Customer Experience Analytics Formula Blog

Evaluating Your Customers’ Mobile Experiences with Watson CXA

Posted by Steven Perry on May 23, 2017 7:00:00 AM

Introduction

You understand the importance of offering exceptional customer experiences across all the journeys that customers take with your brand.   Of growing importance across these journeys is the mobile experience, as mobile is fast becoming the preferred customer tool for interacting with brands and it serves to integrate customer experiences across channels.   But, how can you begin to assess the mobile experience your site is offering to your customers?  Do your mobile customers struggle?  And if they do, where and why do they encounter issues? 

 

Analysis Overview

Using IBM Watson CXA, you can segment two major categories of customer engagement – desktop web and mobile web  – and compare conversion and abandonment rates for each to begin to understand how mobile is performing.  By further segmenting mobile by operating system, evaluating mobile gestures across different sessions and employing additional usability analytics, you can gain increased insight into your mobile customers’ intentions, experiences and struggles and better implement site design changes to ensure your mobile opportunities are maximized.

 

Analysis Benefits:  

  • Assess your customers’ mobile experiences to identify potential areas of struggle and better understand how your mobile web business is performing relative to desktop web.
  • Gain insight to address opportunities for increased optimization in your mobile channel
  • Offers opportunity to retarget customers who may have abandoned due to poor mobile experiences and the potential to build brand loyalty and maximize mobile sales.

Analysis Formula

This customer experience analytics (CXA) formula will assist you with using Watson CXA to further segment data you use to evaluate standard business processes to generate reports that provide views into your mobile business and mobile customers’ experiences, and then advise on how you can apply additional usability analysis like heat maps to achieve even more valuable insight into your customers’ mobile interactions with your site.

This analysis is flexible and you should select the standard business process metric reports that are most applicable to your site and business key performance indicators (KPIs.

Create Session lists segmented with mobile-specific data

Many of the reports you create to regularly examine standard business practices on your site – like reports on abandoned carts or abandoned sessions and reports on order confirmation -- can easily be constructed and segmented to display mobile-specific data.   

  1. To include mobile-specific data in your reporting, you will want to create events to record relevant information on mobile customers such as platform, operating system (OS), OS version, device, device model, device vendor, mobile carrier, as well as orientation changes, gestures, unresponsive gestures, and resize gestures.

As a starting point, compare your desktop web business to your mobile web business to get a baseline view of how mobile is performing.    For example, you could build your “abandoned carts” or “abandoned sessions” reports to include platform so you can take a look at both desktop web and mobile web customers.   Or, you could compare desktop web and mobile web customers in your “order confirmation” reports.    How many mobile customers complete orders compared with desktop web customers?    Do more mobile web customers abandon their carts compared to desktop web customers?   How many desktop web sessions take place in a day, week or month compared to the number of mobile web sessions?  

After you have a basic view of your mobile business, you will want to create session lists to further evaluate your mobile customers and better understand why and where they may struggle.   To create mobile session lists, you can select from the reports you built to evaluate your mobile business, as described above (i.e. order confirmation reports, abandoned carts or abandoned session reports), and use session search to further filter and segment mobile customers by mobile-specific attributes including orientation changes, gestures and mobile OS, for example.  

Mobile experience_image.png

Using session search, you can select from user-defined or out of the box objects to filter your search results by specific criteria or particular user behavior.    With session search, you can:

  1. You can select to “include” or “exclude” particular conditions in your session search.
  2. From the “Field” option, you can select from events, dimensions, session attributes and more to be included or excluded for your session search results.
  3. You can also select “add another condition” to include or exclude an additional condition to your session search.
  4. After you configure the desired search, a list of sessions matching your selected criteria will be displayed. Each row represents an individual customer session.
  5. You can replay any of the sessions by clicking the replay arrow as displayed to the far left of each row.
  6. You can also select from different “views” such as overview, customer, performance, gestures or environment.
  7. After the mobile data is properly configured, you can “export” the reported data and pin to your workspace for on-going analysis of your mobile performance.

As a start, you may want to filter your session search by mobile OS as a session attribute to begin to take a look at mobile performance (i.e. abandonments and conversions) relevant to specific mobile OS.     Was a particular mobile OS linked to a high number of abandonments?   To drill down further, you can filter the data by OS version or device model to better understand if a particular OS version or model of device is causing a struggle for the mobile customers on your site.  

Insight into mobile gestures like resizing and orientation changes are also important events and session attributes to consider when evaluating your mobile data.   Do you observe a high number or orientation changes for customers using iOS versus Android?   Do most customers using Windows Mobile perform resizing gestures?   To help answer these questions – and most importantly, to understand why these particular actions may be happening -- you can access replay for specific sessions from the mobile lists you create to see the exact customer interaction and experience on your site.  Are important function buttons readily displayed on the mobile screen?   Do particular mobile customers need to resize their screen or change orientation to properly see key information on your site?  The ability to replay sessions and observe the customer experience can help you answer these questions and work to better optimize your site. 

 

Apply usability analytics for increased insight into mobile experiences

Finally, applying additional usability analytics like heat maps can be very beneficial in identifying usability flaws on your mobile site that may cause customer confusion and struggles.   By identifying particular sessions and pages where your mobile customers struggled – and applying heat map analytics to the particular page – you can isolate what caused struggles for your mobile customers and better enable an optimal mobile site design.  Heat mapping can be a powerful tool in helping you to maximize opportunities with our mobile customers, and we will cover this in more detail in a future CXA formula.

Ensuring that you are offering exceptional experiences to your mobile customers is becoming a paramount component of an overall successful CX strategy.   Using Watson CXA, you can effectively segment standard business processes using mobile-specific attributes and begin to understand how your mobile channel is performing.   Further segmentation and analysis of the mobile data can help you drill down and understand where – and why – your mobile customers may struggle, allowing you the ability to optimize your mobile experience and maximize opportunities with mobile.  

 Su

Topics: Customer Experience Analytics Formula

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.

Watson, Can you help improve digital experience ebook
 
Read the Shubert TIcketing CXA Case Study

Recent Posts