Overview
Customer journey management (CJM) is a proven approach to delivering the seamless experiences your customers demand. Today, customers expect their experience with your business to mimic those of customer experience (CX) leaders. Anything less can lead to dissatisfaction and churn. Let’s learn a bit more about what CJM is, and how we’ve gotten to today’s customer experience paradigm.
Customer journey management focuses on the journeys your customers take as they try to achieve a goal, rather than optimizing single interactions at each touchpoint. It’s a shift in mindset that enables you to not only measure, monitor and optimize CX, but align your entire organization with your customers’ goals. And by using all the customer data you’ve gathered, experience orchestration allows you to improve your customer journey across all channels of engagement. Customer journey management is used by customer-centric organizations to:
Leading organizations are using customer journey management to improve customer experience, delivering value to both their customers and their organization.
While traditional marketing can also segment customers, customer journey management stands out by leveraging customer behavioral data across all touchpoints and over time to understand what customers were doing before, what they are doing now, and even estimating what they might do in the future. This enables companies to make data-driven decisions and accurately target the right customer segments, rather than relying on broad, generalized campaigns. For instance, you can prevent high-value customers who are dealing with an issue from getting an up-sell campaign while they’re less likely to buy.
Customer journey management is a newer way of looking at the way in which customers interact with brands. In fact, CJM wouldn’t have been possible without some advances in digitalization and the way people expect businesses to serve them.
People expect more from brands today than they used to. The purchase process is no longer simply a matter of looking for the lowest price and buying it. Customers want better service, they communicate across multiple channels, and they want it all both during and after the sale. Buyers are no longer simply transacting business; they want to be able to interact with your brand when and where they want.
This has largely come about as a result of the digitalization of the buying process. Online shopping allows a customer to buy almost anything without setting foot in a store. And social media allows praise and complaints alike to flow publicly so prospects as well as customer service agents can see them.
Most importantly, there are more touchpoints than ever, from traditional storefronts and billboards to today’s Facebook pages and message boards. That means that for a smooth customer journey, your brand has to be on point in more places than ever before.
Explore
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.
In order to properly manage a customer journey, you have to first be certain that you know what that journey is and what it’s like. There are a number of methods available to you in analyzing the customer journey.
Customer journey management encompasses three primary approaches: journey mapping, journey analytics and customer journey orchestration. Mapping and analytics help to identify issues within the journey, and orchestration helps to optimize it.
Customer journey management is an approach that encompasses these three elements, and together they help organizations understand, create and improve customer experiences. These approaches are often combined to enhance experience design, generate journey insights and optimize journeys.
Here is a quick summary of the primary journey management capabilities and the three most frequently used ways to combine them.
In general, people form impressions quickly — often within seven seconds. Those impressions are important and they’re hard to break. This is why customer experience is so crucial: it is your first impression. By definition, it’s the way your customers experience your brand.
If your customer experience is poor, your customers are far less likely to stick around, and even less likely to come back. Customer loyalty depends on a good experience.
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 customer data platforms. And they lack the integrated omnichannel time-series data that provides the foundation for a journey management approach.
Integrated customer journey data enables analytics, 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, and it makes data accessible to everyone in the organization, not just analysts — empowering data-driven decisions at every stage of the journey.
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. That hub is the foundation for your customer journey management software platform — gathering everything in one place, allowing your team to analyze it holistically rather than piecemeal from a hundred different sources.
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, Net Promoter Score (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.
Obviously, when gathering and utilizing customer data there are important considerations around the privacy and security of that data. Personally identifiable information must be protected absolutely, which means that whatever software platform you use has to have stringent safety controls. It’s also important that this information is used ethically, so make sure your team is trained on how to use and protect this information.
Implement
It’s time to start working to discover the journeys that are important to your customers, and optimizing them to ensure customers can get from awareness to purchase without a struggle.
Customers can exhibit different behaviors; 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.
The first step to building a customer journey map is synthesizing the right set of data from various customer touchpoints. Collecting this data over time allows you to uncover patterns in customer behavior and interactions, providing a holistic view of their journey across all channels. This ensures that your insights are grounded in a comprehensive understanding of what customers are doing, rather than relying on isolated data points or assumptions.
Next, analyze the data to identify key patterns and friction points. What challenges are customers encountering? Where are they dropping off or experiencing delays? Which channels are most effective, and which are underutilized? By answering these questions, you can begin to understand how different aspects of the journey contribute to the overall experience.
Visualize the information in a journey map. This map acts as a dynamic tool, helping you track customer behavior and use those insights to take action. By focusing on data-driven decisions based on journey insights, you can continuously optimize the customer experience, remove friction points and ensure that every step of the journey meets their needs.
Your analysis is only useful if you take action based on what you’ve learned. Through analyzing and gathering customer data, you’ve already gotten a start here by identifying where bottlenecks exist; now we start to fix them by optimizing the overall journey.
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 goes beyond basic personalization by providing a comprehensive view of customer behavior across every channel, allowing you to visualize your customer journeys and uncover trends in customer behavior.
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.
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.
A single platform that can manage all of this — from gathering data all the way to journey mapping and optimization — is a must if you want to get the most out of your customer journey management efforts. The right platform can pull data from all channels, organize and analyze it for you using artificial intelligence, and help you map the journey and identify pain points and bottlenecks (as well as guide you toward fixing them).
Optimize
Now that you know the journeys your customers are taking, it’s time to improve them to take your customer experience to the next level.
Customer journey management is complex, so measuring success can be complex as well. You’ll need to track the ongoing performance of your customer journeys, and you’ll need to iterate and adjust based on what you learn. None of this is going to be static forever, after all.
There’s a long, long list of KPIs that customer experience experts should be tracking. But one way to narrow down what to prioritize is to focus on metrics that show how your customers are doing before they even get to your customer service agents, as well as metrics that track overall customer satisfaction.
For the former, think about metrics like customer effort score, the rate of use of self-service tools like chatbots, and the total number of escalations from self-service tools to customer service agents. For the latter, you can move beyond traditional contact center metrics to measure the impact of customer behavior on self-service containment rates, abandonment and churn.
CX leaders use customer journey management to measure, monitor and optimize their customers’ experiences. By continuously monitoring journey performance, you can identify which journeys or moments within the customer lifecycle need improvement. And you can prioritize each improvement by its potential impact on journey scores and other CX KPIs.
Obviously, as with anything else you’re likely to face some challenges as you work to improve your customer journey management processes. Let’s take a look at some common issues you might run into and how they can be avoided, as well as a few businesses that have seen success in their own customer journey management work.
First, 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:
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.
Next, make sure you 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.
Also, make sure you properly define your metrics for success, as we discussed above. 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.
Identify the KPIs that 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.
Define what success looks like for your customer and your organization. This is where internal metrics such as self-service containment rates, abandonment, churn 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.
Finally, align customer journeys to your business outcomes, not just customer goals alone. 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 framework.
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, assets under management, 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.
Today a frictionless journey isn’t optional for customers, it’s expected. Every enterprise strives to deliver differentiated, exceptional customer experiences, but many struggle to put the pieces together to actually achieve that goal.
Data and analytics are a critical piece of the puzzle. But the reality is that today, companies have more data than insight and more insight than action. Adopting a customer journey management approach allows customer experience managers to bring the puzzle pieces of data, journey measurement and journey optimization together.
In short, happier customers. A smooth customer journey means that customers struggle less to get their needs met and to achieve their goals. Increased customer satisfaction leads to more loyal customers, so an effectively managed customer journey can lead to customers buying again and again, and can even turn them into evangelists for your brand. In a larger sense then, a well-managed customer journey means more sales of your product or service, and more revenue for your business.
You should constantly be gathering data on your customers’ habits and learning more about their journeys. That doesn’t necessarily mean that someone should be updating the journey map every day. And really, it’s less about a specific time-to-update best practice and more about allowing your maps to evolve naturally as data is gathered. It’s about enabling you to keep your journey maps and flows updated using the journey analytics and insights you get from your solution to make the best, data-driven decisions.
Primarily, businesses should anticipate that customer journey management will only become more important as time goes on. Customers are becoming more comfortable with managed, personalized experiences, and the expectation now is that journeys will be smooth for the individual, rather than just optimized for a persona. If you’re not thinking about the customer journey, your business will fall behind.
All businesses can benefit from customer journey management, from the smallest to the largest enterprises. In fact, the benefits of CJM may be even greater, in a sense, for a small business. Happy customers stick around, and they tell their friends about a business — and a smooth customer journey is one of the easiest ways to make customers happy. Retention is all the more important for a small business, and CJM can be a relatively low-cost way to retain and acquire customers through word of mouth.
Customers know more about their journeys than anyone, so their feedback is critical. Several KPIs that should be measured as a part of journey management, like Net Promoter Score, incorporate that feedback. But if you can survey customers to learn the precise pain points they experience through interacting with your brand, you’ll get information straight from the source that supplements the data you’re gathering from all your various channels on your own.
Looking for a customer journey mapping tool to help you get started? Or just confused about where your customers are looking for your business today? Reach out to Genesys, and see how the Genesys Cloud™ platform can provide actionable insights to improve your customer journeys today.
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