5 Steps to Exceptional Customer Journey Management
There are high stakes to getting customer experience right: One frustrating moment can send a loyal customer packing. But what if you could anticipate those moments? And fix them before they happen?
That’s the promise of customer journey management (CJM). By mapping, measuring, and orchestrating key interactions, CJM helps you turn fragmented experiences into connected ones. This post breaks down five essential steps to help you build a journey management program that’s scalable and centered on your customers.
What Is Customer Journey Management?
Customer journey management is the practice of designing, monitoring and optimizing the full experience a customer has with your brand. That means you’re working to improve not just the outcomes from a single touchpoint (like a customer’s completion of a loan application), or even a collection of touchpoints (website visit, online portal access to the application, document uploads, etc.). CJM looks at the entire journey holistically (personal loan onboarding journey).
It’s about more than just mapping out touchpoints, too. The object of CJM is to connect the dots among channels, systems and teams to create a smooth, personalized experience that adapts to each customer’s needs in real time.
At its core, customer journey management is a framework for understanding how customers move through your business, and then what you can do to make that movement more intuitive and satisfying. It combines data, technology and strategy to help CX teams anticipate customers’ behavior and guide them toward outcomes that benefit both the customer and the business.
Whether you’re using a customer journey management system to automate outreach or journey management tools to analyze behavior, the goal is the same: deliver the right message, at the right time, on the right channel to move the customer to the best outcome.
Why Customer Journey Management Matters
Customer expectations are higher—and more fluid—than ever. A single disconnected journey can undo months of brand-building. A Gartner study had customers rate whether they would stay loyal to a brand or switch to a competitor after a service interaction. For those customers whose issue was resolved in a single interaction, 56% said they’d stay loyal . But for customers who required multiple interactions, that loyalty figure dropped to 36%.
That’s why CJM has gone from a nice-to-have capability among the standout brands in CX, to a must-have for anyone trying to keep up with customer expectations. CJM gives teams the visibility and control to shape experiences that feel connected to the customer, even when they span multiple systems, departments, and channels. And that matters, because , and the more channels a customer uses, the more likely they are to disconnect.
