A
customer journey
is a set of interactions that a customer has with the company to complete a task such as evaluating, registering, getting support or renewing a product or service.
Looking back, Customer Journey Management is an omnichannel customer engagement strategy that takes an outside-in approach from the customer’s perspective to improve the customer experience (CX). It is a part of Customer Experience Management (CEM) that Gartner defines as “the practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed customer expectations and thereby increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and recommendation.
In practice, the journey management represents the break with the traditional system of silos in departments and channels for unify and automate the customer engagement process. Cross-channel customer context is collected and analyzed to inform in real time the best next actions in self-service and assisted service to then support customer experience optimization at the same time.
In each industry, only those sets of journeys that have high transaction costs or high customer value (CX, loyalty, up-sell) really matter. These are where we focus our greatest efforts to obtain the greatest returns.
Companies that focus on Customer Journey optimization achieve much better returns in sales growth, customer satisfaction with reduced service costs.