Journey management is the ongoing practice of researching, measuring, optimizing, and orchestrating a customer journey to improve the customer experience for users and achieve business goals.

I think of journey management as the natural progression beyond the conventional interaction-level UX work that has been widely established across organizations over the last few decades. As digital technology became a mainstay in modern business, UX practitioners have become more and more cognizant of the broader journey-level customer experience. However, although many UXers are aware of this larger scope of experience and have dabbled in related activities like journey mapping and service blueprinting, most organizations do not dedicate resources to the design and management of customer journeys.

Why Journey Management

With smartphones and other technologies giving customers immediate and continued connection to brands, users are much more immersed in product and service experiences than ever before. The result is awareness of the broader experience among customers.

A study by McKinsey shows that a good customer-journey experience translates not only into increased customer satisfaction, but also into better business outcomes (on metrics such as like revenue, churn, and repeat purchases). Moreover, according to Pointillist, a majority of organizations with a good customer experience have invested in roles or teams dedicated to journey management.

Journey Management as a User-Centered–Design Practice

Many sales and marketing groups practice what they call journey management. In these settings, journey management tends to be focused around getting new users through the sales funnel and retaining existing users through marketing and relationship management. In this context, journey-management activities usually include:

  1. using behavioral data to identify “the current state” of individual customers:  where they are in the sales journey and whether they are a risk for churn, and
  2. designing marketing materials or other types of actions tailored to these customers in order to encourage them to move to a desired state (e.g., complete the purchase or stay engaged with the company).

The practice of journey management is valuable beyond sales, however. We can use it to manage any type of customer experience, to predict individual customers’ current needs and proactively meet them, ultimately producing easy, enjoyable, and fulfilling brand experiences.

Journey management involves applying user-centered design principles to the journey-level experience. For that reason, the same tenets of UX that apply to the design of interaction-level product experiences also apply to the design of journey experiences. The goal should be the same; to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother, with simplicity and elegance of design.

To implement journey management, we can apply the UX learning loop: observe and understand, test, iterate, and learn. We start by understanding the current state of individual customers, where they are in the journey, and what they are trying to achieve. We experiment with various actions that we could take to move them as smoothly and quickly as possible to a desired state that meets their goal. We then learn from the results of these actions and go back to the drawing board to refine them.

What’s Unique About Journey Management?

Though the goals and tenets of journey management are shared with traditional UX work at the interaction level, there are certain elements that are unique to journey management. We discuss these below:

  • Crossfunctional context: A customer journey is the end-to-end process that a customer goes through to complete a task over time. For example, the experience of researching a flight, booking a ticket, receiving follow-up emails, receiving customer support, checking in for the flight, traveling on the airplane, and receiving your luggage at the arrival airport are all part of a flight journey with an airline. Users interact with various channels of the organization’s ecosystem, and each interaction may be owned by different parts of the company — for example, marketing, support, various product teams, as well as the airport staff and flight crew. For this reason, journey-management work is inherently crossfunctional, requiring collaboration and alignment across normally disparate teams.
  • Technical infrastructure and integration work: Again, because of the crossfunctional nature of customer journeys, journey management depends heavily on the integration of disparate data and systems from across the customer journey to create a unified source of customer data. Such a source of data allows for design control over the journey as a whole.

Three Competencies of Journey Management

In our training course CX Transformation and Journey Management, we teach three competencies of journey management: understand, design, and orchestrate.

three competencies of journey management
Journey management involves three types of activities: understanding the user and their needs, designing interaction that support the user and their goal, and orchestrating interventions that are personalized for each customer.

Understand

The user-centered design of the journey experience should be informed by a multipronged research practice. Combining qualitative research data and journey metrics can help researchers identify opportunities for design and orchestration. Various journey-performance metrics should be benchmarked and monitored to inform this effort. Because journeys take place across channels, early investment in the integration of systems is important, to allow for journey analytics and tracking of behavioral data across the journey for benchmarking and analysis.

High-level activities related to this competency include:

  • Ethnographic research
  • Creation of a journey map and service blueprint
  • Integration of disparate systems and databases
  • Establishing journey-analytics capabilities
  • Conducting customer-listening or voice-of-customer research
  • Analysis and reporting of data and insights

Design

Utilizing the insights from research, practitioners will direct the strategic design of the journey in conjunction with leadership.

High-level design activities include:

  • Prioritization of design work and road mapping
  • Design thinking and ideation
  • Prototyping, testing, and iteration of solutions
  • Coordination of stakeholders and resources across functional groups

Orchestrate

In addition to the user-centered design of the journey experience, journey management should also focus on delivering a personalized journey for every customer through journey orchestration. Orchestration is achieved by tracking behavioral data as a means to understand customers and anticipate their needs in order to deliver the right interactions on the right channel at the right time. It’s possible to do some degree of orchestration manually via existing systems; however, large organizations and mature teams utilize specialized journey-orchestration tools and real-time interaction-management platforms. These tools have various degrees of capabilities, with the most advanced ones utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning to aid in the delivery of personalized journey experiences.

High-level orchestration activities include:

  • Implementation of specialized tools for orchestration
  • Analysis of behavioral data and tailored delivery of those content and interactions that are most relevant and useful to the specific customer’s journey

Establishing Journey-Management Roles and Resources

I’ve been asked whether it’s appropriate and feasible to have existing UX or design practitioners take on journey-management activities, in addition to product-specific design work. Though these professionals may certainly be capable of carrying out the work required, good journey management requires dedicated resources. Organizations are starting to invest in this space by establishing dedicated roles and teams of individuals to manage the journey-level experience.

Journey-Manager Role

Journey management can be likened to product ownership. Just as a product team is responsible for the strategic vision and user experience of a product, journey managers own the customer journey, continuing to learn and optimize the journey that users take across channels to achieve a goal.

Though most organizations support various top user tasks, a journey manager should own just a single customer journey — for example, the journey of buying online with pickup in-store in a retail setting or the claims experience at an insurance company. It would not be feasible for a single journey manager to effectively manage multiple user journeys well. For this reason, journeys should be prioritized and selected strategically.

The responsibilities of the journey-manager role include:

  • Managing the strategic vision of the customer journey
  • Working closely with product teams and other functional groups to coordinate crossfunctional optimization efforts
  • Continuously evaluating the quality of the customer-journey experience

Journey-Management Teams

A single journey manager might be sufficient for organizations that are small or just getting started with journey management. However, with the variety of skills required to deliver on each competency, for many organizations it makes sense to create a journey-management team including additional specialized roles. Some high-priority specialist roles include

  • Data scientists, journey analytics or insights specialists, and UX researchers to deal with the Understand aspect of journey management
  • Service designers, UX designers, content specialists to address the Design and Orchestrate aspects of journey management

Where These Resources Fit in the Organization

One of the first questions that comes up when exploring the possibility of establishing a journey-management practice is: Where would these roles be situated in the organization chart and where would they report? Because organizations are structured differently, there is no single right answer to that question. It could be appropriate for these resources to be aligned with UX, design, marketing, customer experience, or customer success (if these functions already exist). A new function could be established within the organization as well. Below, we discuss some considerations for determining the best fit in your organization.

  • Journey management requires a wide scope of influence. Journey managers must connect siloed teams and functional groups. They need a line of sight into all underlying product teams and functional groups. For this reason, it’s best if these roles are situated relatively high in the organizational structure, reporting to someone in leadership with influence over the underlying teams. If existing design and UX resources do not have this scope of influence, it may make sense to establish a new journey-management team or explore alignment with other teams that may already do related work, as discussed in the next bullet.
  • Do any existing functions currently conduct related work? Customer-experience, customer-success, and marketing teams may already do some journey-level research and management. There is, likely, a foundation of technology, and research capabilities that can be leveraged for a user-centered journey-management practice. If that’s the case, you could align the new roles with these groups.

Conclusion

Most organizational leaders now know that good customer experience is not limited to channel and touchpoint excellence, but now involves the journey-level experience. However, many organizations have yet to dedicate resources to the design and management of customer journeys  — often, because they don’t know where to start and how to evaluate return on investment.  

There are a few bits of good news for those organizations that are hesitant:

  • More and more data shows strong evidence of return on investment across industries.
  • Much of what journey management entails is familiar territory for organizations that already have mature UX practices.
  • In the last few years, more and more practical guidance around journey management has been developed.

We recommend that organizations start small and explore this space with just a single dedicated practitioner. Focus your early efforts around what you can do now without significant technical and resource expenses. Track improvements and gains and scale your efforts with more mature solutions over time.

For more about customer-journey management, we offer a full-day training course, Customer Journey Management.

References

Pointillist. 2021. The State of Customer Journey Management and CX Measurement in 2021. Retrieved from http://myjourney.pointillist.com/content-customer-journey-cx-measure-report.html?utm_source=website&utm_medium=resources&utm_campaign=cjxm21-report.

McKinsey & Company. 2016. From Touchpoints to Journeys: Seeing the World as Customers Do. Retrieved from https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/from-touchpoints-to-journeys-seeing-the-world-as-customers-do.