Every interaction your customers have with your brand matters. Are you making the most of each touchpoint? With so many moments and journeys to juggle, it’s easy to drop the ball and miss opportunities for improvement. But with Customer Journey Management, you can optimize customer journeys—including those critical, make-or-break moments of friction—by aligning everyone on the right goals.

In this all-encompassing guide, we explain how the practice of Customer Journey Management can help you craft spectacular customer experiences, and effortlessly manage them all. We’ll cover everything you need to know—from understanding what customer Journey Management is and how to do it, to assessing where you stand on the path to achieving “journey excellence.”  

Let’s dive in.

What is Customer Journey Management?

Journey Management is the ongoing practice of researching, measuring, designing, and optimizing a customer journey to improve the customer experience and achieve business goals. While this might seem similar to “experience optimization” and “journey mapping,” CJM is much more comprehensive.

CJM is an extension of CX management and design thinking. However, unlike traditional CX management, which emphasizes improvements based on past data, Customer Journey Management puts the focus on finding the right opportunities in the right journey for the right customer (employee, client, patient, or user)—any person you intend to delight. 

True customer excellence is about how your product or service fits into your customer’s life, and designing seamless customer journeys is key to achieving this fit. However, organizational silos often threaten productivity by isolating teams and hindering communication.

A CJM practice addresses this problem by closing the value-delivery gap. It ensures that everyone—from product development to marketing to customer success—focuses time, effort, and resources on opportunities that add the most value to your customer and your bottom line. This unified approach fosters a shared “customer-obsessed mindset” across your entire organization. 

9 Reasons why you should build and optimize a Journey Management system

As a CX expert, you have a deep understanding of the intersection between business priorities and the customers’ pain points and needs. But unless you can rally the rest of the organization around these using the customer journey, those critical insights can get lost—and you miss the opportunities that matter most.

If the business leaders and key stakeholders are not aware of or, on board with, the opportunities that make the customer happier, the organization won’t be focused on the right things. Sure, you can throw spaghetti at the wall and see if it sticks, but with a data-backed Journey Management system, you wouldn’t need to. Here’s why:

1. The Journey is everything

CJM transforms traditional journey maps (from mere sketches of initial ideas) into dynamic tools that reveal not just what happened but why. It integrates real-time data to provide actionable insights that are aligned with your business goals. Your teams can manage complex journeys in real time, make swift adjustments, and connect every aspect of the customer journey. 

With a routine practice in place, it elevates customer journey mapping to an art form, empowering your teams to craft engaging, seamless, optimized customer experiences—with the customer as the guiding star of the show. Instead of navigating a “sales funnel,” your customers feel like they’re dancing with you down a path that fulfills their desires—happy and deeply satisfied every step of the way.

And, since the journey is everything, your renewed focus on it—and how and where it connects—will result in these additional benefits:

2. Holistic customer insight 

CJM provides a comprehensive view of all customer journeys across segments, which prevents important data from falling through the cracks. Insights are complete and actionable, rather than fragmented and based on intuition.

3. Cross-functional alignment

By rallying the entire organization around the customer journey, you break down silos and foster collaboration. Teams can easily align their efforts and strategies, instead of getting bogged down and frustrated by unclear priorities.

4. Innovation

Since the key opportunities for innovation are easy to see with a CJM system in place, your teams’ focus can naturally shift from repetitive, incremental improvements to the big ideas that stand out in the marketplace.

5. Deeper customer insights

Regularly updated and accurate customer data provides true insights into customer behavior. This enriched understanding helps in crafting product use cases that truly resonate with customer needs and expectations.

6. Actionable feedback

A robust system ensures that customer feedback is captured, organized, and easily accessible, and valuable insights are not lost.

7. Reliable metrics

With a Journey Management system, you can establish clear, reliable metrics for measuring success and easily pinpoint where customers are making critical decisions.

8. Customer-centric decision making

A CJM system focuses everyone on the customer journey—strategies are aligned, customer expectations are met (and exceeded!), and revenue is made, not lost.

9. Sustained growth and success

Great experiences lead to happy, loyal customers—a smart return on investment.

Achieving “Journey Excellence” 

Journey Excellence is the pinnacle of Customer Journey Management, where organizations achieve a deep yet holistic understanding of their customer experiences. At this level, customer insights seamlessly integrate into every aspect of the business, allowing companies to anticipate and meet customer needs. These organizations use standardized methods and tools across all teams to create engaging, seamless, and optimized experiences that leave customers delighted.

There are many approaches to achieving Journey Excellence. However, organizations typically progress through 5 similar stages of maturity along the way: 

Stage 1: Intuition-driven: Actions are based on anecdotal evidence and hunches.

Stage 2: Fragmented: Methods for organizing journeys are introduced but not yet standardized.

Stage 3: Coordinated: Teams coordinate collaboration around customer feedback, with all information stored in one place.

Stage 4: Scalable: A company-wide strategy, methods, and tools are centered around customer journeys, which play a key role in major business decisions.

Stage 5: Excellence: The entire team has a deep understanding of customer experience and anticipates customer wants and needs ahead of time.

If you want to make the customer the guiding star of your business by implementing a CJM practice, there are the 3 common steps that successful organizations have followed. Let's explore these in detail:

Step 1: Gain deep customer insights

Gather insights at various stages of the customer lifecycle. Ensure they are actionable and linked to specific steps in the customer journey. 

Create and utilize (buyer) personas to view the journey from different customer perspectives. CX Managers, Marketers, and UX Researchers should interview customers before mapping their journeys and structure insights using standardized persona formats. 

Use a centralized system for documenting insights, such as reasons for customer churn or retention at key moments, to facilitate stakeholder buy-in and accelerate project timelines. A  journey-centric system enhances team collaboration and ensures that all insights are organized and accessible.

Step 2: Standardize the Customer Journey Management framework

Implement a framework that organizes all types of journeys and ensures consistency across the organization. Ensure all teams are aligned on the methods and tools used for Journey Management, fostering a cohesive understanding of the customer experience.

• Triple Diamond Approach: At TheyDo, we use the Triple Diamond approach for problem discovery, solution discovery, and solution delivery. This framework aligns all teams on how to collect information and take action, continuously refining journeys to improve the customer experience and identify new opportunities.

Step 3: Customer-centric prioritization

Implement an objective method for scoring opportunities from the customer’s perspective. This scoring reflects customer needs and business goals, ensuring decisions are not swayed by bias or opinion.

Clarify what the business will and will not do. Balancing customer desires with business-centric values ensures strategic alignment and effective decision-making.

Use a standardized prioritization model to align teams and stakeholders on the most critical opportunities.

Simply put:

• Without a prioritization model, you lack strategy despite having customer insights and a journey framework.

• Without customer insights, you miss understanding customer behaviors even if you can prioritize opportunities across a journey framework.

• Without a journey framework, you cannot get a comprehensive overview of the customer experience, even with deep customer insights and prioritization.

Great CX leaders ensure transparent decisions on what to do next and why are based on customer engagement and business strategy. They work towards a common vision for customer excellence, where business and customer priorities are equally important. Customer-centricity becomes a priority for everyone in the organization, not just for Customer Service or UX teams. Achieving this goal is challenging but attainable with the right approach and commitment.

Know where you stand, know where to start

Implementing a Customer Journey Management practice is a journey in itself, but it doesn’t have to be difficult or overwhelming. By breaking the process into manageable stages, using the right tools and training, and garnering buy-in and guidance from leadership, your teams can master the art of Journey Management to effortlessly create customer experiences that satisfy and delight them every step of the way.

Before you begin, it’s a good idea to know where you stand, so you can realistically plot a course. How mature is your organization’s Journey Management practice? Are you lost in a maze of unlinked journeys and missing out on opportunities?  What are your goals, and how will you get there?  Do you need help keeping the balls in the air? Our Journey Management Maturity Scan is the ideal tool to help you identify your strengths and improvement areas.