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 74% of customer service journeys involve more than one channel, and the more channels a customer uses, the more likely they are to disconnect.

CJM helps CX teams move from reactive service to proactive engagement, using real-time data to anticipate needs and guide customers toward the best outcomes. It’s also a proven way to reduce friction: 89% of loyal customers say the company made it easy for them to handle their issue, according to a Gartner study, which underscores the value of low-effort experiences.

Whether you’re nudging a customer to complete a loan application or reminding them of a payment deadline, journey management ensures those moments are timely, relevant, add up to an experience greater than the sum of their parts.

5 Steps to Exceptional Customer Journey Management

Follow these five key steps to develop and implement an effective journey management program.

1. Assemble a CX Team

To be effective, journey management needs to be enterprise wide. Start by assembling a cross-functional customer experience team that includes people at different seniority levels from many departments (e.g., sales, marketing, customer service and billing). These departments (and their software systems) need to be integrated to provide rapid, coordinated support to customers throughout their journeys. The team leader doesn’t have to be a C-suite person, but it helps to have buy-in and support from senior executives who have the authority and connections to promote new initiatives.

2. Choose The First Journey to Manage

Start by focusing on one customer journey to achieve a “quick win” (i.e., greater customer satisfaction and positive return on investment). Consider the feasibility, desirability, and profitability of improving CX in that journey. Choose a journey that is feasible to orchestrate and that will make the biggest impact in meeting your business goals. Desirability refers to whether the interaction would improve the customer experience, while profitability addresses whether it generates revenue.

Medical appointment and payment reminders are good examples of customer journeys that immediately benefit patients/customers and businesses. Patients avoid no-show fees or late charges, while healthcare organizations/businesses get paid more—and sooner.

Consider orchestrating these industry-specific journeys:

• • Retail: Sales notifications, shopping cart abandonment, and picking up purchased products

• • Telecommunications: Payment reminders, upsell offers, and promo roll-off

• • Healthcare: Patient online registration, appointment reminders, and prescription notifications

• • Financial Services: Mortgage loan approval status updates, fraud alerts, and receiving overdraft limits or financial health reviews.

Once you’ve chosen a journey to manage, you need to measure the value delivered.

3. Select Journey Metrics

Use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and metrics to measure the success of your first journey. If you’re unable to demonstrate a positive impact on customer satisfaction/retention and/or sales, it will be nearly impossible to get the board’s approval. Unfortunately, traditional KPIs are often channel specific. KPIs like website visitors, call center callers and ad views do not measure the full impact of an end-to-end customer journey.

Instead, consider true customer journey KPIs that evaluate the specific journey being orchestrated. For example, look at shopping cart abandonment rates, medical appointment no-show rates, percentage of completed loan applications, and number of upgrade packages sold.

4. Evaluate Your Tech Stack Capabilities

After you have those first three pieces in place—a solid CX team, a journey to orchestrate, and metrics to measure success—it’s time to consider what tools you already have in place to build a connected journey. Omnichannel communications are the foundation of journey management, so start there.

Can your notification platform:

• • Harness customer data from across your enterprise? You need a full view of customers, including their needs and activity. A customer data platform gathers and consolidates data from different departments (e.g., sales/marketing, billing, customer service) and communication channels (e.g., email, phone, SMS, MMS) to create a 360-degree customer profile.

• • Make decisions in real time? Using business rules and logic, the solution needs to intelligently automate which messages to send to which customers, at what times and over which channels. Journey analytics uses artificial intelligence to analyze customer data, predict customers’ needs and determine what their next best action should be. Journey orchestration tools then guide customers toward that best action by automatically sending the right message at the right time via the customer’s preferred channel.

5. Implement a Journey Management Platform

By the time you’ve assembled your team, selected your first journey, defined your metrics, and audited your tech stack, one thing becomes clear: disconnected tools and siloed systems won’t get you where you need to go. To scale journey management, you need a platform that 1) brings everything together and 2) lets you act on insight in the moments that matter.

That’s CSG Xponent. Xponent helps you move from planning to execution by turning customer data into real-time decisions. It connects the dots across departments and channels, so your team can deliver coordinated, relevant communications—whether you’re reminding a customer about a payment, nudging them to complete a loan application, or following up after a service interaction.

Instead of just sending more messages, Xponent helps you send the right ones. It gives you control over who gets what, when and how—so you can reduce noise, avoid overlap, and make every interaction count. And because it works with the systems you already have, you can start delivering value without a full-scale overhaul.