Customer journey management is the process of improving the interaction your customers have with your brand. We will guide you on successful customer journey management!

It uses technology and behavioral science to create interactions that your customers find irresistible as they move through your sales funnel.

Customer journey management will be thoroughly covered in this article, including its definition, significance, and how to get started.

What is Customer Journey Management?

The goal of customer journey management is to optimize customer journeys rather than individual interactions at each touchpoint. It’s a mentality change that enables you to not only measure, monitor, and optimize CX but also align your entire company with your customers’ goals.

Customer journey management is used by customer-centric organizations to:

• Identify the journeys that matter based on customer goals and business outcomes
• Measure and monitor the in-journey signals that predict journey success
• Orchestrate corrective actions when needed
• Track journey success using journey success scores, and
• Prioritize underperforming journeys for investment

Leading businesses all over the world are using customer journey management to enhance the customer experience and benefit both their clients and their business.

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What Tools Are Needed for Customer Journey Management?

Businesses require tools for data segmentation, marketing, and analytics. When it comes to deciding which tools and platforms to use, ideally a brand would use multiple solutions from one company to maintain consistency.

For the data piece, there are customer data platforms (CDPs) that provide data segmentation and consolidation at the same time. The marketing piece itself is usually slightly more the focus of marketing platforms. They do provide data consolidation, but it’s not as reliable as the CDP itself. The analytics component is generally comparable to a CDP, but rather than just doing segmentation, it provides more insight into the actions that the brands can take next. 

In an ideal world, all platforms and teams would operate in unison, but in practice, there are numerous diverse teams within larger companies using various tools, which can impede workflow. For instance, Team A might not be aware of Team B’s equipment. So if team A t starts using Oracle, for example, but team B signs up for another mobile push service, like Braze, you experience a disruption. The ideal situation is for a business to use a single solution that provides everything from data consolidation to marketing to analytics, but in most cases, that isn’t how things actually go.

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Benefits of Customer Journey Management

Want your clients to stay? Make certain you are providing the experience they anticipate.

Research by Accenture shows that some 64 percent of customers will switch from one brand to another if they feel they’ll get a better experience, product, or service. Most of the time, they are drawn to interactions that are simpler.

Such encounters don’t just happen. It’s necessary to engineer them. Understanding and improving how your customers interact with your brand as a result has become crucial. According to the Aberdeen Group, brands that do enjoy: 

• greater marketing ROI Your marketing ROI can increase by up to 10% overall with carefully managed customer journeys.
• increased sales as a result of customer recommendations. Your customers’ propensity to recommend your goods or services to others increases by 10%.
• greater success at upselling and cross-selling. People like and trust the products and services you can offer, which results in an increase of 5% in cross-selling and upselling.
• an increase in employee engagement. Brands that manage their customers’ journeys have seen a startling 25% increase in employee engagement.

Anatomy of the Customer Journey Management Framework

The entire customer journey is managed, from mapping to optimization. The five components of your customer journey management framework are listed below.

1. Mapping

When hearing the phrase “customer journey management,” most people immediately think of journey mapping. Its popularity and effectiveness account for this.

Sometimes called user journey mapping, your journey map outlines the route in which your customers take from the point of first contact through the final sale (and beyond). A touchpoint is any location where a customer interacts with your brand.

You can better understand the behaviors of your clients by mapping out the touchpoints. You can also use it to find bottlenecks, pain points, or places where the customer journey falters and people get lost.

2. Analytics

When it comes to the customer journey, psychology can take you a long way, but data is your friend. Daily interactions between customers and your brand can reveal information about what they need, want, like, and dislike.

We strongly recommend that you invest in a solid digital experience platform to harvest all of that data. With it, you’ll be able to quickly identify how and why customers interact with your brand.

3. Design

You can start orchestrating the experience you provide for your customers once you have a journey map and the data to support it.

But how does a well-designed customer experience appear?

Customers of today demand omnichannel, seamless, and emotionally engaging experiences. According to Deloitte, 95 percent of all purchasing decisions are driven by emotion. Because of this, be mindful of the chances to forge and foster emotional connections as you start to design your customer journey.

4. Optimization

Your customer journey is not a static asset that can be left in place. To stay on top of shifting markets or customer expectations, you’ll need to keep checking in and making adjustments to your plan.

You’ll need that digital experience platform you bought to manage your data. We recommend that you have a plan in place to:

• Proactively identify and solve pain points
• Routinely audit your customer experience
• Identify opportunities for expansion
• Collect and analyze customer feedback

Best Practices in Customer Journey Management

Forrester found that 27 percent of companies increased the quality of their customer experience in 2020 — and that was only the beginning of the decade. In the 2020s, they predict, a greater focus on the customer journey will become a determining factor in the success of a brand.

You’re not alone if you’ve found weaknesses in your customer journey management strategy and want to strengthen it. To maximize your success in customer journey management, make sure that you:

1. Adopt a Holistic Point of View

It may be tempting to limit your attention to the customer journey’s marketing components when you first start out. However, many businesses commit this error, which leads to a skewed map that doesn’t accurately depict the situation.

Every business function will be involved in a successful customer journey. Make sure to include:

• peripheral touchpoints These include initial points of contact like seeing an advertisement in public or indirect points of contact like hearing about your good or service through a recommendation.
• The direct interactions that your customers have with resources that are located outside of your company, such as websites, social media, physical stores, and the like, are referred to as external touchpoints.
• Internal touchpoints are any interactions a customer has with staff members or internal business procedures, such as customer service.

2. Set Clear Objectives

Why is your customer journey being mapped and changed?

Your actions should have specific goals — simply doing so because “everyone does it” is not enough.

Some common goals or objectives that brands have in mind when they manage their customer journey include:

• Solving pain points or bottlenecks
• Improving customer engagement
• Increasing revenue or average order value 

3. Know Your Customer

Only half of the challenge lies in anticipating the path your customer will take as they engage with your brand. The second half entails knowing your clientele.

Market research should be done before creating your journey map. Be certain that you have a firm grasp on your target market and ideal customer. To help you visualize the people who will be taking your customers on their journey, think about developing buyer personas.

4. Involve Your Entire Company

Silo danger is a well-known fact. When information becomes stuck in one area of the business, it forces other areas to make do or come up with their own solutions. A disconnect between various departments of a company eventually results from this. This frequently occurs with departments.

The customer experience is no longer just a marketing concern in the 2020s. Including your sales team and developers is important. You can take advantage of the different perspectives each of them has on the customer journey.

Final Words on Customer Journey Management

Delivering the seamless experiences that your customers expect is made possible by customer journey management. Customers today expect that their interactions with your company will be similar to those of CX industry leaders like Netflix, Google, and Amazon. Any less can result in dissatisfaction and a higher chance of churn.

Customer journey mapping enables businesses to comprehend consumer behavior and improve customer experience.

For businesses to effectively manage customer journeys, data processing and analysis must be a part of a strong marketing platform overall.

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