Definition:

Customer Journey Management is an approach that helps understand and manage a brand's experience from the customer's standpoint. It identifies the best way to interact with customers at each stage of their journey to continue moving them through the sales funnel.

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Customer Journey Management Critical Capabilities:

Today, many marketing terms exist around how to create customer-centric engagement strategies. As this market constantly evolves with new technologies and processes to consider aligning your internal teams, I recommend you focus on the following critical capabilities when looking for a Customer Journey Management technology.

1. Customer Data: Data is at the heart of every successful engagement strategy. Without it, you won't know enough about your customers, and your efforts in creating compelling experiences will mostly go in vain. As you look for a Customer Journey Management technology, I recommend you watch for robust data ingestion features to help you collect customer data across various sources. I would also recommend retaining a technology with identity graph features to help you recognize your customers across screens. Additionally, look for data management features to help you get the best segmentation you need to achieve your business goals.   
2. Journey Mapping: Before running any journeys, I recommend you design your journey maps first. A journey map is a visualization of a customer's path as they look to address a need through interacting with your brand. Journey Mapping is an essential step as you can use it to truly understand how your customers interact with you and the highlights and shortcomings they encounter throughout their journey. Journey Mapping is also used to set clear objectives with internal teams and drive alignment on achieving successful customer-centric journeys. 
3. Cross-Channel Engagement: With customers having a wide gamut of ways to interact with brands, I recommend you look for a technology that has the support of all channels your customers use to reach out to you. Channels typically include social, email, text, website, chatbot, mobile push/in-app, call-center, and in-store, to list a few.
4. Journey Orchestration: Journey Orchestration is an engagement-driven approach. It takes a real-time and individual angle to engage with customers. It becomes a powerful tool when combined with a real-time customer view and all the channels your customers use to interact with you. I recommend you look for features such as offer decisioning, next best-action, testing, and journey optimization to ensure you deliver the best customer experience and maximize your business objectives.
5. Journey Analytics: Journey Analytics provides the framework for analyzing customer interactions across channels, screens, and offers and measuring the impact on the business goals. Use this step to get insights into where your journeys score high with your customers and identify areas of improvement where your efforts fall short. I recommend you look for a technology that includes channel attribution models, path optimization, and the ability to analyze based on all your engagement data.

Online resources to learn even more about Customer Journey Management:

• • Forrester's Now Tech: Journey Management Platforms, Q4 2021‍
• • IDC's Future of Customer Experience: Create a Better Value Exchange by Thoughtfully Managing Friction During Customer Engagements
• • Digital Experience Platform (DXP) definition
  

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