The customer journey consists of several steps to complete a task, most often the purchase of a product or service or getting support. However, many customer journeys have weaknesses, sticking points, and inefficiencies.

Customer Journey Management is a strategy for engaging customers through multiple routes, beginning at the outside and working in. Managing and optimising the customer journey will drive customer experience improvements, leading to loyalty, satisfaction, and the creation of advocates for your business. Journey management is a continuous process of monitoring, analysis, and optimisation.

Companies that focus on improving the customer journey develop significantly better performance. McKinsey’s research shows that a focus on onboarding, purchasing, renewal, and problem resolution, across all customer contact points, delivers up to 15% revenue growth, increased customer satisfaction, and a lower cost to serve.

Customers have access to a higher number of digital channels, such as mobile apps and websites. This gives consumers greater access to information and the options to conduct self-service journeys. Companies need to put a high priority on optimising the customer experience and buying cycle to improve revenue and satisfaction.

Customer Journey Management improves performance against key performance indicators by creating a Journey map from the furthest points out, such as social media, towards the Journey’s goal. Journey mapping identifies opportunities for improvement, driven by data from customer interviews, web analytics, and observations. It is a highly-effective process of finding weaknesses that can be leveraged into opportunities.

In most companies, departments such as sales or customer support, typically only look at their part of the business. Customer Journey Management breaks down these restrictive views by showing the whole picture, from the customer’s point of view.

The process highlights customer journey sticking points that result from a lack of standards, weak assumptions, poor information exchange, or duplications. This show breaks in the Journey and provides opportunities for solutions, consistency, personalisations, priorities, design, and testing.

Customer Journey Management aligns teams with long term business goals and identifies high-level journeys. Prioritisation criteria are added to show which routes have the most significance for your customers in terms of pain points and opportunities to exceed customer expectations. The prioritisation criteria consider business goals, retention, revenue, costs, the effort for value, and brand reputation.

The methodology states the vision, conducts research and highlights opportunities, and identifies the solution options to guide the development and design process. Focus is given to reducing customer effort by determining and shaping best actions and measuring results to create an optimisation cycle.

Customers are identified across all channels, such as chat, text, websites, and social media. Behavioural analysis is conducted to understand intent and opportunities, and to optimise engagement, considering the context and business rules to predict the next best actions.

Customer Journey Management partners assess different strategies, predict profitability and lifetime value, highlight risks, and determine the return on investment. Insights on customer profiles, customer activity on different channels, and customer efforts to achieve their goal, serve to optimise the customer journey to increase satisfaction, reduce serving costs, and drive business revenues.