After exploring the topic of the customer value journey, it’s time to take into account the process of measuring, tracking, and optimising the provided experiences. Customer journey management is an approach to delivering seamless experiences to your customers across all channels and touchpoints. It consists of aligning the entire organisation to your customers’ goals, so you can pinpoint and fulfil buyers’ needs every step of the way.
In this article, we break down everything there is to know about customer journey management. You’ll find out what are the benefits of taking this approach and learn how to implement it through the organisation. Therefore, sit back and let us take you on this exciting journey!
Why should you apply journey management approach?
As mentioned above, customer journey management focuses on the path your customer takes for achieving a goal. Rather than optimizing every interaction and touchpoint, this process takes into account the entire buyer’s journey, making sure to measure, monitor, and improve CX across all stages. Essentially, customer journey management is a mindset that allows you to align your business operations with your customers’ goals.
Thanks to the process, you can identify journeys that matter the most to your customers. You can also measure and predict the success of journeys, which gives a better sense of the actions needed for improvement. Moreover, your teams can use the gathered information to work on the underperforming journeys and make the most out of them.
Let’s take a look at some of the main benefits of customer journey management:
Enhanced CX
As mentioned above, customer journey management allows you to pinpoint what your customers need and provide them with proper solutions. When you track journeys at all times and measure their performance, you have an opportunity to identify pain points and actions needed for improvement. This has a direct impact on journey scores and other KPIs within your organisation. As you measure your results in real-time, you can see your success and make the necessary changes accordingly, always keeping your performance at a high level.
Seamless DX
Customer journey management can also help you accelerate digital transformation. The customers’ need for improved digital services in the last two years has put a lot of pressure on businesses all over the world. To meet the growing demand, companies had to invest a lot of time and effort into their online operations. Customer journey management comes in aid, recognizing which digital experiences customers crave and minimalizing costly investments.
Here are some of the questions customer journey management can answer:
- Do our digital services meet customers’ needs?
- Which channels are most convenient for each customer journey?
- What digital services or channels influence shoppers the most to become prospective customers?
Reduced costs and high revenue
Last but not least, customer journey management impacts internal operations and revenue. When customer service teams and the entire organisation work to understand and meet customers’ needs, success is guaranteed. Journey monitoring allows employees to assess the brand’s progress, improve less successful points, and avoid future issues.
Naturally, customers notice the efforts of companies to ensure seamless experiences, and they place trust in those brands. Loyalty further leads to repeated purchases and directly influences revenue.
Moreover, customer journey management allows marketers to send out offers at the right moment and through the best channels, reaching out to the customer when they need it the most. This practice doesn’t only increase loyalty but reduces churn.
Customer journey management framework
Now that we covered the basics and benefits, it’s time to showcase the customer journey management three primary approaches to CX:
Mapping
Journey mapping can be described as a process of creating a map of your customer’s interactions with your brand. This map allows you to visualize and understand people’s experiences across all touchpoints over time. It also gives you a unique perspective of your business, so you can track pain points and improve them for seamless experiences.
During the journey mapping, you track interactions and internal coordination throughout all departments, from web designers to call centres and sales teams. This allows you to answer crucial questions related to your business, such as:
- How do customers get in contact with your brand?
- What are the main touchpoints of your customer’s journey?
- What are the pain points on that journey?
- How can you improve the journey?
Analytics
The next most important step in customer journey management is analytics. Once a map of customers’ interactions is created, it’s important to analyse customer behaviour data across all touchpoints over time. This will allow you to better understand customers’ needs and measure the impact of their behaviour on your business performance.
Customer journey analytics can answer these questions:
- How many customers go through your sales funnel?
- At which stage of the sales funnel most customers drop out?
- What are your customers buying habits?
- What are the causes behind customer frustrations?
Orchestration
Customer journey orchestration allows you to understand and orchestrate customer journeys across all channels and provide a unique brand experience to every customer. It stands for the practice of tracking and personalizing interactions to help customers achieve desired outcomes.
Now, this practice aids in understanding the motives and goals of each customer and uses AI to ensure every person achieves these with the greatest efficiency. It should be implemented through all organisational levels, so all teams can work together on providing value to the customers. Essentially, this bridges the gap between teams and systems when managing the customer journey and driving engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty.
Combined together, these three approaches create the customer journey management framework that allows you to meet customers’ objectives, maintain satisfaction levels, and achieve other business goals.
Establishing journey management in your organisation
In the end, it’s important to highlight that customer experience is not limited to one channel of touchpoint. That’s why customer journey management is so essential – it provides a holistic perspective and approach to customer-brand interactions.
When organisations combine journey mapping, data analytics, and orchestration, they can be sure they are on the right way to delivering exceptional CX.