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What is Journey Management?
Effective journey management is vital for businesses to remain competitive and relevant in today's market. It helps optimize every step of the customer journey, ensuring customer satisfaction, building brand loyalty, and driving revenue growth.
Effective journey management is vital for businesses to remain competitive and relevant in today's market. It helps optimize every step of the customer journey, ensuring customer satisfaction, building brand loyalty, and driving revenue growth.
Journey management (or journey operations/journey map ops) is the process of understanding, mapping, and optimizing a customer's experience with a brand across all channels throughout their entire experience. The goal is to create a seamless and consistent customer journey at every stage and touchpoint of the customer lifecycle. It involves understanding the customer's needs, preferences, pain points, opportunities, and behaviors and using this information to improve the customer experience and drive customer loyalty and satisfaction.
The goal of journey management is customer excellence: the authentic fulfillment or exceeding of customers' concrete and emotional key expectations wherever and whenever they come into contact with the company. This requires continuously improving the customer experience, removing pain points, understanding potential moments of service recovery, and allowing for a satisfying customer experience throughout the service.
Why is journey management important?
Journey management is important because it can positively impact a company's long-term success and help to meet strategic goals, e.g. through:
Positive customer experience at every step of the customer journey and overall experience
Improved customer satisfaction
Higher customer loyalty and engagement
Better relationships with customers
Improved brand reputation
Optimized processes through journey analytics
Increased customer's lifetime value
Increased revenue
It empowers you to ensure that your products provide real value to your customers and turn them into ambassadors.
Journey management can also serve as an information system connecting organizational silos: It helps to align different stakeholders around a common vision for customer experience.
Furthermore, customer journey management is important because it implies a range of operational benefits:
- You get an overview of ongoing and planned CX projects
- You can coordinate all projects in your organization that have impact on CX/EX
- It results in a repository of previous CX projects and research data hub which is enormously useful when you want to start new projects based on existing data
- Keep a hierarchy of journey maps and keep them up-to-date
- It forces you to define clear ownership of CX initiatives, allowing for synergies and preventing redundancies
- Organizations that consciously do journey management actively build bridges between organizational silos/departments; the customers' experience can become anorganization-wide information and communication system
- It allows you to find overlaps and contradictions between projects early on, thus saving time and money.
Customer satisfaction does not come from single wow moments. It needs to be built coherently, long-term, and cross-silo. Thus, it is essential to monitor all moments and facets of the customer journey for sustainable customer satisfaction.
How to start with journey management?
01
Gather the relevant journey maps in a repository
If you start from scratch, start with a high-level journey map and decide where you can have the easiest and fastest impact on your customers (not the biggest). If you have journey maps, conduct a journey map inventory to review all existing journey maps, which you can integrate into your journey hierarchy.
02
Organize your journey maps in hierarchies
Start from a new or existing high-level map, e.g., a customer life cycle, that describes your main customer journey in 10-20 steps. Then, connect/link the high-level map with nested maps describing a specific step in more detail. Obviously, the customer journey is not always linear but might be perceived as looping and nonlinear. Therefore, we recommend also paying special attention to recurring events.
03
Define journey management taxonomy
Define how many zoom levels you’ll need; at which step from the high-level map you want to maintain sub-level maps, and how many detail levels. Which data do you want to represent in these maps: customer pain points, employee pain points, projects, KPIs, insights, research data, opportunities, alternative journeys, scenarios, CX vision, links to project maps, etc.? What do you want to call everything? Language matters. Don’t use any given approach from a textbook or agency, but build on what you already have in your organization.
04
Build governance model
Responsibilities are important in journey management because they help ensure that each aspect of the customer journey is given the attention and resources it needs to be successful. Assigning responsibilities can help ensure that no crucial elements of the customer journey are overlooked, streamline processes, and improve communication within the team. Each journey should be clearly assigned to one person, eventually supported by a dedicated team. These folks take care that the data on their customer journeys is accurate and up-to-date.
05
Agree on metrics per journey
To prove the value of your work, it’s helpful to define sets of KPIs per journey and qualitative factors, such as pain points, opportunities, unmet needs, insights, etc. Consider this as a balanced scorecard per journey with a healthy mix of quantitative and qualitative factors from a business and a customer’s perspective.
06
Prioritize your CX projects
Visualize your pain points or opportunities from one or more journeys as a portfolio for hands-on prioritization. You can use this to agree on where to focus your next research efforts and which design and prototyping projects can have the fastest or biggest impact. Define responsibilities and move intro doing.
