What is Customer Journey Management, and is it Important?

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Demystifying the Next Evolution of Customer Experience

What is Customer Journey Management, and is it Important?

Customer Journey Management is the process of discovering and optimizing your customers’ journeys as they interact with your brand, to improve customer experience and achieve positive business outcomes. It’s an ongoing practice rather than a discreet project and offers a proven solution to customer experience and profitability for the customer-centric business.

Hold on – a “solution to customer experience”? Isn’t CX its own solution to customer experience? Today, your customers are more self-empowered and unpredictable than ever before and being good at CX is no longer enough. According to Forrester’s CX Index, 81% of brands have reported stagnant growth from their CX investment in recent years1.

“Journey management enables you not only to measure, monitor and optimize customer experience, but align your entire organization with your customers’ goals.” 2

CustomerThink

Journey Management solutions and tools empower today’s CX professionals to achieve the following:

  • To easily discover customers’ actual journeys and pitfalls through easy visualizations of existing data
  • To measure customers’ sentiment and gather their emotional context throughout their journeys
  • To uncover the ‘why’ behind customer behavior
  • To optimize journeys by orchestrating real-time, personal nudges and interventions
  • To measure ROI and the impact of strategies, and fine-tune to further optimize

Is Journey Management really important?

More than ever, customers interact with organizations on journeys that cut across touchpoints, often managed by different functions. As such, their journeys are multi-touch, omni-channel and cross functional. A journey-first focus will lead businesses to an understanding of the end-to-end customer journey rather than the isolated customer experiences of traditional CX. Customers can be guided personally and contextually depending upon their behavior and goals.

But what is the real impact of being journey-centric?

McKinsey & Co. have reported that more than half of customer interactions happen during multi-event, multi-channel journeys3. They’ve also found that a journey focus is 30% more strongly correlated with your important business metrics (such as likelihood to stay, and satisfaction). Research by the Aberdeen Group uncovered that customer win-back rates improved 14X, and revenue from referrals improved 3X following the implementation of an effective customer journey management framework4.

Today’s leading businesses are turning to dynamic, data-driven journey management to increase customer conversion, grow acquisition, ensure customer retention, accelerate real-time customer insight and grow business revenue. At inQuba we’ve seen a doubling of customer conversion and an improvement in customer experience within weeks!

How to double customer conversion – Customer Journey Management in 2 Minutes

Customer Journey Management

Customer Journey Management is the discovery and analysis of customers’ actual journeys, called Journey Analytics, and the optimization of customer journeys for success, referred to as Journey Orchestration. Journey Management is often confused with traditional journey mapping. While there is some overlap between journey management and journey mapping, they are fundamentally different practices.

inQuba Customer Journey Management

Customer Journey Mapping

inQuba Customer Journey Mapping

Source: www.columbiaroadcom.medium.com/

Journey mapping is often the initial step a business takes when it wants to improve customer experience. Internal stakeholders model the processes and steps that they expect their customers to take. Lines are drawn and stickies are stuck. Maps sometimes include touchpoints and responsibilities, and even an assumed indication of customers’ emotional state at each step. The output is a static visualization of the customers’ paths across touchpoints as they attempt to reach their goals. It’s an important first step to understanding and improving the customer experience because it defines customer goals, optimal paths and areas of responsibility. It’s a good starting point. In isolation, though, journey mapping stops short of being actionable, as discussed in our blog The 4 Reasons Your Journey Maps Are Failing You. This is because the maps don’t represent actual customer journeys in the real world, they don’t identify individuals or their goals, and they cannot address the pain points that customers face.

The broader domain of journey management succeeds in turning static maps into real-world, data-driven journey visualizations, understanding individual customers’ context, goals and feelings, and addressing the obstacles that customers encounter in real time. So how do we discover actual journeys?

Customer Journey Analytics

inQuba Journey AnalyticsYou know the destination you want your customers to reach. Unfortunately, the paths to using your product or service are sometimes more complex and winding than intended. That’s because obstacles and confusing processes can lead to individuals taking detours and actual journeys become messy and unpredictable, making journeys difficult to see and understand.

Customer Journey Analytics is data-driven, allowing you to visualize customer behavior and end-to-end customer paths (across channels) by joining the dots in your customers’ transactional and behavioral data. Your customers’ paths are presented as a dynamic, real-time visualization, showing which customers are reaching their goals, dropping away or getting stuck in recursive loops. Sentiment and customer feedback at every point provides an emotional overlay to journeys, ensuring enhanced insight into customer behavior.

Journey analytics answers the following questions:

  • What are our customers real journeys, and where are they getting stuck?
  • Are we succeeding at delivering value at each step of the customer journey?
  • What are our customers experiencing along the path?
  • Why are customers dropping away at each point?
  • Which are our optimal and sub-optimal paths?
  • Which customer cohorts are reaching their goals, and which aren’t?

Having discovered the customer’s journey, behavior and emotion, how will we guide them towards the goals they’re trying to reach?

Customer Journey Orchestration

inQuba Journey OrchestrationImagine that many customers are stalling during a credit card application process. Despite their goals and strong intent, they’re encountering friction such as confusing processes and a lack of helpful information. They’re losing momentum, stalling, or dropping away. Whether digital experiences or omni-channel, customers need to be helped towards their goals.

Customer Journey Orchestration uses insight into journeys and behavior, and, together with Machine Learning and AI, launches dynamic interventions to reach out when customers need help. The business can guide customer behavior with hyper-personalized, real-time interventions and nudges that boost customer conversion. Journey orchestration results in the optimization of individual customer journeys for success. This is where your journey data is ultimately harnessed for success and revenue growth. When your customers are achieving their goals, you are too.

Today’s customers demand seamless and personalized experiences, and today’s CX practitioners need a flexible toolbox when customers need help. In our card application example, orchestration could include digital nudges (such as a personalized prompt when something is outstanding), a value communication (such as a reminder of a particular benefit), or even personal customer service by introducing a consultant in a contact center.

About inQuba Journey Management

Customer Journey Management is the laser technology of CX. Lasers offer targeting precision for specific use cases. Users have granular control. Similarly, managing customer journeys allows you to focus on the specific – cohorts, behaviors and use cases. Every systematic action is for someone, not everyone.

While CX results are flattening, inQuba Journey Management – the next evolution of CX – is helping businesses to visualize actual journeys, understand their emotion, dynamically clear their paths, nudge them in the right direction and double customer conversion.

inQuba Journey Management is laser-focused CX.

We’d love to understand your business challenges better, and discuss how Journey Management can transform your customers’ experiences and business growth.

Download Product Paper
Book a demo

References:

  1. https://www.nctech.org/_files/_pdf/Speaker%20Presentations/Jake-Brody_Accenture_NCTech-Talk.pdf
  2. https://customerthink.com/what-is-customer-journey-management/
  3. https://www.slideshare.net/McK_CMSOForum/customer-experience-journey-webinar-v10-091713/
  4. https://blogs.oracle.com/marketingcloud/post/why-cmos-must-bridge-the-gap-between-love-and-money

Read the full series on Customer Journey Management now.

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What is Customer Journey Management, & is it Important?

What is Customer Journey
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What is Customer Journey Orchestration?

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    Bruce Eidsvik

    inQuba President, North America

    Bruce is a seasoned executive with over 25 years of experience in sales and marketing mainly within the customer experience space. Bruce has held senior executive roles at Genesys, a private equity backed cloud customer experience company and OpenText, a NASDAQ listed information management company, where he led their Global Growth Marketing and Sales Development organizations. Prior to these roles, Bruce was the Managing Director for the APAC region at Genesys, based out of Singapore. Bruce is also an entrepreneur and a co-founder of Insight Venture backed VoiceGenie Technologies Inc, which was successfully exited in 2006.

    This work has led Bruce to points around the globe, helping both Fortune 100 and SMBs alike. Bruce is a frequent keynote speaker at CX events worldwide, where he is more than happy to share his experiences and best practices to help others. Bruce is a team builder, has a passion for driving creativity, developing leaders and getting stuff done. Bruce strongly believes that fun is an important component of driving great results. Outside of work, Bruce is an avid skier, road and mountain biker, triathlete and in love with the mountains.

    Bruce holds a Bachelors of Science degree with Honors in engineering physics from Queen’s University. After 14 years abroad, Bruce and his family are back in Canada and living just outside Banff, Alberta.

    Liza Rogers-Nolte

    Head: Inside Sales SA and Marketing

    Liza joined inQuba shortly after inception in 2011. She has held various roles and responsibilities during the time and has been vital to the success of the business. Since 2016, Liza has headed up inQuba’s global Inside Sales function, responsible for identifying, qualifying and nurturing new business relationships. She also plays a fundamental role within inQuba’s marketing function, being jointly responsible for all key, global marketing events. Liza also manages the relationships of inQuba Partners, specifically the Microsoft Partner Relationship for which she is the MSFT Alliance Partner Manager.

    Prior to inQuba, Liza spent over 10 years in London (UK) gaining international experience in various industries. This included working closely with top executives in FTSE 250 and blue-chip companies in industries such as banking, private equity, investment property, executive search, and others.

    Prinay Panday

    Head: BI and DevOps

    Prinay is responsible for overseeing all IT operations, technical delivery and technical strategy for inQuba, ensuring alignment with the company’s business requirements and goals. Prinay is responsible for assisting other departments within inQuba, such as Product, Development and Professional Services, in utilising technology efficiently and profitably. He also spent several years in software development at inQuba which has provided him with deeper insight into effective technical delivery and operations of the inQuba platform. Prior to joining inQuba, Prinay worked in IT operations and software development across various industries including insurance, banking and retail. Prinay holds a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology from the University of Johannesburg.

    Dasha Naidoo

    Head: Product Experience

    Dasha joined inQuba in 2013 and has held various positions over the years. Dasha found her niche when she joined the core Product team in designing the inQuba CX platform. As the Head of Product Experience, she is ultimately responsible for the overall user experience and value delivery to inQuba’s customers. Dasha has been instrumental in the product’s success, providing insight into design, customer behaviours and practical solutions to complex customer challenges. Before joining the product team, she spent 2 years guiding customers through their Customer Experience programmes.

    With a professional career spanning 10+ years, Dasha has extensive experience across CX, Marketing, Campaign management and Data management and analysis. Dasha holds a Bachelor of Commerce (Information Systems Technology) degree from the University of KwaZulu Natal.

    Kobus Snyman

    Head: Service Operations

    Kobus is responsible for overseeing all technical operations including customer support and general operations activities ensuring the inQuba’s customer platform is optimal and stable. He has extensive Systems and Business Analysis experience gained from industries such as Banking, Information Technology and Mining. He has gained solid knowledge in Project Management, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity management as he managed the Disaster Recovery site for one of South Africa’s Big Four Banks for a significant period. In 2016, Kobus joined inQuba as a Senior Analyst and has subsequently been promoted to Head: Service Operations, bringing with him the technical platform knowledge as well as customer management experience gained through the management of large, strategic inQuba clients. Kobus holds a Certificate in IT Service Management (ITIL) and SDIP. He also holds an ‘Essential skills for the Business analyst’ certification.

    Eben Odendaal

    Head: Professional Services

    Eben is responsible for the successful delivery of inQuba’s CX solution programmes to clients. He is an experienced Business Consultant and Project Manager and has delivered multiple Management Consulting, Digital Application and Software Development programmes, across multiple industries, throughout his career. Eben holds a Mechanical Engineering degree from the University of Pretoria, an MBA from the University of Stellenbosch and is a registered Project Management Professional.

    Allan Lee Son

    Senior Software Architect

    Allan is a Senior Architect in the core team working on the architecture and development of the inQuba CX platform for over six years. As a technical lead, product designer and software architect, he is a driving force in the inQuba Product Development team, providing insight into design and practical solutions to complex software challenges.

    Previous to joining inQuba, Allan’s five years at On-IT-1, developing software solutions for the Bosasa Group, have given him broad perspective on design, development and deployment of software applications across various industries, including aquaculture, youth rehabilitation, fleet management and device integrations for biometric and programmable logic controllers. Allan brings this valuable experience to bear on the challenges of developing a globally distributed SaaS platform.

    Allan completed his treatise in 2006 and holds a honours degree in Bachelor of Commerce (Computer Science and Information Systems) from the Nelson Mandela University.

    Warren Reed

    Senior Software Architect

    Warren is responsible for high-level software design choices and selecting the best tools, platforms, and technologies for developing and delivering inQuba’s CX software platform. He helped build the inQuba platform from the ground up, including products such as Engage, Case Management, and Journey Analytics. He implemented the continuous delivery pipeline that automatically deploys inQuba’s software solutions globally. Prior to inQuba, he spent five years at Bosasa architecting and developing systems for vehicle maintenance, youth development centres, access control security, and job recruitment. He also spent two years at Korbitec developing legal practice management software. Warren holds an honours degree in Computer Science and Information Systems from the Nelson Mandela University.

    Jon Salters

    Non-Executive Director

    Jon brings with him a wealth of experience in market research and technology enabled services in the insights domain.

    Prior to being strategic advisor to inQuba, Jon spent four years at Vision Critical, the world’s leader in Insight Community solutions where he launched Vision Critical’s presence in Africa, re-launched their partner program internationally and was also integrally involved in the team that executed the spin-off of Vision Critical’s Research and Consulting business unit which became a cornerstone of the newly formed Maru Group.

    Jon holds a GDE in Engineering Management and a B.Sc Mechanical Engineering (industrial Option) for the University of the Witwatersrand.

    Antony Adelaar

    Head: Product Marketing

    Antony joined the inQuba story early, towards the end of 2011. He is responsible for the planning, design, production, marketing and release of inQuba’s CX software solutions to customers on 4 continents. Prior to managing product, Antony oversaw the account management team who in turn oversee inQuba clients using the full range of inQuba CX solutions.

    Antony has ten years’ experience in market research across the African continent and across all major industries. Prior to inQuba, he headed up digital research at an agency, Yellowwood Future Architects, which specialises in strategy, research and design.

    Antony completed post-graduate Leadership Development studies at Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS), following a Bachelor’s degree (Industrial Psychology) at the University of South Africa.

    Trent Rossini

    Managing Director

    Trent is responsible for all operational delivery, professional services engagement, product conceptualisation and delivery of inQuba software. Prior to joining inQuba, Trent was the CIO for Discovery Health and in 2003, was appointed as COO of PruHealth, Discovery’s UK joint healthcare venture with Prudential. He also spent several years consulting on various systems integration projects for Deloitte and Accenture.Trent holds a B.Sc.(Mech) Engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand and a Graduate Diploma in Industrial Engineering.

    Micheal Renzon

    Group CEO

    Michael Renzon is an entrepreneur and visionary and the driving force behind highly successful internet, technology, content and Customer Experience companies. He is an Endeavor Entrepreneur, the leading high-impact entrepreneurship movement around the world, and was named the Most Promising Entrepreneur of Entrepreneur Organization (EO) in 2006.

    Michael’s thought leadership in Customer Experience and Customer Journey Management has been adopted by leading companies around the world who use inQuba’s analyst-rated Customer Journey SaaS Platform and Methodology to drive their customer experience transformation and customer journey optimization.

    Michael holds an MBA from the University of Cape Town, an Honours Degree in Computer Science and a Bachelor of Economic Science Degree, both from the University of the Witwatersrand.

    <h4>Link to CX series</h4>

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