Editorial
As brands continue to up their customer experience game, a focus on stellar experiences across the entire customer journey becomes more and more important. Doing this well in the enterprise poses big challenges, however, and it means the function of customer journey management and operations must be introduced to maintain governance over consistency and continuous improvement.
There are several important areas of customer journey management and operations that can guide an organization in its own journey towards a better customer experience from first contact with a customer to building a loyal lifetime relationship.
In this article, I’m going to talk about some of the components that make successful customer journey operations.
1. An Organizational Strategy
We will start with what might be the most obvious component of customer journey operations, but perhaps the most important aspect nonetheless. After all, without a clear strategy tied to goals, customer journey operations won’t be truly successful.
Many organizations use customer journey mapping to visualize various customer journeys, and even map them to strategies. As part of customer journey operations we must take this further. For instance, strategy must take into account new and potential channels, types of customer interactions, customer behavior, like switching between channels, and all while anticipating shifts in customer expectations.
While this means that goals and strategies can be a moving target, the customer journey operations team is there to make sure there is alignment between the latest goals as well as direction and focus for the overall customer experience.
- What to do: Start and end with strategy. After all, if you can’t answer the question “Why are we doing this?” then your customer journey operations needs some adjustment. Strategy is there to keep everyone on point and aligned to make sure that there is the right focus and priority.
- What not to do: Don’t stick to a strategy that isn’t working for your business or your customers. After all, if your customer journey approach isn’t getting the results you want, it’s time to rethink the goals and premise.
2. Federation to Remove Siloes
One of the biggest challenges to successful implementation of customer journey orchestration and customer journey optimization is the siloed teams, channels and data sets that often exist within the enterprise. The component of federation is intended to solve this.
A federated approach to customer journey management requires coordination between channel teams, product and service teams, as well as other teams that interact with customers throughout the buyer’s journey, from marketing, sales, customer service and beyond.
One goal of federation is to allow management of key areas to the teams directly responsible for outcomes in that area, while allowing oversight on the overall customer journey. While this can be easier said than done, customer journey operations is meant to support this and optimize it along the way.
- What to do: Plan to continue to “democratize” your customer journey operations over time. Even though you may have a more centralized approach to start due to technical or expertise considerations, giving greater responsibility to individual teams will allow your customer journey operations to scale to where they need to be.
- What not to do: The opposite of siloed channels and teams is… siloed channels and teams. Ironically enough, if you decentralize control of the customer journey too much and have too many teams with too much autonomy in a customer journey orchestration or similar platform, you run the risk of creating a disconnect. Instead, maintain management and oversight while providing the flexibility for individual teams to create. In other words, find the balance between centralization and decentralization that works best for your organization.
3. Customer Journey Management
Let’s not forget about the teams that are responsible for customer journey management across channels on a day-to-day basis. After all, customer journey management is a key function that is arguably the most mature of these components.
Whether it is planning customer journeys, mapping them to goals and objectives or performing analysis of customer feedback on a regular basis, customer experience management ensures orchestration, automation and overall coordination is happening effectively.
- What to do: Make sure your teams are working together and remove siloed thinking and incentives. For instance, find ways to align your teams towards achieving an end goal together, rather than pitting channel or product teams against each other. Everyone wins when the customer lifetime value increases.
- What not to do: Don’t forget that there do need to be team members that are looking at the big picture and managing the overall customer journey. While we want to break down siloes, we also need some roles in customer journey management that ensure everyones works together and towards the same ends.
4. The Right Data & Platforms
Successfully implemented customer journeys rely on access to the right customer data at the right time, and utilize a series of platforms spread across channels and the stages in the customer lifecycle. Because of this, data and platforms have a key role to play in customer journey management and operations.
The platforms component will likely consist of customer journey orchestration (CJO) as well as many other platforms that are automated and orchestrated, and which allow personalization and data collection throughout the process.
- What to do: Break down your data siloes early, and ensure you have a good plan to incorporate new data sources over time. Consider composable approaches to data and platforms in order to anticipate and adapt more easily over time.
- What not to do: Don’t forget to look at your platforms from your customer's perspective, which is increasingly channel agnostic and decentralized. In other words, an individual channel is only as important as its contribution to the end-to-end experience.
5. Governance that Aligns With Business Strategy
Supporting the strategy, federation and management is a strong process of governance that ensures consistency, optimization rollout of new channels and methods, and alignment with business strategy and key performance indicators (KPIs).
When governance is done well in customer journey operations, it brings together the teams, data, platforms and processes to make sure there are clear objectives, roles and responsibilities. All the while, governance streamlines work so that there can be a better focus on customer satisfaction and outcomes, while ensuring alignment with the business.
In other words, good governance of customer journey operations is a win-win for everyone, including the employees working to support a great customer experience.
- What to do: Think of governance as a support team to all of the different groups that contribute to the customer journey. While everyone has the best of intentions, there may be plenty of opportunity to improve consistency in many areas, and the governance component is there to get everyone aligned while enabling the freedom to continue to experiment. It’s a delicate balancing act, but that’s why good governance is so important to operations.
- What not to do: Customer journey operations will likely have plenty of maturing to do within your organization, so don’t make your governance so rigid that it can’t incorporate new ideas.
6. Continuous Customer Journey Optimization
While good governance should include continuous improvement, I think this aspect of continuous improvement is important enough to include as its own item. Additionally, as a fierce proponent of agile principles and practices, it is something that I believe must be a part of every aspect of the enterprise.
When continuous improvement is done well in customer journey operations, it brings together the teams, data, platforms, and processes to
- What to do: Get all of your teams involved in continuous improvement, not just a handful of them. After all, great ideas come from everywhere, and each team member may have a unique perspective on how to make things even better.
- What not to do: Don’t let good ideas get filed away in a place no one will ever see them again! Make sure you regularly review ideas for improvement, even ones that may have collected a little dust.
Customer Journey Success Depends on Organizational Harmony
As you can see, customer journey management and operations takes several components working in harmony to be successful in both the immediate and the long-term.
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By taking these areas into account both individually and as a whole, your enterprise can achieve greater success while boosting customer engagement and satisfaction, providing employees with a clear mission and purposes and developing a more profitable business.
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