According to a recent study, approximately half of consumers think their attention span is shorter today than it used to be. Access to multiple forms of technology, the proliferation of shorter content, and a faster news cycle all pull people’s attention in multiple directions each day. This means that as a brand, you’re not just competing with other businesses in your industry; you’re vying for consumer attention in a crowded digital marketplace.  

To convince consumers to interact with your brand, you need to provide an excellent experience across digital touchpoints – not just on your website, but on mobile, in apps, and on any other branded properties. Remember: your competition is only a click away.  

Brands need to know how to build an optimized site that captures the most attention and engagement as possible. Zendesk found that 65% of customers want to buy from companies that offer quick and easy online transactions. You can see this in the one-click “Buy Now” buttons that exist on many websites today.  

Retention is no easier. Even if you have built a relationship with a customer and they love your brand, it doesn’t mean they’ll stay loyal forever. PwC found that 32% of customers will stop doing business with a brand they love after only one negative experience. You need to be able to understand how consumers interact with your properties so you can ensure each engagement is simple and seamless. However, many brands rely on traditional web analytics which only tell part of the story. 

The unfortunate case of the digital experience insights gap 

I was recently joined by our partner Pereion Solutions to discuss how going beyond traditional web analytics can lead to a better understanding of the digital customer experience (CX). 

Having only a partial view of the customer experience is like trying to put out a house fire with a garden hose. You’ll do the best you can, but without firefighters and an industrial strength firehose that has the necessary water pressure, volume, and fire retardant, you’ll only be able to do so much. 

Optimizing the digital customer experience is similar. Traditional web analytics (think: Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics) may show where consumers are clicking and engaging or how traffic is spiking or dipping on a particular webpage. But this is the “what,” and not the “why” behind consumer behavior.  

If you see engagement and traffic drop, you’ll be able to identify that an issue must be resolved, but you won’t be able to gain a deep enough understanding of why this is occurring. Perhaps a button is broken or a field for credit card information can’t be filled out, causing consumers to drop before completing their purchase. If you don’t know that there’s a larger issue at play, you may send the individual customer a reminder about items in their cart, only to cause more frustration when the experience isn’t truly fixed. As problems arise, you must solve the micro problem that the individual customer is having but also the macro problem that may be affecting your bottom line.  

When customer experience can be a deciding factor for consumers, “good enough” isn’t good enough. Solving individual issues along the digital journey without digging into why they’re happening can lead to lower revenue, lower customer retention, and a worse overall customer experience.  

Real-time visibility you can act on 

So how can organizations solve these problems? By moving beyond web analytics to powerful digital experience insights.  

Digital experience insights, such as those provided by Tealeaf by Acoustic, can help your team make data-driven decisions rather than relying on intuition alone.  

With Tealeaf, your CX team – including customer support, DevOps, marketing and others who touch the customer experience and customer journey – will be able to find and fix issues in real time before they cause consumers to bounce. Automatic alerts notify you when anomalous behavior occurs, enabling you to see exactly what your customers are seeing and where they’re running into issues on your digital properties. By capturing more granular data than traditional web analytics, Tealeaf can automatically analyze individual and collective group behavior so you can pinpoint which session replay to watch instead of sifting through multiple replays, or manually tagging every element.  

Any customer support tickets and frustrations can be looked at on a session-basis in real time. This enables customer support teams to see exactly what the customer experienced without asking them to repeatedly explain where friction occurred, helping resolve support tickets easier and quicker. Engineering teams can also see what caused the issue on the back end and resolve it, improving the user experience for all. 

The customer experience is the primary differentiator in the digital economy. To be competitive, you need to be able to attract and retain consumer attention on your website and mobile properties. With a full view of the digital customer experience, you can create an optimized journey for every customer, every time.