Customer Experience Analytics Formula Blog

Creating Business Process Reports to Optimize Process Conversions

Posted by Steven Perry on Nov 28, 2017 7:00:00 AM

Introduction:  

Offering an optimized customer experience requires more than just providing your online customers with enhanced web pages or advanced site functions -- it requires you to ensure that your entire online business process is optimized and nurtures conversions.  As customers progress through various process steps to complete transactions on your site, it is important to monitor your critical business processes and identify and alleviate customer friction within individual process steps.  Understanding where your customers may struggle within your business process offers you the opportunity to optimize your process steps, enrich customer experiences and improve conversions.  

 

Analysis Overview

By using process reports in Watson Customer Experience Analytics (CXA), you can gain visibility into the overall performance of your business processes and identify individual process steps that may require enhancements or improvements.   By then comparing the performance of process steps across a common process flow for different segments of your business, you can recognize segments that may require increased refinements and optimization.

 

Analysis Benefits:  

  • Measure and score overall business process success by identifying the abandonment and conversion rates across and within each step of a critical business process
  • Uncover customer struggles or usability issues in your business process steps to identify areas requiring improvements and optimization.
  • Compare segments across a common process flow to identify segments that may be underperforming and require fine-tuning to increase the success of your overall business process.

 

Analysis Formula

This customer experience analytics (CXA) formula will explain how you can:

  1. Create process reports in Watson CXA to gain visibility into the performance of your business processes by identifying the conversion rates and abandonment rates for all process steps.
  2. Drill deeper with session analysis to understand what causes abandonments in your process steps and implement the necessary improvements to increase conversions.
  3. Compare process reports for different segments across a common process flow to begin to recognize process issues with particular segments of your business, allowing you to improve underperforming segments and processes and overall optimize your customer experiences.

 

Create process reports for your critical business processes

Online business processes differ, but common examples include placing an order for a product on your ecommerce site or registering a new user account for your business.   Similarly, the process steps and sequence of events can vary and may include the following:   place items in a shopping cart, provide customer information and shipping address, complete payment method, review order and submit order for fulfillment.   The events that follow the placement of a customer order are key in your overall business process as well and can include:  processing payments, verification of orders and shipment of the final products and more.

As such, you will want to ensure you have events built to record the important process steps that make up the sequence of events that define the flow of your critical business processes. 

 

  1. Create a process report using the Report feature in Watson CXA
    1. Go to Optimize > Analytics and go to your workspace.
    2. Select Add widget and select Create Report > Process report from the Actions menu.  The New Process Report page is displayed.
    3. Select an application profile and click Next.  Select metrics as step page is displayed.
    4. Select the steps that define your business process.
      1. From the Metrics column, select the events that when sequenced together define the process that you want to score or evaluate.
      2. Drag each object one at a time a time to the Steps column. The metrics are linked together in a sequential process flow in the Steps column.
      3. For each step you select, the absolute numbers of visitors are counted, and a conversion rate is calculated.
    5. Enter a step name for each metric you added to the Steps column and click Next
    6. Select any additional segments or use the default segment only. 
    7. Click Create to Preview your Process report. 
    8. Click Save report to create the report and add it to your workspace.
  1. Evaluate your Process Report to understand how the steps in your business process are performing.
    1. Process reports automatically measure and score (against defined goals) the overall success and failure of your online process steps.
    2. Analyzing the scoring for each process step allows you to easily identify process steps that include a percentage of abandonments that fall outside expected or typical percentages for your business.

Ongoing monitoring of your process report is important and can help your identify significant changes in performance across your business processes that might signal a concern, allowing you to quickly rectify issues and keep your business processes and customer experiences optimized.

 

Drill deeper to understand what causes abandonments

By identifying process steps that reflect a higher than normal percentage of abandonments, you have the ability to analyze sessions to better understand the cause of customer friction or struggle within the process step(s).  

 

Process Report image_1.png

Example:  Process Report in Watson CXA

 

For example, if your process step for “Check Out” is showing a high percentage of abandonments, you can drill down into sessions to understand if customers may be entering expired promotion codes or an invalid payment type.  Or, if you have added a new step to your registration process, and abandonments are high for the new process step, you can use session analysis to understand if customers may be confused on the new step or if there may be an issue with your registration form or field.   As a streamlined and frictionless business process is key to creating loyal customers and boosting conversions, it is important to quickly identify and understand what obstacles may prevent customers from successfully progressing through your business process steps with optimized experiences.

 

Compare segments for a better understanding of your overall business process performance

Comparing your process reports for different segments allows you to look at how your various segments are performing across a common business process flow or how your data from process reports may change over a period of time by comparing different dates.   By comparing process reports, you are able to identify individual segments that encounter challenges in your business process steps and then apply improvements to increase conversions across your entire business process.  

For example, you can compare a process report for all mobile visitors and a process report for all desktop web visitors to determine if a segment encounters a struggle in a particular process step.    If your mobile visitors struggle during a particular process step, while your desktop visitors do not, you can then drill down further to understand what is causing friction for your mobile visitors.  Perhaps one of your process steps is not optimized for mobile?  Or, are your mobile abandonments isolated to a particular operating system?  You can also compare segments to understand if customers struggle in a particular geography or if customers encounter friction while using a particular browser across your business process.

 

1. Compare process reports for different segments

There are a couple of ways you can compare segments or audiences for process reports in Watson CXA. 

First, you can update the audience view or date view when viewing a process report.    

  1. While viewing a process report from your workspace, click the audience or date boxes in the upper left corner to switch your audience view or date range view
  2. The process report will refresh to reflect the data for the updated audience or date

Or, you can compare process reports for different audiences or dates for a common process flow in a side by side comparison view.

  1. From your workspace Open the Process report for which you want to compare data.
  2. Select the Compare The Compare mode dialog is displayed.
  3. Enter the compare criteria. You can compare by date or by segment.
    1. Enter the date or segment for the current report and enter the dates or segments for the comparison report.
    2. Select Applyto apply your criteria to the report.
    3. The original report and the report with the new date or segment are shown side by side for comparison. You can view the data in chart and grid form.
  4.  Select Save Reportto save the report to your workspace and enter a name for the report.
  5. Select the Full screenicon on the saved report to return to the side-by-side comparison view.
  6. Select the Comparelink to exit Compare mode.

 

Process Report image_2.png Example:  Comparison of Process Reports for Different Segments in Watson CXA

 

2. Analyze the comparison data across the process reports

Comparing the performance of process steps for different segments across a common process flow allows you to easily recognize customer struggles for a distinct segment and understand if a particular segment is impacting your business process success.  With this increased insight, you have the ability to make improvements that will increase conversions and the success of your business process across all segments  

By creating process reports, you are able to look at the performance of your overall business process and understand where you may be losing customers in your process, providing you the opportunity to optimize your process steps to improve the customer experience and boost conversions.

 

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Topics: Watson Customer Experience Analytics, Watson CXA, business process

About this blog

The CXA Formula Blog is designed to provide formulas or recipes in using IBM Watson Customer Experience Analytics and Tealeaf CX on Cloud. This includes formulas in digital analysis, customer experience analytics, journey analytics, and Universal Behavior Exchange. These formulas are designed to provide you insight and best practices in customer analytics.

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