Customer journey vs Customer Experience: 6 Tools to Track Both

Published by Yash Chawlani on November 14, 2022

Customer journey and customer experience might sound similar but they are very different. The lines seem blurred and there is room for confusion. Before we talk about the differences, let’s look at the funnel.

A lead doesn’t convert into a customer overnight. There goes a complete process to turn a lead into a customer. Around 75% of B2B businesses take four months to acquire a new customer. On the other hand, B2C companies can get new customers within minutes.

B2C journeys are complex and efforts are mainly put into improving the customer experience. This is not to say that the journey is not important. It is, but on an analytical level to improve conversions. On the other hand, B2B sales deal with customer journeys and need a bigger focus on it.

So, let’s understand what customer journeys and experiences are and how they differ from each other. In this article, we will also share the best tools to track customer journeys and experiences throughout your sales funnel.

What is a Customer Journey?

The customer journey defines all the interactions and actions a customer takes with your products, solutions, and business. These actions happen throughout the process both before and after the purchase. For example, when customers search for your services online, it is a part of their journey. Similarly, after-sales activities are also a part of the journey when customers communicate with customer service agents.

Broadly speaking, a customer journey is divided into five stages as follows:

Awareness

Awareness involves spreading awareness about your products and services. At this stage, customers search for different products and services. It is the right time to shine and attract customers through your sales funnel.

Consideration

At this stage, customers are directly interacting with your brand. But, they are also searching for better alternatives. So, it is a crucial stage where you must convince customers that your products are superior to others.

Conversion

This is a make-or-break stage in the customer journey. Customers now decide whether they want to take action on your products and services. They decide whether your solutions are better than other available alternatives. For this stage, you need a clear call to action button so that customers won’t think twice before taking action.

Retention

At this point, you already have a customer. So, your main attention should be on retaining your customers. That is because a study shows that a 5% increase in customer retention can lead to a 25% to 95% increase in profit. Therefore, you must focus on retaining your customers with excellent after-sales services.

Advocacy

Do you know 97% of consumers depend upon online reviews to make a purchase decision? That’s why you must motivate your satisfied and happy customers to leave good reviews for your business. This practice will help you acquire more customers and touch their journey at a personal level.

As you can see, a customer moves through different stages before buying. Analyzing the customer journey can help you produce accurate content and promote your business on the right marketing channels.

However, the first step in tracking your customer journey is to create a buyer persona. This can help you categorize your customers into different groups and keep a close eye on their journey. This can further enable you to create a customer journey map to visually analyze your individual customer’s journey.

What is a Customer Experience?

Customer experience is a perception of a customer about your company after interacting with different aspects of your products and services. It is an amalgamation of the entire customer journey. In short, it is how a customer feels about your brand.

Usually, customer experience revolves around two things – products and people. If your product and the buying process is excellent, it can improve user experience. Similarly, if your customer support team provides fantastic services, it can reflect on customer experience.

So, there are limited means to improve customer experience. But, with user behavior analytics, you can gain insights to enhance your customer experience.

Customer Journey vs. Customer Experience: What is the Difference?

Now that you have learned about a customer journey and experience separately, you must wonder how they differ when both focus on customers.

To be honest, customer journey and customer experience are closely tied. They are parts of the same process that helps to convert potential leads into paying customers.

However, the customer journey is a strategy that improves customer experience. Through customer journey mapping, you can understand different touchpoints of customers with your business. As a result, it helps you improve customer experience and generate more leads.

Let’s keep an example to clear your confusion once and for all.

Suppose you are a loyal customer of a local taco restaurant. You love the taste of their tacos, and never forget to recommend this restaurant to your friends.

But unfortunately, you don’t like their customer service. All the waiters are super rude, and it takes ages to get food out of the kitchen.

As mentioned above, products and people make the experience. In this case, the product is excellent, but people are not. This means that there is a faulty part in the customer’s buying journey. This revelation can help the restaurant to improve customer experience and prevent a loyal customer from going anywhere else.

This also means that despite some differences, customer journey and customer experience are two extremely important parts of customer retention and acquisition. Thus, you need to track them both to boost your sales.

How Does Customer Journey Tracking Help Me?

Tracking and analyzing customer journeys helps you understand how customers engage with your product and marketing both before and after the purchase happens. It helps you:

• Understand product and service usage.
• Track buyer intent and know when leads are ready for the next step.
• Identify campaigns that generate more revenue.
• Eliminate low-performing strategies.
• Segment leads/customers/users.
• Score leads based on how they engage through the customer journey.
• Track live chat and webform submissions and their influence on the customer journey.
• Understand how specific pages and content pieces influence visitors.
• Identify problems in the funnel.

How Does Customer Experience Tracking Help Me?

Tracking customer experience and improving it can significantly improve your acquisition and retention. It helps you:

• Improve the experience of buyers throughout the funnel and have positive experiences.
• Retain existing customers by providing good experiences.
• Get referrals from happy customers.
• Upsell to existing customers.
• Avoid bad press.

3 Best Customer Journey Tracking Tools

To map your customer journey in real-time, you use the following customer journey trackers:

1. Salespanel

Salespanel is a good customer journey tracking solution for B2B businesses. This software tracks your customers’ journey across your content and website elements. It provides analytical data to improve customer experience with personalized solutions.

You can track custom website events and product elements to understand how your customers engage with your services. This will help you get proactive control over the customer journey and enhance the experience of your customers and close more qualified deals.

Salespanel allows you to track all website elements to take real-time actions to convert leads. With our analytical engine and actionable data, you can also learn which campaigns are leading to MQLs, SQLs, and customers.

All in all, it is one of the best tools in the market to get a grip on customer journey.

2. Woopra

Image Source: predictiveanalyticstoday.com

Woopra is a Customer Journey Analytics solution changing how businesses ‘understand, analyze, engage, and retain customers’. The platform supports optimization and growth across the entire customer lifecycle. In addition, Woopra uses individual-level data to generate aggregate analytics reports that bridge all departmental gaps.

Woopra’s proprietary tracking technology monitors user behavior across your website, product, and mobile applications. Furthermore, the platform provides 51+ one-click integrations with partners such as Salesforce, Marketo, Intercom, and Segment to unify disparate data points across tools and teams.

3. Adobe Customer Journey Analytics

Image Source: venturebeat.com

Adobe Customer Journey Analytics is a service built on the Adobe Experience Platform. It allows users to combine data from all channels into a single interface for real-time, omnichannel analysis and visualization.

Further, users can make better decisions with a holistic view of the business and the context behind every customer action.

The Experience Platform allows users to connect and standardize data from any online or offline source for non-destructive querying, analysis, and modeling.

3 Best Customer Experience Tracking Tools

Let’s next check out the best tools to track and analyze your customer experience across platforms.

1. Hotjar

Image Source: billmark.com

Hotjar is a good conversion rate optimization and customer journey analyzer tool. Its main features are heat mapping, visual session recording, conversion funnel analytics, form analytics, feedback polls and surveys, and usability testing.

It is the best for digital analysts, UX designers, web developers, and product marketers.

2. VWO

Image Source: getapp.com

VWO is a split testing and conversion optimization tool for growing businesses. It allows them to conduct qualitative and quantitative visitor research, create an experimentation roadmap, and run continuous experiments on their digital properties.

VWO enables businesses to understand on-site visitor behavior through heatmaps, surveys, and visitor recordings. In addition, VWO enables research-driven A/B testing to optimize web experience across desktop, mobile, and other devices to deliver a unique experience based on visitor preferences.

3. Heap

periencImage Source: saasworthy.com

Heap analysis datasets to uncover hidden insights within the user’s digital journey, allowing them to act confidently. Heap enables product and marketing teams to see and understand everything users do to make the most impactful improvements to the digital product.

Customer Journey vs. Customer Experience: Which Matters the Most?
Both!

Both customer journey and customer experience tracking are crucial to boost your sales and retain your customers. Customer journey is a path that takes you to the point where you can improve customer experience.

Without customer journey mapping, CX is not possible. Thus, you need to track both aspects to create a proper sales funnel for your customers. For that, you can use powerful tools like Salespanel that help you understand and analyze the data from different angles. Get in touch with us if you wish to learn more!