Customer journeys are being reshaped by the rapid changes in digital technology and artificial intelligence (AI), which are challenging businesses to keep up with customer demands. As customers’ expectations evolve, companies must find ways to meet them while delivering an exceptional experience. Top managers now need to understand their customers better and ensure that their organizations provide seamless, high-quality customer journeys.
While customer experience (CX) has been a focus for some time, it’s a field that’s constantly evolving. Recent studies from Forrester and Qualtrics have revealed a significant gap between how customers and managers perceive the value of CX. However, journey management offers a promising solution to bridge this gap. One of the main challenges in the CX field lies in fragmented, siloed experiences. This means that many businesses provide disjointed customer journeys, which weaken the overall experience. Journey management can help unify these experiences and deliver a more cohesive customer journey.
In this article, we’ll focus on a critical strategy called journey management, which helps companies overcome these challenges and deliver better customer experiences. But first, let’s define journey management and how it can transform your business.
What Is Customer Journey Management?
Customer journey management is the ongoing process of documenting, designing, and refining customer journeys over time. It uses insights from customer behavior, feedback, and business goals to improve the experience continuously. Florian Vollmer, an expert in the field, describes it as a practice that combines agility and continuous improvement. The idea is to give organizations the tools to improve customer journeys and ensure they meet business objectives.
From Journey Mapping to Journey Management
Many companies have already taken steps to map their customer journeys across different channels and touchpoints. They also segment their customers and train employees to deliver more personalized experiences. However, it’s becoming increasingly clear that these efforts are not enough. Many businesses need to move beyond customer journey mapping. Often, the maps are left as static documents, and the insights from them need to be fully utilized. This is where journey management comes in, offering a more dynamic and actionable approach to customer journey improvement.
The main limitation of traditional journey mapping is that it’s not always actionable. Journey maps tend to be fragmented and focus on design rather than implementation. While they offer valuable insights, many companies struggle to turn these insights into concrete actions that improve the customer experience.
Marc Stickdorn, CEO of Smaply, explains that journey maps are helpful in visualizing a customer’s path but can oversimplify reality. They help businesses see patterns and opportunities but are not enough on their own. Companies need a shift toward customer journey management, where journey maps are operationalized and used as part of a larger strategy to improve CX.
The Power of Journey Management
Journey management builds on customer journey mapping by turning static maps into actionable plans. Instead of viewing customer journeys as one-time projects, businesses can use journey management to make ongoing improvements. This approach involves:
- Translating journey concepts into real-world actions
- Diagnosing problems in the customer experience
- Designing and delivering better experiences at scale
Stickdorn adds that journey management is about preparing for the unexpected. Businesses need to ask themselves what could go wrong during a customer’s journey and if they are ready to handle those situations. By continuously iterating on customer journeys, organizations can ensure they’re constantly improving.
How to Implement Journey Management
Journey management needs to be integrated into a business’s core for success. This means developing a framework and standards for customer journeys and aligning them with business goals. Journey management should be practiced across the organization, not just by the CX team. It involves scaling up existing practices, setting clear goals, and creating tools for continuous improvement.
One critical step in operationalizing journey management is transforming journey maps into action plans. These plans should be based on real-time customer data and include tasks for different departments. This helps ensure that customer insights are applied across the entire organization.
Measuring Success with Customer Journey Analytics
To ensure that journey management efforts are practical, companies need to track performance. This is where customer journey analytics comes in. By using analytics tools, businesses can measure customer feedback, behavior, and satisfaction at different touchpoints along their journey. These insights allow companies to see what’s working and what needs improvement.
Depending on the type of experience, different metrics can be applied to customer journeys. For example, companies can measure customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, or financial performance. This helps businesses understand the impact of journey management on both the customer experience and business outcomes.
Benefits of Customer Journey Management
Adopting a journey management approach can transform how a business operates and how customers perceive its brand. Here are three key benefits:
Loyalty and Advocacy: Customers who have smooth, well-managed journeys are more likely to become loyal to a brand. By understanding individual customer needs and providing hyper-personalized experiences, businesses can build long-lasting relationships. This leads to more excellent customer retention and organic growth through word-of-mouth advocacy, a promising outcome of journey management. Faster CX Improvements With journey management, companies can improve the customer experience more quickly. The process allows businesses to continuously gather feedback, make changes, and scale improvements across multiple customer journeys. By connecting insights across different touchpoints, companies can prioritize what changes to make and ensure that they’re delivering the best experience possible.
Better Alignment and Efficiency:
Journey management helps companies run more smoothly by encouraging teamwork and removing obstacles between different departments. This not only streamlines operations but also prevents duplicated efforts. When teams are centered around customer journeys, it makes processes more efficient, reduces costs, and improves the customer experience, leading to better business outcomes.
