Customer service journeys are often unnecessarily complex, involving multiple channels with little in the way of a handoff, leading to poor outcomes for both customers and organizations.
Complex journeys are also expensive: according to Gartner research, average costs per resolution start at £7.18 for a service journey involving just one channel before rising to £13.85 where two channels are involved (the most common scenario), and £20.53 where three channels are used.
Many organisations have tried to improve customer service journeys, engaging in activities like journey mapping, but these approaches often fail to deliver long-term results.
Customer journey management refers to the discipline of designing, deploying, and continuously improving customer journeys to drive seamless CX, supporting enterprise objectives around growth, and managing costs.
Instead of handling journey improvement through isolated projects managed by siloed teams, journey management centers the entire service strategy around optimizing the customer journey. This approach requires dedicated ownership, management, accountability, and commitment to continuous improvement.
Establishing a Journey Management Office
Establishing a journey management office is the largest operational change needed to start a journey management discipline. The office should be structured around a small set of high-priority customer journeys, with individual journey teams taking ownership of a single journey.
Each journey should have a dedicated journey manager, whose primary responsibility is to optimize their assigned journey and coordinate the team - otherwise largely comprised of part-time stakeholders representing multiple functions.
Hiring a full-time journey manager who you can trust to take decisions that impact your CX, channels, and operations without the need to confirm every move with leadership first can be the difference between success and failure - this must not be seen as a side-of-desk or part-time role.
Prioritize and Analyze Your Journeys
Improving every service and service support journey simultaneously is impossible, so it’s important to prioritize the journeys with the greatest potential impact on financial outcomes (loyalty, revenue growth, and cost reduction). Then, consider journey complexity, likely time to improve, resource availability, technology requirements, and other dependencies.
Once you’ve identified the journeys to improve, ask your data and analytics team to answer the following questions using channel, voice of the customer (VoC), and operational data: