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:
- Which elements of the customer service journey have the greatest impact on customer perceptions of satisfaction/effort?
- What does the customer journey look like today?
- What channels would be the best fit considering the customer effort and cost to serve this journey?
- How do customers feel about our current state journeys?
These insights will be critical in supporting the next phase: journey mapping.
Develop Key Journey Maps
Journey maps serve as a reference point for discussions about journeys and become the platform upon which to design and optimize service and support experiences.
First, ask your teams to create an initial set of current-state journey maps to fully understand the prioritized journeys. Ensure that this captures the customers’ end-to-end need for service and how their journeys span multiple channels.
Using the current-state journey map as a guide, discuss areas of potential improvement and produce a list of solutions. Consider options to improve both the front-end journey steps and the back-office process supporting the journey. Prioritize these solutions based on their expected impact and viability before producing future-state journey maps. Prototype and test the potential future-state journeys, both internally and with customers and third parties, before producing the business and technical requirements needed to develop and deploy the updated journey. Once complete, ensure the journey maps are updated to reflect the new journey.
Develop, Deploy, and Continuously Improve
Once you’ve designed a new or improved journey, begin developing the journey across your service channels. The actual process of development isn’t markedly different in the journey management process than how it takes place today. But there are two differences in how this process is managed:
- Split design from development. Today, many organizations jump into development, or mapping and development are done in tandem. Splitting these activities ensures that teams have space to incorporate innovative ideas into journey designs.
- The journey manager will help coordinate channel teams and partners in IT to ensure that all business and technical requirements are delivered on time and risks or issues are mitigated.
Once journeys are deployed, leaders must avoid falling into the trap of assuming that the journey is “finished.” Instead, journey teams should analyze how the journey is performing, identify and prioritize new opportunities based on the updated journey map, and repeat the cycle to continuously improve the journey time.
Thanks to Christopher Sladdin and Daniel O’Sullivan, Director Analysts in the Gartner Customer Service & Support Practice, for submitting this article.
