Why Aren’t More CX Professionals Adopting Customer Journey Management?

There is going to be some corporate belt-tightening around expenses for most businesses as the Fed tries to wrestle inflation to the ground, while trying to avoid a recession. It is also clear that board expectations around growth will not change much despite these tighter budgets.

So, what are executives focussing on?

Gartner, in their report ‘2022 Gartner CEO and Senior Business Executive Survey’*, has reported that ‘Customer Acquisition, Retention and Engagement’ are the top (18% selection) combined focus area for CEOs and executive teams in 2022. To give you a sense, that has increased from 10% in 2011.

There is a significant opportunity here – to have our cake and eat it. Customer Journey Management (CJM) is a well-known capability but seems to have a reputation for consuming a lot of energy (and dollars) while delivering a distant ROI. But in reality there are a number of burgeoning companies that are using CJM to deliver real-time results and have significantly automated the ability to discover, map and understand customer journeys. They’re then able to deploy interventions and nudges to help customers reach their goals.

As a marketer, I can tell you that I look for single-digit improvements in conversions as a big win for a campaign. With the law of large numbers, every point can have a dramatic impact on results. The challenge is gaining visibility into every step of the customer journey and understanding the circuitous routes a customer might take in trying to buy your product. Again, a new fleet of solutions can make this task really simple.

The other aspect that I still find surprising (mainly due to existing silos between sales, marketing and customer success) is that we are often not analyzing the entire end-to-end customer journey. Marketing congratulates itself for the generation of a new lead, sales for converting that lead into a sale, and customer success for ensuring adoption and consumption. But a campaign is not truly successful until a customer reaches that consumption goal. Who is looking at those longitudinal metrics? You could argue it’s the domain of the CX team. Their existing tools are useful (customer surveys, CSAT scores, VOC projects), but these VOC tools need to work in parallel with Customer Journey Management to provide the holistic view and specific journey information.

Today’s Customer Journey Management platforms have the ability to really highlight those pain points in the end-to-end customer journey, see where your customers are really going, measure how they are feeling right there and then, and then provide interventions to guide them. By analysing those longitudinal journeys, seeing the real journey paths and identifying the big drop-off points, we are delivering 10X ROIs in under 90 days! That’s an amazing ROI. There are several really strong platforms that offer similar capabilities, but, of course, we believe ours does it best. Here’s a real-life example:

With tools like these, CX teams really do have an opportunity to affect both revenue and cost to serve in a very meaningful way. Back to the Gartner findings, Customer Journey Management has emerged as the shortest path to improved acquisition, retention and engagement.

And yet, adoption has been slow. Do you know why?

We’d really appreciate your thoughts. If you want to learn more, please join me on our upcoming webinar on September 14^th.

Bruce Eidsvik
President North America