Analytics with a Purpose

Analytics are a great thing, but quite often we have a lot of data, but not a lot of ability to easily act on that data. It is one thing to understand, for instance, the different ways users try to accomplish a specific task and it is a whole other effort to influence those user actions to provide a better customer experience. Providing actions that can be taken on data is more powerful than the raw data alone.

In our case, one of the primary uses of analytics is in targeting guides based on the analyzed behavior of your customer base.

Educating users about how to accomplish a task is a great example of what I mean by that. In Pendo, you can set up path analysis to see the different steps a user might take in trying to accomplish a particular task. You may find that certain paths are efficient and effective in enabling the customer to achieve the desired outcome, but other paths are inefficient or worse yet, do not yield the desired results.

By taking this knowledge of customer paths and using it to build in-application guides, you can gently nudge customers to more efficient steps to accomplish their tasks, or teach them why their existing approach will not achieve the results they desire. And you can personalize this guidance based upon the past behavior of the specific customers you are helping. By combining guidance and powerful analytics in this way, you are providing an enriching and highly personalized product experience.

Informing customers about the functionality you have is another great example of analytics with a purpose. Quite often in the past when working with product companies, we would see data about usage patterns and be able to identify customers segments that look like they would get value from specific areas of product functionality, but for some reason were not using those functional areas. What we often found through followup calls and interviews is that those customers were not aware of the existence of that functionality. By combining this analytics information with guides, we can identify those customers and teach them about the product capabilities that they were not aware of.

These types of applications of analytics, with a purpose so to speak, can be very powerful and lead to much better customer experiences and happier customers. And happier customers lead to less churn and more revenues.

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