JOURNEY MAPPING
Journey mapping is essentially the strategic practice that illustrates how customers interact with your company throughout their various journeys, touchpoints and channels. It is still a relatively new approach here in Japan.
Your company may have a journey map or two mapped out on a white board with defined customer touchpoints. You may have started understanding customer touch-points and channels better while looking at this bigger and the more important picture of all these various customer journey. However, with ever-changing technologies and the non-linear, often irrational behavior of your customers, this static output simply won’t cut-it if you want to execute these journeys.
Some companies are making progress, but are often faced with the reality of how complex and time consuming this can be as a task. Persevering through it as a process can produce valuable outcomes. But not when it is left on a whiteboard, a 3M chart, or a PowerPoint presentation. In reality, these customer journey maps are only marginally better than wallpaper.
There are new technologies, new social media platforms, new channels and new applications introduced each day and your customers expect to be able to move from one social media platform to another, engaging with your brand via social media private messages, emails, to live chats on your website seamlessly.
So how is that journey map on the wall keeping pace with this dynamic and ever-changing environment and omni-channel behavior?
It is almost impossible to predict all these customer interactions end-to-end, in a linear and static format such as a manual journey map (believe me, I have tried!)
EXECUTABLE MAPS
So, we have established that this static traditional concept of a journey map no longer serves its purpose and it’s time for more dynamic, shareable, updatable, and executable journey solution.
Today a new class of software/platform called Journey Orchestration is enabling this outcome providing not just a front-end design framework that is both digital and dynamic. But importantly, they can actually ORCHESTRATE these journeys through their back-end, connecting your decision logic into your application layers to make it all happen.
This way, marketers can avoid gaps between the journey design and the decision logic because they both exist in one platform and are updateable anytime. Also, before journey orchestration, marketing technologies are all over the organization and nobody did not really know how all the technologies integrate to work together. But after journey orchestration, any team that’s involved in the marketing programs from marketer, sales, developer, data scientist can go back to the platform to gather data, see results, update journey and logics in one place.
So, journey orchestration is enabling businesses today to engage with customers the way they never did and work cohesively and dynamically with teams across the organization so they can achieve marketing and sales goals they could never achieve without it. The benefit you will see is amazing – now it is time for you to get out of the white board!
If you would like to learn more about what customer journey orchestration can do for your business, sign up for our demo or find more information on superdrive.io.
Written by: Haruna Komuku – Customer Journey Consultant | SUPERDRIVE
