Journey management platform in digital transformation explained
A Journey management platform that supports a connected and personalized customer experience delivered seamlessly across all touchpoints is an essential tool for digital transformation.
This article discusses the importance of a customer journey management platform in the context of digital transformation and explains the blueprints to enable this capability.
Background
In an earlier article, I wrote about the pivotal role of customer experience journeys in digital transformation. In this article, I will explain the architecture of the journey management platform, and how it integrates with other technology components to provide a connected, consistent, and personalized customer experience.
The most critical part of any digital transformation is its customer-facing experiences that define the relationship between the customer and the brand. The customer interacts with the brand in numerous touchpoints (or interaction channels. These include digital channels, traditional sales channels, call centers, back-office support, etc. Customers interact with the brand in one of three ways:
- Directly through a digital channel (Web, Mobile, Smart Assistants, Social, etc.)
- Through a representative agent (In-Store, Sales Channels, Call Center, etc.)
- Though the use of the product or service (e.g., using utility services like phone or internet, traveling in a plane, or products like driving smart cars, etc.)
For any successful digital transformation (DT), the brand must transform its customer experience (CX) in each of these areas. In addition, the organization must re-engineer and optimize its operational processes. Hence, a Digital transformation is tightly coupled with CX & Operational transformation, and visa-versa. They are essential for each other’s success.
Lastly, the product or service the brand provides to its customer should be fully functional to meet customer expectations. An ATM card failure, an airline ticket booking mishap, or a mobile signal drop causes significant CX failure and directly results in customer churn.
All of this requires a careful and thorough understanding of the customer journey to provide an optimum and efficient experience to the customer. Before diving into technology architecture, I will recap the key points I wrote earlier.
What is Customer Journey Management?
Customer Journey Management is a customer-centric approach that focuses on providing a curated path for customers to achieve their goals. It is a method that helps enterprises understand customers’ goals and create efficient and optimized experiences to help customers reach their goals.
Customer Journey management involves managing the following:
- Identify Customer goals and brand (or business) outcomes.
- Define and map a curated journey that meets those customer goals and brand outcomes.
- Journeys are not linear, hence, monitor the customer journey’s progress to orchestrate corrective actions.
- Receive real-time signals from customer interaction to personalize their experience in key moments.
- Analyze journey data for cx failures and customer feedback. Identify optimization opportunities for underperforming journeys.
Customer Experience Journey Mapping
Customer Experience Journey mapping is a modeling approach that allows businesses to define the interactions with customers into various phases of their journeys, as they engage with the brand for its products or services. It helps businesses visualize and monitor the interactions with the customer throughout the customer’s life cycle to find opportunities and optimize business processes and operations where these interactions occur.
Each business/industry organizes its customer journeys according to its unique business/industry. However, most journey maps have a common or similar theme. These themes are generally organized into 5 buckets:
- Educate or make the customer aware of the brand’s product or service
- Pre-Sales cycle when the customer has a need and explores the brand’s offering
- Sales cycle when customer configures and purchases the product or service.
- Post Sales cycles when a customer uses the product or service and requires its maintenance or warranty.
- Customer advocacy: It is directly influenced by product or service performance and value. Poor performance results in customers leaving, and good service results in high customer advocacy and retention.
Macro vs Micro Journey Experience
Customer journey refers to an end-to-end process to achieve the customer’s goal and the brand’s outcome. For instance, “Customer wants a vacation in Hawaii” is an overall customer’s goal. The customer experiences this journey in many phases. For example, buying tickets, traveling on a plane, lodging in a hotel, sightseeing, etc. Each phase is often an independent experience that the customer goes through to completion. These are often referred to as macro and micro journeys.
A good customer journey provides a consistent and personalized experience in each of these phases so that the customer feels it is one “connected’ journey.
A Journey Management Platform provides a set of technologies that help business stitch together customer journeys to support overall customer experience journey management capabilities
Why do we need a Journey Management Platform?
In the digital era, customer expectation has changed. Traditionally brands developed customer experience from their perspectives to achieve brand outcomes and they triaged customers to their (brands) preferred channel for many reasons. For instance, to direct customers to a more optimized channel where they have more specialized staff to ensure sales closure.
However, customers now expect to choose their preferred channel without being forced into pushy sales. This sets a new guiding principle that “customer has the right to choose the channel in which they wish to interact or engage with brand”.
Many digitally accustomed customer personas today prefer DIY (do-it-yourself) and prefers self-service for online research, purchase, and shipment tracking. Others prefer to do self-service research before reaching out to sales agents.
Customer Journeys are not linear
Most customer journeys today are served omnichannel. Customers will likely engage with the brand in more than one channel. Today, the use of the digital channel is highly likely in some aspect of any given customer journey. These digital channels are also growing as technology becomes readily available. A traditional approach to providing a “digitally-enabled” interaction on the web or mobile is no longer enough to support customers using smart digital products in their day-to-day use. IoT (Internet of things) devices are also extending how the customer interacts with a brand’s product or service offering.
It is then the responsibility of the brand to ensure that they facilitate customer journeys across all channels and interaction points. Most customers will start their journey in the channel of their choice and will hop through other channels to complete their transactions. This creates new complexities in managing a “connected” journey:
- Customer will initiate their journey in their preferred channel of choice.
- Customers may start, stop, or resume their journey at any time. A journey may not finish in one session and could take days. This means the context of where they last left off and associated data must be saved to allow them to resume.
- Customer journey data must be consistently available in all channels to facilitate warm channel hand-offs.
- Customers may go back and forth in their journey. Hence, the journey cannot be linear or rigid.
- Customers may start multiple journeys at the same time, and the brand must be able to distinguish their separate journeys. At the same time, the brand should receive in-journey signal data in real-time, to detect relevance. For instance, a customer purchases two separate products in independent journeys but could benefit from a bundled discount.
It is then imperative that brands support a consistent and connected experience, not just in one channel, but rather across all the customer-facing channels, including digital self-servicing, agent-servicing, and partners.
Key Challenges to implementing a Journey Management Platform
Three key challenges impede large enterprises to enable a journey management platform:
- Defining the end-to-end customer journey is complex and requires significant collaboration. across the line of business and channels. In large organizations, it is exasperating and exhausting to bring siloed business units together.
Telecom companies generally are more efficient in running Business Transformation programs to re-engineer outdated processes and upgrade their technology. This is primarily because they are pressed by their constantly evolving technology.
One way of solving this is to organize business capabilities by customer journey stages and macro journeys, e.g., “Customer makes payment”, or “Digital Registration”. They can appoint a single owner to each of the capabilities. This will not only help product owners to provide a consistent experience in all channels but will also help them to rationalize and reduce duplicated and outdated technologies and processes. - End-to-end Journey Management Platforms are not as commonly available. No single platform provides all capabilities required. Many platforms are good at supporting journeys within marketing campaigns but don’t deliver end-to-end onboarding or serving or usage journeys.
Certain industries like Telecom have specialized CRM platforms tuned for that industry. They provide support for business processes and journey mapping. However, CRM platforms are outdated and going through their evolution cycle. They are fusing with Digital Experience Platforms to add incremental capabilities to support new capabilities for digitally transformed omnichannel. - Traditional organization struggles to define upfront cost benefits in implementing journey management. This is primarily because an Omni-experience is non-existent in traditional organizations, and their customer experience varies by the type of product offered by each of line of business. They are in their early digital maturity and often use the digital channel for brand education, lead management, providing basic self-service functions, paperless statements, and dropping certain personalized messages into key moments. They lack key technology platforms for product configuration and catalog, order management, and a common CRM across all their product lines. Hence, most of their complex products are sold by sales agents and don’t have straight-through processing to fulfill. In this environment, end-to-end journey management is often a hard sell.
Explaining the blueprint for the Journey Management Platform
Journey management is one of the core platforms within Digital Experience Platforms for any digital enterprise. It enables the brand to support consistent and connected experiences across all channels. It allows businesses to define customer journey maps, and then during an interaction, it will keep track of customer steps in real-time and orchestrate their journeys.
Key capabilities of a Journey Management Platform
The following are the key capabilities that a journey management platform generally provides. Depending on the complexity of the business and industry, these capabilities may be provided by more than one platform.
- Customer journey mapping and visualization provide an ability for business users to visually create customer journey maps and associated journey steps. It allows users to mark key moments in customer journeys and develops a taxonomy for interaction points and milestones. This taxonomy plays a pivotal role later to facilitate integration with various digital experience sub-systems to support customer interactions.
- Integrates with sub-systems to receive data to track journey progress and activate an action during key moments or milestones. This includes systems in all digital channels like web, mobile, IVR, IoT, or agent-facing channels like a call center or sales. It will also receive information from support systems (like CRM, billing systems, network systems, warehouse, shipment systems, marketing campaigns, etc.) if they perform any activity that is part of the customer journey.
- Orchestration of customer journeys when customers interact with a brand on their digital or other channels. Each channel platform will pull real-time journey data to support their interaction. This will allow customers to see their journey progress in digital channels as well as other channels (like call centers) to see a similar view of customers’ journey. Hence it will enable a consistent and up-to-date view of customers’ journey progress in all channels. Other systems will also interact with journey management to pull real-time journey data like real-time interaction management or decision engines or personalization engines to support guided selling, next best actions, etc.
- Provide customer journey analytics to allow business users to monitor and track the progress of an end-to-end journey. A part of it may rely on business metrics and KPIs analytics platforms. However, business analytics “must” be captured in tandem with customer experience journeys to enable organizations to deliver the greatest impact to customers in their key moments. This will enable them to test journey improvements, identify root causes of poor experience, detect customer behavior changes, and uncover new interactions to personalize the experiences.
Journey Management Platform Architecture
In many cases, no single platform can provide all the above capabilities or cover all use cases. Many independent solutions will come together to provide overall platform capabilities.
For instance, the Qualtrics platform has many digital experience management capabilities including market research, brand tracking and perception, pricing comparison, CX measurement, segmentation, journey management, orchestration, etc. Segment, Pointillist also provides similar capabilities. Adobe and SAS platforms provide journey capabilities for marketing automation. Miro provides a journey-mapping collaboration platform but it’s not an operational platform that can manage customer journeys.
Many platforms that provide journey management capabilities generally support it within marketing campaigns. They may not support other journey stages, like onboarding customers. This is primarily because onboarding is complex and involves many different product lines and channels, and its use cases vary in different industry segments.
Let me explain the overall architecture through a generic blueprint like below:
In this artifact, you can see various platforms that interconnect to deliver an overall experience.
- Journey Management (JM) platform provides the ability to create customer journey maps and associated journey steps.
- Personalization Management (PM) platform provides real-time listeners aided with artificial intelligence to support the personalization features, e.g. Amazon Personalize, and Google Recommendation AI.
- Interaction Management (IM) platform is responsible for delivering digital assistance (to journey application) during a live interaction with customers. It can support many use cases like the next best experience, cross-channel marketing, or certain personalization features.
- Content & Digital Assets Management (DAM) platform is responsible for maintaining marketing content, images, videos, etc. The content metadata should include tags for customer journeys, personas, sentiments, and other useful elements.
- Digital Intelligence (DI) platform will retain customer personas, actionable insights, and other relevant intelligence. It will allow users to create deeper profiles (or personas) of customers. It then helps to easily select audiences for segment targets and tailor a more personalized experience based on demographic or other persona qualities.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform is an enabling technology that can analyze and process large data through machine learning and data science.
- Campaign Management (CM) platform, which provides capabilities to create cross-channel campaign events. It includes several stages of CM, e.g., planning, executing, tracking, analyzing, and optimizing a campaign. Campaigns can be targeted to a specific channel and audience.
- Business Metrics (BM) platform, which provides analytics and business intelligence.
- Integration Platform, which provides the ability for API management and Event Management, to enable event-driven architecture. Events are delivered in near real-time so other platforms can respond immediately to events as they occur.
10 Key Journey Management Steps
Refer to the diagram provided below to follow the steps:
- Businesses will use the Journey management platform to define customer journey maps, related meta-structure and taxonomy, its milestones, and associated actions.
Certain customer journeys may be targeted to an audience. These audiences are cohorts of customers with certain attributes or associated customer personas.
Many journey management platforms provide the capability to define audiences. However, this capability can be provided by a separate specialized platform. - Actions are an important part of journey design. It provides the ability for journey designers to activate an “action” at certain key moments, e.g., a call to action, a to-do activity, or even to consider a personalization feature like the next best action.
- The business user will monitor their customer experience metrics in Business Metrics Platform, which will enable them to accurately identify optimization points. They can then use these “actions” to help improve customer experience as one of their optimization tools.
- When a customer initiates their journey, the application will integrate with the journey platform (via API) to get journey maps and associated milestones and actions.
- Participating applications (delivering micro journey experiences) will communicate with the journey management platform (event hub) to record customer journey progression.
- The journey manager will record this information to update milestone statuses in the instance of the customer journey. This journey view will be available to both customers and agents alike across all channels, and it will reflect the progress customer has made during a particular journey.
- The business metrics platform will record upstream cx measures to update the metrics and KPI, ideally in near-real-time. This will provide businesses with just-in-time information and enable them to monitor, track and remediate customer journeys.
- Each journey app should include 3 types of measures to enable tracking, monitoring, and orchestration of the journey experience:
a. Journey milestones
b. Customer interaction
c. Customer experience measures - The journey app will get “actions” from journey maps, and one of these actions will direct it to seek a personalization feature, e.g., get the next best action.
It can also asynchronously communicate with the interaction manager to invoke a personalization response. The interaction manager will also asynchronously respond (back) to trigger the personalization feature in the journey application at an appropriate moment. - Where applicable, an artificial intelligence (AI) platform will provide a personalization AI feature to support some of the more complex use cases. It can either work independently to respond to the journey application directly or in alliance with the interaction manager, whichever is the case in a particular implementation.
Conclusions
The Journey Management Platform is a key building block of digital experience platforms. It is an essential component to providing a modern, connected, consistent, personalized, and compelling customer experience across all interaction channels and lines of business. There is no single platform provider that can converge all required capabilities to deliver the said experience, rather a combination of various technologies will come together to provide an overall experience.
Modern CRM and DX Platforms are converging and evolving to provide out-of-the-box capabilities. However, they are in an evolutionary period and may not provide fully integrated turn-key solutions today. Various industry segments are evolving at different paces and each industry is developing its niche practices. The organization needs to align its strategies to break away from siloed business units to enable them to develop customer-focused experiences and customer journeys.
In the digital era, Customer’s expectations are changing rapidly, and they expect brands to provide the ability to interact in a channel of their choice. They expect fully integrated and connected digital experiences compared to traditional digitally enabled experiences.
The views expressed are my own and do not represent any organization. I aim to have respectful discussions that further positive change as we navigate unprecedented technological transformation. Change is constant, so my perspective may evolve over time through learning, testing, and adapting to new information.
