Customer journey management encompasses three primary approaches to CX: journey mapping, journey analytics and customer journey orchestration.
Each approach helps organizations understand, create and improve customer experiences. These approaches are often combined to enhance experience design, generate journey insights and optimize journeys. This is the foundation of experience orchestration.
Here is a quick summary of the primary journey management capabilities and the three most frequently used ways to combine them.
- Journey mapping is a way to visualize and communicate your customer’s experience across touchpoints and over time as they seek to achieve a specific goal.
- Journey analytics is the science of analyzing customer behavior data across touchpoints and over time. It allows you to measure the impact of customer behavior on business outcomes.
- Journey orchestration is a way to use each customer’s entire experience to inform and personalize interactions that will improve customer experience and drive desirable outcomes.
- Journey insights are the quantitative and qualitative information that help you understand the behavior of your customers as they seek to achieve a goal.
- Journey design is the process of defining the experience a customer has as they seek to achieve a goal and the interactions the company will take at each step to promote progress toward the goal.
- Journey optimization is a closed-loop approach that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to improve the experience of each customer, so they can achieve their goal more efficiently.
Customer Journey Management and the Path to Experience Orchestration
Leading enterprises around the world are using customer journey management to improve customer experience, delivering value to both their customers and the organization. You can do the same by taking prescriptive steps that align your business around your customers’ journeys.
Here are three ways you can support a journey management program within your organization:
Manage Customer Journey Data
Customer journey management starts with the creation of a centralized source of customer journey data. Most organizations are drowning in customer data stored in isolated databases, centralized data warehouses and more modern customer data platforms. And they lack the integrated time-series data that provides the foundation for a journey management approach.
Integrated customer journey data enables real-time analytics, modeling and orchestration based on the behaviors customers exhibit across channels and over time. It eliminates the need for analysts to perform complex aggregations or transformations every time they need to answer a new question.
Adopting a customer journey data hub provides all parts of the business with the real-time data they need to help each customer reach their goal efficiently.
Measure Journeys Across Channels and Over Time
To improve customer experience, CX teams use customer journey analytics to measure the performance of each journey and the in-journey signals that predict success. There are a wide variety of in-journey metrics — like conversion, NPS, customer satisfaction, inaction, elapsed time and more — that should be evaluated to see which captures the key moments that predict success for each journey.
Journey success is captured through journey scores, which are based on end-of-journey metrics, such as satisfaction, completion rates, cost or effort scores. More CX leaders now rely on customer journey management to measure, monitor and assess the performance of customer journeys.
Optimize Journeys to Help Customers Achieve Goals Efficiently
Traditionally, enterprises focus on improving interactions within specific touchpoints. But this neglects the actual journey your customers take across channels and over time. Customer journey orchestration is a way to use each customer’s entire experience to inform and personalize interactions that will improve customer experience and drive desirable outcomes.
It’s critical to understand each customer’s historical experience and current goals. Customer journey optimization is a closed-loop approach that uses AI and machine learning to improve the experience of each customer, so they can achieve their goal more efficiently. In recent years, CX and marketing professionals have adopted customer journey orchestration software as a preferred way to achieve journey optimization.
Combining journey data and customer journey measurement enables CX and marketing teams to prioritize actions that have the highest potential impact on both your business goals and your customers’ experiences.
Together, these three components of the customer journey management framework will enable you to make your customers happy and help your organization meet desired business outcomes.
5 Steps to Succeed with Customer Journey Management
Becoming a journey-centric organization starts from the top. Leaders must prioritize and organize the business around their customers and the journeys they take. Once company leadership has made the commitment, the real work begins.
Implementing an effective customer journey management program starts by realigning roles and responsibilities around customer goals. You should identify the journeys that matter most to your customers, define success metrics and map those metrics to key business outcomes.
1. Align Your Entire Organization Around Your Customers and Their Experiences
Every enterprise strives to be customer-centric or customer obsessed, but the key to achieving that level of customer centricity is to keep your organization focused on what matters most: your customer.
Many companies approach customer experience from a siloed lens, often implementing improvements to increase internal, function-specific metrics. For example, marketing prioritizes conversions, CX prioritizes NPS, contact center prioritizes first-contact resolution (FCR) and so on.
But your customer isn’t focused on conversion or FCR rates. They just want a simple, frictionless way to reach their own goals.
By aligning your entire business around your customer, their goals and the journeys they take to achieve them, you can better understand customer behavior and make more informed decisions about how to optimize CX.
When everyone across the organization is on the same page, it becomes easier to deliver the frictionless, connected and personalized experiences your customers expect.
More organizations are adopting customer journey management to align their people around journeys. The majority of high-performing organizations (68%) have a role or team dedicated to journey management, compared to 31% that underperform. Overall, 53% of organizations currently have a dedicated role or team, 10% plan to add one, and 19% have aligned existing roles/teams with a journey-based approach.
2. Make Sure Everyone Is Using the Same Definition of Customer Journey
The term “customer journey” is used so frequently these days that it’s difficult for some to remember what it really means. A customer journey is the sequence of steps a customer takes to achieve a goal that delivers value to themselves and the business.
Despite the best efforts of hundreds of software vendors and consultants, a customer journey is not:
- A marketing campaign
- A single interaction, such as completing a purchase or placing a support call
- A set of sequential clicks, like opening an email, clicking a link, viewing a page and submitting a form
- An internal process created by the company for the customer
In addition, customer journeys should not be defined by the length of time or even the channels involved. They vary depending on the customer’s goal.
Later in this post, I discuss seven types of customer journeys that every company should manage, monitor and improve.
3. Identify the Journeys That Matter to Your Customer
Customers can exhibit different behavior; no two customers take the same exact path across touchpoints. The key is to identify the goals your customers are trying to achieve, then align them with your organization’s goals.
For instance, the journeys a customer takes to renew or upgrade a service are critical to the success of a telecom provider striving to retain customers and maximize customer lifetime value. Initiating automatic loan payments may be a crucial journey for a financial services institution attempting to reduce the cost of collecting overdue payments.
Once you establish the goals that matter most to your customer and your business, identify the significant steps that indicate progress toward those goals. For instance, a mortgage journey encompasses several milestones, from assessing options to submitting an application to paying the first bill.
4. Define Success Metrics for Your Customers and Your Business
Measuring success always starts by putting your customer first. From their perspective, define what it means to achieve their goals. For a health insurance member, that may mean a new dependent, such as a spouse or a newborn, is officially insured. Or, a wireless customer may define success as restoring internet service after an outage.
First identify the KPIs, which act as signals or indicators along the journey that predict whether or not your customers are likely to achieve their goal. Some examples include the number of repeated steps, abandonment rate and digital leakage rate.
Next, define what success looks like for your customer and your organization. This is where internal metrics such as completion rate, FCR, cost to serve and others can be leveraged. Remember, these metrics should capture the value your customers want to get out of their journey and the company goals associated with it. They also play a role in helping you measure customer behavior and directly link CX metrics to the outcomes that matter most to your business.
5. Use Journey Scores to Align Customer Goals and Business Outcomes
Identifying your high-priority objectives will help you measure company success at the broadest level and crystallize what success looks like for your customer journey management program.
Take your customers’ goals, the success metrics you’ve defined and map those to their corresponding business outcome. Consider the key outcomes that will make your enterprise successful, such as average revenue per user (ARPU) or assets under management (AUM), retention rate and cost to serve. This way, it’s clear which journeys impact not only CX metrics, but the crucial outcomes your specific enterprise is measured by.
