Data Analytics

How Application Analytics Can Optimize Your Customer Experience Strategy

Teresa Wingfield

March 15, 2023

With growing concerns of a recession, many application providers are turning their attention to developing a better customer experience strategy for their existing customers. This strategy often includes application analytics to improve customer retention and growth. Here’s a quick look at what application analytics is and ways to use it to measure and improve customer satisfaction.

What is Application Analytics?

Application analytics refers to the process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data from applications to gain insights into usage patterns, user satisfaction, application performance, and user sentiment. Application providers can leverage these insights to enhance their customer experience strategy by using Application Analytics to:

  1. Evaluate Usage: By understanding how users are really interacting with your software, application providers can identify opportunities to increase user satisfaction. With real-time analytics, providers can more easily spot areas that need improvements such as bugs and missing features. User drop-off points reveal where users get stuck so you can fix the usability issue to increase application adoption. Average session length (how much time the user spends in the application) and sessions per user (how frequently users return to your application) help you understand if the application is delivering user value.
  2. Measure User Satisfaction: In addition to customer usage, there are a plethora of key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that high-tech companies should keep an eye on to determine how satisfied users are with their applications. Active users, retention rate, churn rate, user lifetime value, monthly and annual recurring revenue, and average revenue per user help gauge if users are seeing the value and determine ways to grow the subscription base. Customer service KPIs are also especially important since they let you know if you are living up to your customer’s expectations. You should analyze KPIs such as the number of support tickets, first response time (how long it takes to provide an initial response), first contact resolution (whether the issue was resolved in one interaction), and average handle time (how long it takes to resolve an issue). If KPIs aren’t what they should be, high-tech companies should immediately prioritize customer service improvements that will build user loyalty.
  3. Analyze Application Performance: Another way application analytics can improve the customer experience is by providing real-time insights into application performance. Proactively monitoring KPIs such as memory, CPU and disk usage, response time, latency, uptime and error rates, and many others as well as quickly responding to issues helps prevent negative customer experiences. Also, remember to track on-premises and cloud infrastructure metrics that impact application performance.
  4. Uncover User Sentiment: Sentiment analysis helps application providers discover and measure how users feel about their products. Sentiment analysis with natural language processing (NLP) determines the emotional tone behind a body of text or a conversation so that companies can better understand their users’ opinions and attitudes towards them, including products and services. Support tickets, emails, online chats, and phone calls are all useful information sources that applications analytics can exploit to reveal user sentiment.

Application Analytics for CX

Application analytics plays a crucial role in improving the customer experience by providing insights into usage patterns, user satisfaction, application performance, and user sentiment. By leveraging these insights, application providers can make data-driven decisions that retain customers and drive greater usage.

To be successful, you’ll need the right data platform for your application analytics. The Actian Data Platform, with data integration, data management, and real-time data analytics, makes it easy to execute application analytics for optimizing your customer experience strategy.

About Teresa Wingfield

Teresa Wingfield is Director of Product Marketing at Actian where she is responsible for communicating the unique value that the Actian Data Platform delivers, including proven data integration, data management and data analytics. She brings a 20-year track record of increasing revenue and awareness for analytics, security, and cloud solutions. Prior to Actian, Teresa managed product marketing at industry-leading companies such as Cisco, McAfee, and VMware.