Visualizing Customer Journeys: How to Illustrate the Entire Customer Interaction Universe of a Commercial Website in Real Time

During the last decades, the internet has become an increasingly important channel for businesses to sell products and communicate with customers. Web analytics helps companies to understand customer behavior and optimizes processes to satisfy the customer needs but there is still room for improvement in real-time visualization in the context of business content. In this paper, we describe a graph-based visualization showing the entirety of the website activities at a glance. To increase the tangibility of customer behavior, the graph adapts to the website interactions in real time using smooth transitions from one state to another. Furthermore, we incorporate machine learning in our data integration process to deal with the dynamics of change of website content over time. Finally, we conduct an evaluation in the form of expert interviews revealing that our approach is suitable to optimize digitalized business processes, initiate marketing campaigns, increase the tangibility to the customer, and put a stronger focus on customer needs.