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Contributed on February 3, 2021

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Customer Journey Analysis with Daisy Wain from GOV.UK

The last Process Mining Café was all about customer journeys. In a customer journey analysis you look at the process from the viewpoint of the customer. We invited Senior Performance Analyst Daisy Wain from GOV.UK and also asked Rudi to join the session. You can now watch the recording here.

Customer Journey Mining at GOV.UK

At first, Daisy gave us a quick overview about her recent analysis of the user journey on the “Start a Business” part of the GOV.UK website.

A regular Google Analytics analysis only allows to look at two steps in a user journey (which page the visitors came from to arrive at the current page). In contrast, process mining allowed Daisy’s team to get an end-to-end view of the full user journey.

Challenge No. 1: What do you see as “Customer Journey”

Then, Rudi took us through the three main challenges that you will encounter when you analyze customer journeys with process mining.

The first challenge is that you need to determine the scope and the level of detail of what you want to see as the customer journey process. This seems simple at first. However, there are typically multiple options and there is not one “correct” answer.

Challenge No. 2: Dealing with Complexity

The second challenge is that you need to deal with complexity in different dimensions. First of all, many customer journey processes run across multiple channels. This means that data from different sources (e.g., click-streams, CRM system, etc.) needs to be combined to get the full view.

Another dimension is that the volume of data grows quickly, especially when you analyze data from high-traffic websites like GOV.UK. You need to select the data for your analysis in a smart way.

And finally, once you import your data into the process mining tool, you can expect a very complex process map as well. Rudi showed us in a live demo how this complexity can be reduced in Disco.

Challenge No. 3: Taking Action

The last challenge is that taking action to actually improve the process can be a little bit more complicated than in a regular improvement project.

Traditional processes typically have a process owner who is responsible for changing the process. For many companies, the responsibilities around customer journeys are not that clear. The topic is still quite new and the responsibility is not pushed to one person. At the same time, the place where the change should be made only becomes clear after the analysis and can affect different departments.

Finally, the customer is central to the customer journey process but cannot directly be controlled. User research needs to be carried out in addition to the actual process mining analysis for deeper root cause analyses.

Links

Here are the links that we mentioned during the session:

• Path Analysis in Google Analytics 360 by João Correia

• Simplification strategies to deal with complex process maps

• The public data set from the BPI Challenge 2016 that contains click-stream data (Disco workspace)

• Analyzing the Customer Lifecycle presentation by Carmen Vermeer and Noortje Groenendaal from Total Gas & Power at Process Mining Camp 2020

A big thanks again to Daisy and Rudi and to all of you for tuning in!

If you have questions or additional comments about process mining for customer journeys, send them our way via cafe@fluxicon.com. We are always happy to hear from you.