The Journey Management architecture: How to adopt a customer-centric approach

What are Journey Management technologies?

How would you define what Journey Management technology is?

Is it Customer Experience technology that allows you to map customer journeys in a consistent way? Is it focused on delivering a continuous improvement cycle of Customer Experience optimization? Is it allowing real-time personalization of customer interactions? Or maybe it’s technology that covers the full cycle from strategy until execution?

Many different answers can be provided to this question, and they will probably be right or cover some aspects of it, but the truth is that running an end-to-end Journey Management operation requires a symphony of different types of technologies that work together, covering feedback collection, experience design, insights extraction, journey orchestration, real-time personalization, experience measurement and more.

However, when you scan the technology landscape within organizations you discover a scattered, fragmented and siloed architecture, which limits the value businesses can derive from the efforts invested (hard to prove ROI). It’s not a symphony but rather a cacophony, which binds the organization to turn in an endless find and fix cycle, where everyone might make their best effort to do their own job, but it results in random Customer Experience at best.

To tackle the challenge, this blog suggests a coherent Journey Management architecture that looks at the orchestration of the different technological components needed to run an efficient operation: journey mapping, journey insights, journey orchestration and feedback collection. The technologies are working as a single engine with the objective of constantly aligning the operation model with customer needs and expectations.

The landscape of Journey Management technology - challenges and opportunities

In general, technology evolved from being a means to increase productivity to an essential part in any business value proposition and a basic expectation from customers in every industry. With so much technology out there in the age of Big Data and AI, and especially in the Customer Experience domain, fragmentation has developed, resulting in several key disadvantages for the organization:

1. Lack of alignment between technologies creates a waste of time and investment by using redundant and overlapping applications
2. Lack of integration requires manual work to collect data from different systems in order to create a 360-view of the experience, limiting the accuracy of decision making based on partial information
3. Lack of holistic experience and IT design restricts the ability to align the customer journey with the operating model. Every silo operates with their own processes and tools losing efficiency and preventing fruitful collaboration around customer needs
4. Lack of strategic collaboration results in reduced business impact as the journey has weak areas that are not necessarily addressed due to lack of central management prioritization
5. Lack of cross-functional collaboration results with customer experiences that are not optimized, making the handover from one stage to another a bumpy experience

While fragmentation within an organizational IT structure isn't going away, we still need to be able to see and connect the four parts of the story: feedback collection, insights generation, journey mapping and real-time orchestration, working together in harmony to address both short-term challenges as well as longer term initiatives:

1. Journey Mapping software: focused on experience design and opportunity prioritization
2. Journey Orchestration platforms: focused on driving real-time personalization in the communication channels
3. Journey Insights solutions: focused on the data analysis aspects of customer behavior, operational data and sentiment data
4. Feedback Collection solutions: mainly VoC tools that are focused on collecting customer feedback through surveys and other means

Aligning the customer journey and the operating model

Journey Management architecture works as a continuous improvement cycle that aims to constantly optimize the customer journey and create an alignment between customer needs (everything that happens above the visibility line) and the operating model (everything that happens below the visibility line). 

The siloed structure of organizations and the fragmented technology landscape go against the nature of customer journeys, which do not recognize these barriers and shouldn’t be designed to take them into consideration. But silos do exist, and technology is not making life any easier if it falls into the same pitfall of fragmentation and lack of integration.

Achieving a strategic alignment between the operating model and customer interactions is not an easy task, as both parties are moving targets that change dynamically as a consequence of market fluctuations and other factors. Therefore, it's an ongoing challenge to deliver exceptional customer experiences throughout the journey, to allow customers to achieve the things they engage for, whether it’s looking for information about a product, buying it, using it, or asking for service.

To overcome this, a holistic Journey Management Architecture is needed to bring harmony into operations by creating a continuous alignment cycle which includes collecting stakeholder feedback, analyzing it, pointing out the changes that need to be made in the operating model to meet customer needs and then prioritizing them for execution.

Suggested Journey Management architecture – high level overview

An optimal Journey Management architecture supports the continuous improvement cycle of customer interactions through changes that are constantly made in the operating model, based on recommendations from the Journey Management engine. It allows us to move from experience design focused on segments to hyper-personalization which addresses the individual customer.

This Journey Management architecture is composed of three main areas that constantly interact with each other: the customer journey, the operating model and the Journey Management engine that is responsible for aligning the first two (as represented in the below diagram). 

The customer-facing part, called Customer Interactions, is the area where customers and prospects interact with the brand through the communication channels along the customer journey stages. During these interactions experiences are created, whether they are intentional or random, digital or in-person.

The second area, at the bottom of the diagram, is the Operating Model, which contains all the backstage activities that are responsible for providing the service to the customers through the communication channels, composed of systems, processes, business units, policies and more.

At the heart of the architecture, in the middle between the customer interactions and the operating model, lays the “mediator”, the Journey Management engine, which is responsible for collecting feedback from customers, employees and processes, digesting them into insights and producing two types of outputs: one, strategic which is working on longer term initiatives to optimize CX on the Persona level (journey mapping) and the other, tactical which drives real time personalization and actions at the individual person level (Journey Orchestration).

Suggested Journey Management architecture – taking a deeper look

How does this architecture work and how do the components interact with each other? This diagram helps begin to explain.

Let's start at the top. Customer Interactions is the area where experiences happen. The customer journey is leading the relationship lifecycle allowing prospects and customers to interact with the brand through the organization's available communication channels at every stage. Customer perceptions, and therefore customer experiences, are generated during and following these interactions.

The Feedback collection mechanism is responsible for collecting data and capturing sentiment from customers, front-line employees and the business processes. The feedback is collected by different methods, such as survey questionnaires, interviews, research, focus groups and more through VoC tools. Some of the feedback is structured as preformatted metrics and some is unstructured and requires interpretation.

The Journey Insights hub is where the feedback is consolidated in a unified data model (Customer Data Platform – CDP), analyzing it and producing insights (using AI) with a journey context. The data sources are various and span from transactional data such as volume of calls, behavioral data such as buying patterns, operational data such as conversion rate KPI, and sentiment data focused on satisfaction scores. The insights are pushed to the journey mapping and customer journey orchestration tools as inputs that help validate the journey hypothesis and make informed decisions.

Journey Mapping is the area where experiences (persona profiles and customer journeys) are designed, identifying the key pain points and areas of opportunity to improve CX. The design of a current state journey and a desired future state experience helps decisions makers prioritize the different initiatives and focus on the ones that are expected to bring the highest value to the business and to the improvement of Customer Experience.

Journey Orchestration is the tool responsible for dynamic, real-time management and personalization of customer experiences across all touchpoints. The tool monitors customer activity in the channels and proactively intervenes to fix an issue, personalize an experience, or provide real-time assistance to help the customer achieve their goal.

The Operating Model is composed of all the backstage activities that provide the service along the customer journey. It includes mainly the systems, processes and business units that are in charge of providing the customer the means to interact with the brand and accomplish their goals in the fastest and easiest way possible.

Tactical or strategic? You can and should play on both fields

Journey Management plays both a tactical and strategic role for a customer-centric organization. From a strategic perspective the Journey Management architecture should support the ability to plan for the longer term and provide a holistic view of the customer journey, while at the same time serving the tactical needs of the business by implementing quick wins, solving current experience frictions and performing real-time personalization in the channels. 

There is no need to choose between the strategic and the tactical, they co-exist in order to create a maximal business impact in the current state as well as preparing the terrain for experience design in the future state.

It is still important to remember that the operational efficiency of the Journey Management engine is not only a question of technology, it needs to be supported by a clear customer strategy that reflects the brand promise, tight collaboration between business units, deep customer understanding, access to data of good quality, execution capabilities, customer-centric learning programs and more, in order to be successful.

Implementing this type of approach guarantees following a sustainable business model that can overcome market fluctuations, taking care of today while preparing for tomorrow. 

By harmonizing the technologies that play a role in managing the journey, you gain time, money plus as an outcome, better customer experiences and business performance.

Contact us to discuss how you can practically move toward such an approach with the help of our Journey Management Framework.