How To Use Real User Monitoring As A Customer Journey Mapping Tool

By Yosan Legaspi | Posted Aug 10, 2016 | 6 min. (1224 words)

You don’t have to be blind when building new software features, especially since so much dev time and money goes into every stage of release. Customer journey mapping can make sure the features you release are consistent with what your customers want.

Having a document like this is like having a road map before you go on an epic car journey. Making data driven decisions around feature releases and product updates become a breeze. Especially if you have the data to back it up. It’s a delicate balance between actionable insights and just more noise from irrelevant data, and building a document that’s reliable does take a little time. However having a solid customer journey map will help your company obtain reliable and actionable insights on what your customers are doing inside your app, making arguments for and against using valuable resources much easier.

What Is A Customer Journey Map?

A document that maps how customers move through an application from first touch point to exit.

What better way to understand customers than through their behavior? If we can anticipate a customer’s needs before they get to a certain milestone in your app, we’ll know how to move them to the next step. Perhaps this is with a well-placed call to action or shopping cart. (More on how having a customer journey map helps build better software here)

Customer journey maps are designed to sit alongside customer personas and analytic tools. You may already have a wealth of tools to give your team sample sizes of your audience. However, to build a reliable customer journey map, it’s essential that you can understand how customers are using your software in these key areas:

  • Most popular pages
  • Navigation
  • Platform

Here they are in more detail. We’ll also look at how a Real User Monitoring tool can provide a reliable data source when understanding the journey a customer takes through your app.

Check your most popular pages and see how they correlate to your customer journey map.

It’s in your best interest to get and keep these pages incident free. No one wants bugs and slow load times to affect their workflow.

Your most requested pages could be responsible for most of the hits to your server. Find out where possible stress points are and optimize them before your customers receive a negative experience.

In Raygun Real User Monitoring you can quickly determine the most requested pages by navigating to the ‘Performance’ tab. You can then view the ‘Most requested pages’ table.

Now you know what pages your customers use the most, check the page load times with the colored bars on the right of the page URL. Is the load time surprisingly slow? Find out why by digging deeper.

(Read up on how to do a quick page load speed check)

When you click on a page link, you can find out all the requests on that page. This is paramount in determining what you and your team can fix, optimize or remove.

If you spot un-minified JavaScript, for example, get your dev team to minify it and see that asset’s load time shrink.

Are there images which are adding significant, precious seconds to the load time? Consider CSS instead.

For the product and design teams, look through the most requested pages and see if there’s anything these pages have in common to make them the most popular among your users. Is there anything your team can replicate in other areas of your site or app?

What happens, though, if you checked the most requested pages and something isn’t matching what you originally thought?

If you worked hard on a feature, you expected to be part of the customer journey map, but see the page it’s on doesn’t even make it to the top 20 of the most requested pages, it can be disheartening.

The first place to look is the data that you used to support this feature in the first place. If that data is reliable, perhaps the way you expected customers to navigate needs an adjustment.

Here’s an example:

  1. Say you receive a support ticket asking where a particular setting is.
  2. Locate that user in your Real User Monitoring tool and check the paths they took in their most recent sessions to try and locate the setting.
  3. You then see how many support tickets over the past six months have asked for the same thing.
  4. If there is an unreasonable amount, you can then take action to make it easier for customers to find the notification settings.

In Raygun Real User Monitoring, you can quickly view user session and see the exact pages they visited. You can also see how long they spent on a page, and check their experiences for each. If you see a page has a slow load time, just click on it and view why.

There are two ways to view user sessions:

  1. Using the **Sessions **tab: Click on the magnifying glass to the right of the user to view their session
  2. Using the Users tab: Click on a user and view all their sessions in the Session table. Click on a date to dig deeper into a particular session

On top of viewing session page views, Raygun Real User Monitoring displays which devices and platforms are the most popular among your users.

Platform

By now, you’ve found the most popular pages on your site and optimized them for seamless customer experiences.

You’ve tweaked your customer journey map based on actual user behavior – and may have done some customer research into the way individuals are navigating your app.

Now it’s time to tie them together by building a solid platform experience.

More than half of the time someone uses the internet is on a mobile device. But just because the trend is there, doesn’t mean you have spent hours bloating your site or web app with features for mobile devices.

Company time – dev, marketing, product, support – is precious. Use data to back up your decisions.

In Raygun Real User Monitoring, you can view platform information by navigating to the **‘Platform’ **tab.

You may find that fewer people than you thought used your site on a mobile device. From here, you need to determine if this is because your site isn’t particularly mobile friendly or because people prefer to use your site on a desktop.

How would you find this out? The old fashioned way – ask them!

As mentioned in the second point, you can check out user sessions with Real User Monitoring. Every session also has user data. If you have a site or app with a sign in, you can capture contact information, such as email.

You can use Real User Monitoring as a customer journey mapping tool

Data is vital to give you information on customer behavior. Using this data to map how customers are using your app can help drive major decisions on resource allocation and allow you to have confidence in your decisions.

Do you want to dig deeper into your customer? Raygun Real User Monitoring allows you to see exactly how individuals are moving through your app so you can put your resources where they count.

Trial Real User Monitoring for 14 days here and ship with confidence.