings can help you uncover any friction points in your customer’s journey, which if fixed, can reduce time to value and increase retention.

You can also find areas in your product causing a poor customer experience that needs improving.

And you can find out the reason why customers are bouncing from your product so you can make your marketing funnels more efficient.

Hotjar’s session recording.

Google Analytics 4 for basic analytics

Google Analytics is a great customer journey analytics tool as it provides key information regardless of whether you are a power user or a beginner. You can access key metrics for website performance, including traffic, bounce rate, and conversions.

However, the data collected is not personally identifiable, so you can’t do cohort analysis. You would only be able to use Google Analytics 4 for time-based analytics.

You can go deeper with Google Analytics using it to track conversions and events, but it isn’t something that is easy to comprehend and would require some training to understand how it works.

Google Analytics 4 path analysis.

Conclusion

Customer journey analytics is vital to improving the customer experience. Using various techniques and tools, you can learn how to analyze the customer journey and identify areas for improvement.

Want help with customer journey analysis? Get a Userpilot Demo and see how you can easily perform customer journey analytics.