Journey management is vital for businesses to remain competitive and relevant in today's market. It helps to optimize every step of the customer journey and thus ensuring customer satisfaction, building brand loyalty, and driving revenue growth.
Overview
- What is customer journey management?
- What is the difference between journey mapping and management?
- Why is it important?
- Getting started: How to manage a customer journey
- Tools and methods
- Summary
What is customer journey management?
At its core, customer journey management (CJM) is a broad approach or system aimed at creating a seamless and personalized customer experience across all touchpoints and channels throughout the entire customer lifecycle. It goes beyond simply visualizing a journey; it’s about operationalizing that understanding to consistently meet customer needs.
This process involves leveraging data, analytics, and technology to understand and anticipate customer needs, preferences, and behaviors. The goal is to respond with relevant and timely messages and interactions at every step of their journey. It is viewed and described as a customer-centric management approach for agile organizations and a visual management tool with a governance structure. Customer journey orchestration specifically emphasizes delivering a consistent and personalized experience by leveraging data and automation. Ultimately, the language used internally might be adapted to resonate better within a specific organization. A key element of customer journey management is using journey maps not just as one-off project deliverables, but as a living information system.
This system often involves a hierarchy of journey maps, ranging from high-level customer lifecycle maps to more detailed maps focusing on specific steps or stages. Information and insights from detailed maps can roll up to higher-level maps, providing a layered view of the customer experience.
Are you looking for more depth on what journey management is? Find it here.
What is the difference between customer journey mapping and customer journey management?
To fully grasp journey management, it's helpful to understand how it relates to, and incorporates journey mapping:
Journey mapping: This is the act of visualizing the customer journey. It involves outlining the steps, stages, touchpoints, emotions, pain points, and opportunities a customer encounters. Maps can be created for specific projects, workshops, or even initially based on assumptions. Adding elements like storyboards, importance ratings, and satisfaction scores enhances the map.
Customer journey analytics: This refers to the process of collecting, aggregating, and analyzing customer data across multiple touchpoints. It's about making sense of the data behind the journey visuals. Customer journey analytics helps identify customer behavior patterns, friction points, and opportunities for optimization. It can answer questions about customer drop-off rates, common pain points, and how different customer profiles behave. User journey analytics can include data from various sources, including offline interactions.
Journey management: This is the overarching system or approach that operationalizes journey maps. It uses the visual representation from journey mapping and the insights from customer journey analytics. Journey management maintains maps as a continuous information system, often in a hierarchy, supported by a governance structure. It connects journey insights to internal processes like research, design, and development backlogs, helping organizations prioritize efforts based on customer needs and business impact.
In essence, journey mapping and customer journey analytics are critical components and the foundation used within the broader framework of journey management. While mapping provides the visual structure and analytics provides the data-driven insights, journey management provides the system and process for using these elements continuously to improve the customer experience and drive business outcomes.
Why is customer journey management important?
Implementing journey management offers numerous benefits:
Improved customer experience:
It enables businesses to provide a seamless, consistent, and personalized experience across all touchpoints and channels, which is crucial for customer satisfaction, loyalty, and lifetime value. By understanding the journey, organizations can proactively address issues and optimize the experience.
Data-driven decision making
Journey management leverages customer data and analytics to ensure decisions are based on real customer insights rather than assumptions. Integrating data like KPIs, pain points, and project status into maps provides a clear view of performance and areas needing attention. We recommend using metrics on your journey maps so your qualitative research is backed up by data.
Prioritization and resource allocation
By highlighting common pain points and opportunities on maps, and summarizing journey health with metrics like the Journey Performance Indicator (JPI), journey management helps organizations focus efforts and resources where they will have the biggest impact. It helps prioritize backlogs for research, design, and development based on customer needs and potential outcomes. Framing the cost of not fixing pain points can turn it into a clear investment decision.
Operational alignment and efficiency
Journey management helps optimize internal operations by aligning the customer journey with business objectives and goals. It provides a multi-level roadmap and helps coordinate projects that impact the customer experience.
Breaking down silos
Journey maps, used as a universal language and information system, can help bridge organizational silos. They provide a shared view of the customer, enabling better collaboration and communication across departments (e.g., sales, marketing, service, IT).
Building a customer-centric culture
By embedding customer understanding and experience data into the organization's workflow, Customer journey management helps build thought leadership on customer centricity and fosters a common culture focused on the customer.
Continuous improvement
Journey management establishes a rhythm for continuously monitoring, evaluating, and optimizing the customer experience based on ongoing feedback and insights. Making this a habit in your organization will make your customers feel heard and can set you apart from your competitors.
Get started with customer journey management
Implementing journey management is typically a gradual process. Here are some steps and considerations based on the sources:
Start small and build the case
We recommend to start rather small and slow. Begin within a specific team (e.g., design, CX, innovation) or department and focus on a few key journeys. Consider starting with a small, low-risk stealth project to demonstrate value without drawing too much early attention. Prove that the approach works within your organization's specific context before attempting to scale broadly.
Establish a journey map repository and hierarchy
A core first step is building a repository to house your journey maps and establishing a hierarchy. Start with a high-level view (like a customer lifecycle) and link more detailed maps to relevant steps or stages. Ensure maps are based on research and data, not just assumptions.
Define a standard structure and integrate data
While allowing flexibility, define a minimum standard set of lanes for your maps to ensure consistency and usability across teams. Integrate relevant data into the maps, such as pain points, opportunities, research findings, KPIs, and project status. Leverage customer journey analytics to gather necessary data. Use metrics like a balanced scorecard per journey (e.g., three experience KPIs, three business KPIs) and a simple JPI (traffic light) to summarize journey health at higher levels. Remember not to over-engineer or use too many metrics.
Introduce governance and define roles
Set up a governance structure to ensure maps are kept up-to-date and used effectively. Define roles such as sponsor (high-level support, political champion), journey map manager (master of ceremony, ensures rhythm), coordinator (owns/manages specific maps, ensures data is current), and an informal network of supporters in other departments. Start with roles potentially overlapping, especially in the beginning.
Building a team that is responsible for different parts of the journey management system is important as continuously adding to your teams workload has a negative impact on motivation. Make sure to allocate time and resources to each team member focused on your customer experience endeavours.
Set up a rhythm for collaboration and review
Establish a regular pace or rhythm for updating journeys, reviewing insights, and taking decisions. Consider setting up council meetings where teams review key journeys (perhaps focusing on those marked red by the JPI), compare projects, and discuss priorities.
Regular council meetings or rituals are typically established where coordinators and stakeholders review the map hierarchy and journey performance indicators (JPIs) to understand where to focus.
Integrate strategic personas
While detailed maps benefit most from personas, introduce strategic core personas at appropriate levels of the hierarchy to represent key customer segments across the organization. Ensure personas are research-based and ideally incorporate behavioral criteria, not just demographics. Personas can help teams empathize with users and put important topics (like accessibility) on the organizational radar.
Connect to backlogs and drive action
Use the insights from journey maps – especially pain points and opportunities – to prioritize backlogs for research, design, and development (tying into concepts like triple track agile). Track projects and their impact on the journey. Emphasize fixing pain points by highlighting their financial impact.
Plan for scaling
Once you have proven the value and built momentum, plan how to scale the approach to other teams and journeys. Use a stakeholder map to understand potential supporters and blockers and how to engage them. Increase the pace and involve more people as capacity and trust grow.
By focusing on these foundational elements and building momentum gradually, organizations can effectively move from simply mapping journeys to actively managing them as a core part of their continuous effort to improve customer experience and achieve business goals.
If you’re already using Smaply, or want to learn how it works within the platform, read about getting started with journey management in Smaply.
What are customer journey management tools and methods?
To do justice to the comprehensive matter of customer journey management you need a broad range of tools and methods, such as experience research, prototypes and stakeholder or system mapping.
A journey map can be readily conceptualized using conventional tools such as pen and paper. However, once you begin utilizing journey maps as a visual management tool for journeys, dedicated software will be essential for a structured approach to analysis and journey optimization. Look into the details of tools and methods for journey management in this article.
Summary
Customer journey management helps to build a customer-centric mindset and thus is crucial for a company's success in a customer-driven market. Skilled managers who know how to use tools to map and optimize the journey are essential and will provide actionable insights on how to meet important business goals. Choosing the right tools, and customer journey management software & framework is vital and should consider a good balance between journey mapping and journey management.
Feeling ready for the next step?
Start managing your own customer journey with Smaply! The tool will guide you through the process of journey map creation and assist you in making them manageable.
