Adobe Experts Joe & Eric discuss how Adobe Customer Journey Analytics brings together multiple data sets to help you break down the data silos in your organization to truly understand and optimize your customer journey.
This is the first in a 5-part series exploring five key areas of Adobe Experience Cloud. Each session features Adobe and BlastX analytics experts sharing their wisdom and offering advice on how to get more from Adobe Experience Cloud applications.
In Session 1, ‘Building an End-to-End Customer Journey Analytics Foundation that Drives Insights and Action,’ BlastX’s analytics expert Joe Christopher and Adobe expert Eric Matisoff went under the hood of Adobe Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) to give you a close-up view of how to build an end-to-end customer journey analytics foundation.
We encourage you to check out the recorded Adobe Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) session on LinkedIn–and read on for a recap of key takeaways from the event.
Highlights from the Adobe Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) Session
- Established the importance of a unified customer view for effective decision-making.
- Examined the role of data integration and enrichment in building a strong data foundation.
- Provided a detailed rundown of the capabilities of Adobe Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) in addressing the challenges of modern analytics. This included a detailed demonstration of different features.
- Shared a real-world example of a successful, large-scale migration from Google Analytics to Adobe Customer Journey Analytics (CJA).
Adobe Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) Q&A with Joe and Eric
Challenges in Building a Single Customer View
Joe Christopher and Eric Matisoff outlined the common challenges businesses face in creating a unified view of the customer across different data sources and touchpoints, highlighting the need for data-driven decision-making and the shift from traditional BI teams to self-service analytics.
Eric Matisoff: I want to talk through some of the opportunities that you’re seeing with your clients when it comes to building a strong data foundation. What are some of the biggest challenges out there?
Joe Christopher: I often cite the ‘2023 B2C Marketing Challenges And Priorities’ Forrester marketing survey. It echoes a lot of what I’ve experienced working with our clients. They asked survey participants what their biggest challenges were, and two things floated right to the top of that list: creating a single view of the customer across channels, and how to drive decision making with customer insights.
Customer experience is a big competitive differentiator, and it’s also met with the rising expectations that customers have. And yet brands are struggling with understanding the customer and their journey to deliver on those expectations. And we’ve grown well beyond the days of early days of Urchin and Google Analytics, where you were focused on what customers were doing on your website. It’s much broader than that, and I think a lot of brands are struggling with this reality.
According to research conducted by Forrester, creating a single view of the customer across channels is one of the biggest challenges marketers face.
Eric Matisoff: If brands are still having trouble getting to that single view of the customer, what are they attempting to do? How are you guiding them towards a more holistic view across everything that their customers experience?
Joe Christopher: Data is everywhere, and the full customer journey is complex, as we all know. There’s an old way and a new way approach this single view of the customer.
We’ll start with the old way, where brands with traditional BI teams try to pull together data to facilitate the requests of the business. They’re trying to traverse data silos and operate in a model that’s slow, and also happens to be dependent on that BI team to help answer increasingly complex customer journey questions. This can lead to a competitive disadvantage, and it can lead to frustration with analytics talent that wants to go beyond their data silo. It can even lead to inaccurate analyses at times.
The quest for unified single view of the customer is leading a lot of our clients to Adobe Customer Journey Analytics.
The new way is to still do many of these things to help you understand your data—how to connect it and so forth—but to use that understanding to build automated data pipelines that join it all up and, most importantly, provide a self-service method that allows business users to break out of their data silos. This also requires an effort around building and implementing a strong identity map, because the data needs to be joined together.
Whether you use Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, or another platform, this quest to build a unified single view of the customer and their journey is leading a lot of our clients to Adobe Customer Journey Analytics. They’re being rewarded with a much deeper understanding of the customer journey, a self-service platform that meets their needs, and a way to build robust audiences that can then be activated elsewhere.
Data Integration and Enrichment
Next, Joe and Eric talked about the importance of integrating various data sources including website data, call center data, voice of customer (Voc) data, CRM data, and more to create a comprehensive customer journey.
Eric Matisoff: It’s been interesting to see the questions that come up in the meetings with customers that aren’t yet using Adobe Customer Journey Analytics. They’re very interested in pulling in this data or that data and tying it all in—which they can technically do—but it’s a lot easier if you can automate it and make sure it’s clean, valuable, and accessible.
What are some of the common data sources you’re seeing clients want to pull in—beyond just digital, beyond just web or mobile apps. What data sources have you been playing around with most?
Joe Christopher: The beauty of Adobe Customer Journey Analytics is that you can bring in a variety of data sources. We start with the web and app behavioral data that all of us are used to working with–but then we start to look at the other data sources that make up the components of a customer journey map. How are customers traversing through different experiences, and what data sources can we pull from to bring all of these together and add value?
Examples of these other data sources include voice of customer (VoC) data, surveys, call centers, CRMs, email platforms, marking automation, advertising platforms – the list goes on and on, but those are some of the key ones that we often see.
We’ve seen a lot of value from voice of customer (VoC) data, and from marrying that data together with web behavioral data for a new set of capabilities and insight potential.
I’d particularly like to highlight the value we’ve seen from voice of customer (VoC) data. For one of our clients, we used Adobe Customer Journey Analytics to bring together the web behavioral data, then brought in the Qualtrics voice of customer survey data. Marrying that quantitative and qualitative data together provided us with a new set of capabilities and insight potential.
For example, we can quickly segment on users who’ve indicated a problem with their experience, whether through sentiment or specific rating feedback. From there we can see what else they did in their journey as well as how their experience compares across multiple users that we segment against. We can then start to address these issues as well as use the audience in personalization and other marketing efforts.
Adobe Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) Capabilities
Joe and Eric expounded on the capabilities of Adobe Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) as a modern analytics platform, focusing on its ability to handle multiple data sources and create a single view of the customer, as well as its self-service analytics features.
Eric Matisoff: Taking a wider view some of the digital analytics platforms like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics and others, I’m curious—from your perspective, what makes Adobe Customer Journey Analytics unique or differentiated compared to some of their predecessors?
Joe Christopher: I’ve been referring to Adobe Customer Journey Analytics as a modernized analytics platform. We have to remember that some of these other platforms, including Adobe Analytics, were built long, long ago. They were impressive back then, but technology and capabilities—as well as expectations—have changed.
The biggest difference is that Adobe Customer Journey Analytics can bring together all of these multiple data sets to really help you understand the customer journey and break down the data silos in your organization.
Beyond that, there are features that will excite any analyst. I’ve witnessed it first-hand. For example, Adobe Customer Journey Analytics gives you the ability to retroactively and non-destructively create a new metric, or to create a new dimension based on specific logic or the built-in forecasting paired with anomaly detection. There’s so much the platform can do.
Migration and Implementation CASE STUDY
Joe walked Eric through a BlastX case study that recapped a client’s successful migration from Google Analytics to Adobe Customer Journey Analytics (CJA), highlighting both the benefits and the challenges of making this kind of transition.
Eric Matisoff: I talked with you last week about a big migration that your team led from Google Analytics over to Adobe Customer Journey Analytics. What was that process? What were the outcomes? Where were there hiccups, and where were your biggest successes?
Joe Christopher: This was a really large migration from Google Analytics to Adobe Customer Journey Analytics for a Federal healthcare agency. Due to the sunsetting of Google Analytics Universal, we had to do this in a very condensed period.
We completed the migration in under 10 months, during which time we migrated over 30 sites–all with different implementations. We joined together more than 15 different data sets to start showing the value of Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, migrated over 100 complex dashboards, and trained over 400 users.
With one of our clients, a Federal healthcare agency, we were even able to bring historical GA360 data into Adobe Customer Journey Analytics to allow self-service usage of the historical data.
To top it all off, we even brought the historical Google Analytics 360 (GA360) data into Adobe Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) to allow self-service usage of the historical data. The outcome has been very positive, especially when you consider how unified, self-service reporting has contributed to significant customer experience improvements.
When I talked about the power of voice of customer (VoC) data earlier, this was the client I had in mind. We brought in that voice of customer data to marry the quantitative and qualitative data together. Today, we have over 600 users in Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, leveraging that data to make informed decisions. That’s a significant win, and we’re really proud of the work that we continue to do with them.
Get More from Your Digital Experience Investments
The goal of this session was to share practical insights and give participants a deeper understanding of how to build a strong customer journey analytics foundation. This is a critical component in building customer journeys, and with a powerful platform like Adobe Experience Cloud, it’s just one part of a much bigger picture.
Interested in learning more and watching the Adobe Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) demo from the second half of this session? We encourage you to watch the LinkedIn Live session, which requires a quick registration before you are sent to the recording. Plus, you can register for our upcoming sessions that will be hosted live every two weeks over the summer.
BlastX Consulting helps companies of all sizes create superior digital experiences with their analytics and marketing platforms. Our expertise across the MarTech stack helps you unlock value from your digital marketing investment and deliver compelling personalized experiences at scale.
View Session 1: Building an End-to-End Customer Journey Analytics Foundation that Drives Insights and Action with Adobe Customer Journey Analytics (CJA)
Register for our upcoming customer experience-centric Adobe Experience Cloud LinkedIn Live sessions with experts from Adobe and BlastX:
