Customer Journey Management

Definition of Customer Journey Management

Customer journey management is about delivering seamless experiences that a company’s customers want, providing them with optimal experiences. It’s an approach that focuses on the journey as a whole first, rather than individual touchpoints and steps. It’s used to:

• Identify the journeys that consumers want
• Monitor the signals that predict journey success, retention, purchase, etc.
• Alter details of the customer journey where needed to give the best experience possible
• Prioritize underperforming journeys for improvement, as making great strides to improve a poor performance is much better than marginal increases to an already great one

Customer journey management uses the mindset that the overall experience is what matters, and uses data and feedback to make the best changes to your business’ operations that match customer desires. It’s an ongoing, dynamic process that you can’t just tick-box for, and is tracked overall by the feedback that your customers give at the end of their journeys.

Control every feature of your customers’ experience

Consumers want a personalized, careful approach which matches their expectations and desires about how they want to be treated by your business. In order to maximize customer satisfaction you need to exert a level of control over the individual steps in a customer’s journey, while keeping in mind the overall experience you wish to give. 

Using what’s called journey orchestration, past customer experience can be used to personalize future interactions for that specific person, by catering to their personality and anticipating their needs. This is often done by software or AI in order to do so speedily, but can be just as effective in a face-to-face environment if the information on said customer is readily available. 

You can also use journey mapping to visualize your touchpoints and identify possible problem areas, as well as analysis of data to anticipate how a customer might react. It’s all about the process, not the steps taken, but do keep in mind that a single bad step might affect the entire journey.

Measuring in real-time is key to keeping a consistent level of control, as it allows for instantaneous feedback and near-instant changes to the process to suit the consumer in question. This usually has to be done by AI, and so is much easier to achieve on digital platforms.