What is Customer Journey Management?
The customer journey is the “path” customers take when interacting with a company, hopefully on their way to a purchase. It can consist of a series of touchpoints, is often not linear, and it can vary among customers. For example, a customer’s journey may begin with a promotional email, move to the business's website via a link in the email, and then end in a retail store where a purchase is made. Another customer of the same company may find an item via a web search, read reviews online, and ultimately make a purchase from the store website. Customer journey management is the series of activities organizations undertake to understand the current customer journey as well as move toward a future vision.
Customer journey management teams frequently map the "as-is" with a customer journey map. This mapping process allows organizations to understand the behavior of their customers in addition to how they think and feel. When combined with multichannel data, maps often identify pain points in the customer journey, such as confusing checkout screens or long response times for email inquiries. Customer journey management teams use this information to remove barriers customers encounter along the way to making a purchase or getting support.
Challenges and benefits of customer journey management
Customer journey management requires organizations to truly understand their customers' goals and the paths they may take to accomplish them. The multichannel nature of many customer journeys adds complexity not only to the heavy data analysis that is part of customer journey management, but also in aligning often siloed departments to the future vision. Organizations that are willing to put forth the effort are likely to reap rewards such as higher revenue and increased customer loyalty.
How NICE can help
NICE CXone is the market leading call center software in use by thousands of customers of all sizes around the world to help them consistently deliver exceptional customer experiences. Our analytics tools provide insightful information needed for effective customer journey management. CXone is a cloud native, unified suite of applications designed to help a company holistically run its call (or contact) center operations. CXone includes:
Omnichannel Routing – routing and interaction management that empowers agents to positively and productively interact with customers in digital and voice channels. These solutions include an automatic call distributor (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), interaction channel support and proactive outbound dialer.
Analytics – turns insights into results by making data relevant, easy to consume and actionable to drive measurable improvements and understand the omnichannel experience customers receive. These solutions include interaction analytics, customer surveys, reporting and performance management.
Automation & Artificial Intelligence (AI) – leading-edge, intuitive technology that eliminates mundane tasks and speeds resolutions of customer issues for better business outcomes. It provides self-service, agent-assisted and fully automated alerts and actions.
CXone also includes pre-defined CRM integrations and UCaaS integrations with most leading solutions on the market. These integrations provide a holistic call center software solution capable of elevating customer experiences for companies of all sizes.
