A fundamental method is journey mapping, which involves creating a visual representation of the steps, emotions, touchpoints, pain points, and opportunities a person encounters over time while interacting with a product or service. Complementing this visualization is customer journey analytics, the process of collecting, aggregating, and analyzing customer data across various touchpoints to gain deeper insights into customer behavior and the 'why' behind their actions.
Software solutions play a vital role in enabling these methods, ranging from dedicated journey mapping platforms to tools for data collection, aggregation, and visualization. These tools help manage detailed maps, integrate analytics, and make information accessible. Successfully operationalizing journey management also requires establishing a clear governance structure with defined roles and processes to ensure maps are current, data is analyzed, and insights lead to action across organizational silos.
By combining these methods and tools, organizations can move towards a more systematic and data-driven approach to journey management and customer experience improvement. In customer journey management you need a broad range of tools and methods, for example:
- Customer experience research: qualitative data like interviews, observations, or service safaris, as well as quantitative data like satisfaction scoring and surveys
- Customer journey visualization: no matter if sketches created with pen and paper, pictures, exported journey maps – visualizations help with the understanding of customer journeys
- Prototypes: prototyping is of great benefit along the development phase. Prototypes can be made in digital, analogue ways.
- Techniques from stakeholder mapping or system mapping: these are used to understand the bigger picture in which a service or product is embedded
- Business-centered disciplines, like budget planning or leadership techniques: these help with change management and other internal challenges of CX management
What is the best software solution for customer journey management?
You can easily visualize a journey map with pen and paper. However, once you start using journey maps as a visual journey management tool, dedicated software will be indispensable for a structured approach to analysis and journey optimization.
Types of customer journey management software
Nowadays people working in the field use customer journey management software from different categories, for example:
- Dedicated customer journey management software, for example Smaply
- Classic project & product management tools, for example Monday.com
- Specified CX tools for each phase of the project, for example Miro for prototyping
- Customer journey automation software, for example Mailchimp
How to choose the best customer journey management software for your use case
To help you pick the best software for your use case, consider the software's capabilities in the following areas:
1. Standardizing customer experience documentations
Flexibility is great, however it does not always lead you to structure insights finding, documenting and sharing. Imagine you would draw your journey map on a simple blackboard where you have full flexibility – how easy do you think it is to understand for others? Especially after you have created dozens of sub-journeys, each of them with their own focus? Standardizing the software you’re using allows you to establish a common taxonomy around customer journey mapping. You can link maps into each other and progress your repository into a hierarchy of maps that helps you to navigate customer experience across organizational silos.
2. Discussing and commenting
Customer journey maps should never be static. Thus, you need to keep talking about them, work on them, and update your most-used maps regularly. Your journey mapping software should allow you to work asynchronously on a map by inviting others to comment on the map. Think about including a panel of users commenting on the future customer experience you’re planning, a group of experts having asynchronous discussions on future trends and technical feasibility of your ideas, think about researchers adding insights and data as comments to your map, or your colleagues estimating the development time of various features or user stories you’ve included on your map.
3. Presenting professional journey maps
It does not matter if in front of your own team or in front of a client, you will run into moments when you need to present a journey map. Customer journey presentations help you bring everybody on the same page and thus foster buy-in – however only if the format and content of your presentation is adapted to the audience.
Being able to present the journey map in different ways – without first manually recreating it with another software like InDesign or Figma – will help you get the point across. Think about hiding certain lanes and data that would overwhelm an audience, or being able to export the same journey map in different formats, like PDF, Excel, PPT, HTML, for different occasions.
4. Scaling customer journey management across organizational silos
Customer journey management should always aim at finding its way into every department of your company, every team, every silo. Thus we recommend you to pay special attention to scalable solutions. Part of this is for example user roles: The more stakeholders (team members, clients, customers, …) you expect to participate and the more varied their backgrounds (techie or not, service design background or not), the more you should check for access rights and restrictive sharing modes.
5. Data security and safety
There are uncountable customer journey tools out there; some of them top-nodge solutions that really bring value; some however might not be maintained well, are outdated or just hosted in countries with loose data security policies. Make sure you go for a solution that comes with a data security framework that you trust and that matches your own organizational policy. Otherwise, you’ll have a hard time during procurement and risk assessment.
