Translating data into insights with Adobe Customer Journey Analytics
Data visualization is an invaluable tool for businesses to improve data literacy throughout the team, which helps establish alignment and better decision-making across the organization. But how can you best make use of this skill?
How businesses effectively leverage data visualization
- Make your data accessible to a wider audience
It’s natural for those presenting data to want to do so with as much clarity and thoroughness as possible – though ironically, this can often mean losing the audience in overly complex data and explanations that they are not familiar with. This doesn’t mean you need to oversimplify your data, but a good rule of thumb is to filter the data through the lens of someone who doesn’t have specific expertise in the subject matter. It’s best not to assume data literacy within your audience, and to start with an introduction to the basic terms and values to establish common ground. From there, it will be easier for your audience to follow more complex insights and graphs to connect with the data.
- Get creative by storytelling with data
Regardless of what type of data you’re showing, incorporating visuals is a great way to make important insights engaging. When we think of data visualization as storytelling, it means we get to be creative in the way we explain facts. Everyone appreciates a good story; this makes it significantly easier and more enjoyable for an audience to relate to and retain material. Crafting a narrative using data helps you deliver a coherent, well-documented case that helps ground the audience and prove why numbers matter, and how they can be used to support insights and decisions.
- Foster alignment and buy-in to your decision-making process
When something is not working or needs to be improved, businesses will look to the data to find out why. This is where data visualization becomes an invaluable asset in the process of decision-making. It’s a tool that enables analysts to present critical insights about an organization’s past or current performance, and help determine the feasibility of future strategy. In making data ‘readable’ and accessible to everyone, the business is able to leverage the power of cross-functional perspectives to make decisions with greater confidence and alignment.
In short, data visualization is not just about presenting pretty dashboards and pie charts, but a necessary tool for businesses to understand their past, present, and future performance. Data visualization helps us find the signal in the noise and make use of important insights that would otherwise be lost in the sea of data.
Visualizing data with Adobe Customer Journey Analytics
The process of creating data visualizations often involves a great deal of manual work to compare varying data sets from multiple sources. Adobe Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) addresses this precise issue. Teams can use this tool to simplify complex, hard-to-connect data and quickly visualize insights about customer journeys. This process leverages various tools in the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP). Typically, businesses will implement a cross-channel data setup in AEP alongside a user ID (e.g. email address), which acts as the authenticator of the journeys. Adobe CJA is best suited to organizations with a large array of data across various channels, since it’s capable of connecting mobile and web data to your CRM systems and offline data streams (e.g. call centers and offline stores), providing you with a robust, cross-channel overview of your customers’ activity.
What are the main benefits of using Customer Journey Analytics?
Adobe CJA provides a clearer overview of the customer journey, combining data points from online and offline touchpoints across devices into a single customer profile. This lets us visualize the customer journey holistically: from the initial click on an ad, to scrolling the retail website, to communicating with a call center, and finally purchasing from their closest brick and mortar store. This offers great marketing power, shortening the time a business needs to spend comparing data from different sources and making the connections to draw out insights and translate them into recommendations and business actions for various teams.
Powered by AEP’s Experience Data Modeling (XDM), CJA can combine different data sources into a single view, significantly streamlining the process of investigating and comparing metrics in the customer journey. This makes it possible for businesses to pinpoint touchpoints that impact conversions and get actionable insights on what’s working and what to improve. In time, the team is able to build increasingly robust, accurate customer profiles and optimize the journey. Combined with the rest of Adobe Experience Platform’s functionality, businesses can achieve data independence, building their own particular data sets to visualize where customers go, what they’re interested in, and subsequently tailor solutions and offerings based on their needs.
Get in touch
Today, data is one of the main focuses for businesses across every industry to align the team and make informed strategic decisions. Leveraging automation and the right tools and solutions can make all the difference. At Cognizant Netcentric, we help organizations implement digital solutions to access the full potential of cutting-edge tools like Customer Journey Analytics. Get in touch with our team today to learn more, and start your digital transformation.