Data management is critical for informed product development. When organizations have robust data management tools and instrumentation, product managers can understand their client base better, realize more monetization opportunities, and identify customer journey issues. The only way to know if this is occurring is with meaningful insights derived from data and analytics.

BI telemetry analysis is a great way to achieve these insights. It leverages the automated communication processes from multiple data sources. Telemetry data can then be used to improve customer journey experiences, check security, application health, quality, and performance.

Let’s look at how BI telemetry helps achieve these goals and drive meaningful business insights.

Understanding your customer journey

All customers go on a journey, from interest to product acquisition. This journey is only occasionally instrumented and often with disparate tools.

Within the acquisition lifecycle, website telemetry, Google analytics data, Apple App Store data, Facebook data, and other platform services commonly need to be stitched together. Later, within an overall app’s ecosystem, transaction and in-app interactions need to be tracked, particularly if the app has upsell goals tied to measurement of success.

All these tools can be visualized together on a Sankey diagram below (Fig. 1), enabling easy, simple visualization and analysis of an overall customer acquisition journey. When mapped out, this analysis can provide the basis for monetization opportunity identification, client base growth analysis and planning, and proactive identification of high-value customer issues.  

Proactive issue identification 

Often, the first thing observed is customers cycling out of a successful journey into a standardized point of loss.

As you can see in the example above, many users drop during the transaction step in our customer journey. This drop-off is well above the industry average, so there is likely a root cause.

By diving deep into the website’s logging data, we notice a recurring >5-second load occurring due to a widget issue with our payment transaction processor. Users will open a new tab during this 10-second load and often not return. We can quickly resolve this issue with a website update and by selecting an e-commerce option within our payment transaction processor.

With this update, we will see a smoother customer journey map.

Growth analysis and planning

By measuring users in the funnel, we can forecast results much more accurately, pinpoint spends, and provide data to inform feature roadmap conversations, allowing us to better plan for growth.

Measuring users in the funnel also allows us to measure the impact of individual features and user stories in dollars. Knowing the impact on the user base further allows for better product planning and a more systematic approach to product management.

Identify monetization opportunities and gain insight into your client base

Depending on the application and product function, growth strategy, and client base, upselling based on in-app opportunities and identifying opportunities for additional monetization around features, feature sets, or bundles of in-app content can be key.

Taking the baseline of data and integrating application hooks on a per-scenario basis enables this analysis to occur more frequently and with deeper engagement with the product team. By proactively identifying growth areas and engaging with the product team using data, it becomes possible to increase customer engagement and better understand the client base. This understanding of the client base will further help to drive important business actions like upsell, cross-sell, remarket or target lookalike client base.

Having access to the right data and tools can help product companies optimize customer journeys and gain new insights into their client base. This paves the way for faster growth, improved planning, and the ability to seize new monetization opportunities.

But how do you identify the “right” data, or the right tools? The most effective way is to leverage the expertise of a Microsoft Partner like Neal Analytics.

Commonly used tools for customer journey analysis

A host of different tools benefit from the in-depth analysis of data; Google Analytics & Adobe are common marketing-side hallmark products, while Mixpanel is more common on the product-side. Within websites, tools like Azure Log Analytics are often used and integrated within a website structure.

All these different pieces provide a unique data store for the product’s journey from user engagement to transaction and management. Still, comprehensive management across the lifecycle is essential to see ultimate product management success.

To solve these problems and integrate across key systems, Neal leverages a deep expertise in Azure.

First, we leverage Azure Data Factory to integrate data. Azure Data Factory allows us to easily connect and ingest multiple data sources into Azure. Then, we structure it using Azure Databricks, an Apache Spark-based service with robust data engineering capabilities.

After structuring data, we place the data in Azure Data Explorer to prepare it for analysis. A quick and completely managed data analytics tool, Azure Data Explorer provides real-time analysis on huge volumes of data streaming from many sources, including applications, websites, IoT devices, and more.

Finally, the data is compiled in Power BI dashboards for analysis. Power BI has artificial intelligence capabilities and is a highly recommended tool for business intelligence.

How can Neal help?

As a leading global provider of business intelligence and data analytics solutions, Neal has made it possible for its clients to benefit from detailed, engaging data visualization tools and drive critical business decisions. We have increased the accessibility of accurate data-driven insights to company decision-makers through simple and scalable user BI dashboards.

The metrics provided in the table below provide an in-depth view of the customer acquisition journey visualization and analysis.

Neal’s expertise in the process and tools can enable more rapid analysis. Contact us for assistance if you wish to deploy application monitoring utilizing telemetry; we will be happy to assist.