Analyzing Website Customer Journey Through Insightful Surveys: The Ultimate Guide

It seems like talking about the importance of customer experience is becoming more and more popular daily. 

However, it also seems like numerous businesses don’t get the essence of taking care of their customers.  

So, let’s get one thing straight:

To pay attention to your customers’ experience doesn’t mean to check up on them once in a while when you feel like it. On the contrary, it means to regularly analyze your customers’ journey and try to bond with them, helping them overcome different challenges on your website. 

If you’re constantly trying to work things out for them, you can expect them to feel satisfied and stay loyal to your brand. 

So, to be able to realize how comfortable they are with the way your business works, you should ask them for feedback. And to make sure that they will provide you with high-quality, precise information which you can use to improve your business website, you should create insightful surveys for them. This way, you’ll increase the efficiency of the entire data collection process and speed up the changes your customers crave for.

But how to build a survey that will help you understand and analyze their website journey? How to formulate the questions so that you can transform their feedback into actionable tips? 

Read on and Find Out. in This Article, We’re Discussing:

• How to create a typical customer journey map;
• How to create a survey that helps upgrade customer journey and overall business performance, with survey question examples;
• How these surveys help analyze customers’ journeys.

Customer Journey: What Is It And How To Track It?

A customer journey comprises all your customers’ experiences and decisions from the moment they visit your website until they leave it. The analysis of this path is vital as it helps:

• Determine the sequence of website visitors’ interaction points
• Investigate the impact of their experience on their loyalty and brand reputation
• Determine the problematic website areas, which may provoke customers’ frustrations, and improve them

So, to be able to use surveys to effectively monitor and analyze customers’ journey on your website, first, you have to figure out what this journey looks like in case of your business. And you can do this by creating a customer journey map, which shows your customers’ expected navigation through your website. 

The creation of a customer journey map depends on several important aspects that directly impact its effectiveness. 

To begin with, before designing the map, you should create adequate conditions by:

1. Understand your buyers’ persona. For this, you can use a customer journey survey to understand what they came looking for and their intent towards the product or service.
2. Predict your buyers’ potential expectations and intentions on your website. Track how the website customer journey turned out to be on the website and accordingly work towards designing a map.

Provided that you meet these two criteria, you’ll be able to design a realistic, appropriate map that can be helpful for your customer journey analysis. Only then, you can proceed to the essential aspects of mapping, which are:

1. The Identification of Touch Points

Touch points represent the interactions that website visitors make on your website before the purchase, while making a purchase and after the purchase.

2. The Collection of Visitors’ Impressions

To be able to get to the core of customer journey mapping, you have to get in touch with website visitors and make them open up about their experiences. Probably the most practical way of doing so is by creating a survey. And some of the survey question examples that you should consider are:

• Where did you hear about our brand?
• What did you expect when you visited our website for the first time? 
• Did we manage to meet your expectations? 
• What made you want to purchase our products? 

3. The Identification of Priority Issues

While your website visitors may point out more than one problematic aspect of your website, you probably won’t be able to address them all at a time. So, what you should do is realize what your priorities are. So, start with dealing with the one that represents the biggest obstacle for improved customer loyalty.

As you can see, creating a customer journey map and analyzing it, you’re getting more thorough information on customers’ actions and motivation, as well as their insecurities, uncertainties, and pain points on your website that you should address.

How to Create Insightful Surveys That Will Help Analyze Customer Journey

To create a survey that will help you analyze customer journey and provide representative results, you should have in mind three important rules of effective survey creation:

1. Make It Lightweight and Easily Visible

Whatever you do, make sure that your survey doesn’t slow down your website. Keeping it lightweight and easily visible, you’re reducing visitors’ frustrations and increasing their likeliness of filling it. 

So, to make sure it doesn’t occupy a lot of space and that it prevents from unpredictable bugs, create it using a reliable survey maker, such as ProProfs Survey Maker. With a tool like this, you get to:

• Create a lightweight survey in no time owing to a highly intuitive interface,
• Make the survey flawlessly fit in your website style, owing to highly customization options.

Now, to have the highest possible number of customers fill the survey, feature it in the right areas. And the best way of increasing survey exposure and improving its performance is by combining different placement options. So, if you’re wondering what positions you should combine, you may want to consider:

#1. Email Surveys

This is probably the most practical way of asking your customers to answer your questions. For instance, you can send an automated email with a survey to those who make a purchase (or perform another relevant action). 

#2. Website Surveys

If you decide to implement a website survey, you can either make it available on a special page or use your live chat software to promote it. On the one hand, when positioning a survey on a web page, you risk visitors not seeing it or not caring enough to deal with it. On the other hand, if your live support agent asks visitors to fill in a survey after a chat session, they will probably be more likely to do so. 

#3. In-App Surveys

If your brand has developed a mobile app, don’t hesitate to include your survey in it. Besides, you should know that your customers will be more likely to fill it if they can do it right there, within the app they use. If you’re redirecting them to another web page, you may end up losing their interest.

2. Make It simple and Undemanding

Even if they’re initially willing to spend some time answering your questions, visitors frequently decide to give up on it in the middle of the process. Since these situations will make it more difficult for you to get representative feedback for customer journey analysis, you should try to avoid them. So, when creating a survey, make sure to:

• Ask no more than ten questions
• Combine different types of questions
• Stay unbiased when making questions
• Use simple, easily-understandable questions
• Offer something stimulating (such as a small discount or special newsletter) to increase visitors’ interest in finishing the survey

When it comes to the survey questions, some of the most frequent and most effective question types that you can rely on:

• Open-ended questions (the respondents reply by writing whatever they consider relevant)
• Multiple-choice questions (based on a limited number of answers offered to respondents)
• Questions with two opposite answers (such as yes/no)
• Questions based on rating scales (1 to 5, 1 to 10, etc.)
• Questions that require filling in a gap with one of the offered descriptive answers 

3. Make Only Relevant, Value-Driving Questions

To analyze the customer journey effectively, you have to know what type of questions you should rely on in your survey. Having in mind that this journey comprises several stages and multiple touch points, it’s natural that each of them requires specific types of surveys. So, let’s check what each of these stages refers to, and what types of surveys and questions can be relevant for them.

#1. Pre-Sale Stage

When analyzing potential issues at this stage, you’re trying to figure out if your prospects have:

• Sufficient information to proceed to purchase;
• Difficulties to understand a certain aspect of the purchase.

#2. Post-Sale Stage

Having in mind the importance of customer experience, at this stage, you should get the info on their impressions. So, the questions you should make are those that can let you know:

• How satisfied your customers are with your product;
• How complicated the purchase process was for them;
• How likely they are to spread the word about your brand after the purchase;
• If they would change anything related to placing an order and making a purchase on your website.

#3. Support Stage

This stage can happen practically anytime during your customers’ journey on your website. And once you provide the support they needed, you should pay attention to their impressions. To evaluate the quality of this stage on your website, apart from evaluating the way you solved their issue, you should also check:

• How happy they are with the solution you offered;
• How they felt about the process of providing support;
• How they felt about the communication with the agent that provided support;
• How their unpleasant experience impacted their impressions on your brand, etc.

#4. Product Replacement, Return, or Cancellation Stage

Sometimes, this stage is inevitable, no matter how hard you try to prevent it from happening. So, when it occurs, you should try to get the most out of it by studying the reasons which led to it. 

Having in mind the importance of customer experience, their final feedback may be beneficial for your business future. So, to analyze this stage effectively, let them explain the aspect/ feature of your product/service that made them give up.

THE MOST INSIGHTFUL SURVEYS FOR WEBSITE CUSTOMER JOURNEY ANALYSIS

Now that we’ve gone through the essential stages of the customer journey let’s check the surveys that can help us perform their meaningful analysis and, therefore, improve customer experience and website performance. 

1. Survey Measuring Customer Satisfaction

The main goal of this survey is to determine how happy your website visitors are with any of the experiences they had on your website. Accordingly, it’s a survey that makes a useful evaluation tool in all phases of the customer journey. Being quite a simple survey that commonly doesn’t include more than a single question, it’s also highly efficient. It provides a large number of responses, not taking much of the visitors’ time. 

Survey question examples:

• Are you satisfied with our product/service? (Possible answers: yes/no)
• How would you evaluate the support you received on our website? (Possible answers: good/bad)

Apart from this central question, you can also add the optional open-ended one, where the respondents can justify their answers. When it comes to survey placement, with ProProfs Survey Maker, you can create it to fit live chat window, newsletter email, or a page on your website.

2. Survey Measuring Net Promoter Score

Your net promoter score measures your product buyers’ likeliness to recommend your product to other people. So, it’s practically a one to two-question survey that you should consider using in the post-sale stage of the customer journey after your customers have been using it for a while. It can be featured using the website or social media polls, or emails. 

Survey question examples:

• Would you recommend our brand to your friends or colleagues? (Possible answers: Yes/No)
• How likely are you to spread the word about our brand to your friends or colleagues? (Possible answer: a point on a scale (1 to 5 or 1 to 10) that describes customers’ impressions)

3. Survey Measuring Customer Effort Score

A survey measuring customer effort score is supposed to collect visitors’ feedback on how difficult it was for them to perform a certain action on your website. It’s usually sent after having website support help the visitor handle a problem.

This survey is extremely useful when analyzing the customer journey, having in mind the importance of customer experience when something goes in an unpredictable way. It’s usually presented as an email or on-page survey, as it’s usually sent about half-an-hour after providing support. 

Survey question examples:

• How difficult was it for you to perform a specific action? (Possible answers: 1 to 5 on a point-scale)
• How much effort did it take you to complete the process? (Possible answers: 1 to 5 on a point-scale)

You can also add an optional open-ended question to make them explain their evaluation and ask them to make suggestions that could improve their experience.

4. Survey Measuring Point Of Conversion

The point of conversion represents the moment when your website visitor becomes your customer. So, the point of this survey is to help you realize how satisfied your customers are with the purchase process. Accordingly, you should make it an on-page survey which will become visible to your new customers as soon as they make a purchase.

Survey question examples:

• How would you rate the purchase process? (Possible answers: 1 to 5 on a point-scale)
• How would you evaluate the buying experience? (Possible answers: 1 to 5 on a point-scale)

This survey can also include some open-ended questions that will help you understand the reasons why they evaluated you in a certain way.

5. Survey Measuring Customer Retention

This survey is an essential way of figuring out why your customers decide to downgrade, cancel, or return your product. It is the type of survey that you should use while your customers are going through one of the mentioned processes. Commonly, this survey usually comes in the form of an on-page questionnaire with open-ended questions.

Survey question examples:

• What made you downgrade/cancel/return the product?
• Are you still going to keep purchasing our brand’s products or services in the future?

How to Use Surveys to Analyze Customer Journey on Your Website

As you can see, the customer journey comprises all the actions your website visitors perform from the moment they load your website until they leave it. It includes:

• Identifying customers’ touch points;
• Collecting their impressions on different aspects of their journey;
• Spotting top priority issues that you should solve to improve your business performance. 

What makes the analysis of this process so important is the fact that its quality highly impacts your overall customer experience. 

While customer journey changes depending on the type of business, four stages are pretty similar for all of them. These are pre-sale, post-sale, and support stage, as well as product replacement, return, and cancellation stage. 

Each of these phases can be easily tracked and monitored using different types of surveys. And some of the most effective surveys that you can combine for a thorough customer journey analysis are:

• Customer satisfaction survey, which shows how pleased your website visitors are with different aspects of their journey;
• Net promoter score survey, which lets you know if your customers would recommend your products or services to their friends;
• Customer effort score survey, which shows how difficult it was for them to perform a specific action on your website;
• Point-of-conversion survey, which collects their opinions on the complexity of the purchase process, right after the purchase is made;
• Customer retention survey, which helps you understand how likely your customers are to repeat purchase, especially after experiencing some kind of issue during their customer journey.

Analyzing the feedback collected using these surveys, you can easily get to know what aspects of your business website should be improved to provide an impeccable experience. 

Finally, it’s good to remember that apart from creating relevant and easily understandable questions, you should also pay attention to the technical aspects of building a survey. 

Not only should you keep it lightweight and undemanding to avoid slow loading time, but you should also create it so that it visually fits your website. Accordingly, to make sure to create a high-quality survey, which can be customized as much as you want, you should also choose a reliable and flexible survey creator, such as ProProfs Survey Maker. 

Only when you take care of your survey both in technical terms and content-wise, you can expect it to provide optimal performance and realistic analysis of the customer journey.