What is Customer Journey Optimization?

Customer journey refers to the different paths a consumer can follow while doing business with a company, and what they see, experience, think and feel along the way. For example, a potential customer might click on a Facebook ad, land on a confusing product page, chat with a helpful agent, decide they want to go to a retail store to try the product, and then go online via their mobile device to make the purchase because they have a web-only coupon. It can be a multichannel experience, it's non-linear, and customers can receive different impressions from each touchpoint. Customer journey optimization is the process of analyzing and improving different customer journeys, with the goal of delivering a better, more consistent, exceptional experience that will result in higher revenue.

Customer journey optimization emphasizes analyzing data from an organization’s sales and service channels. This means it combines data from multiple systems, which could include CRM, IVR, web analytics, email campaign management, and more. The sheer volume of data can be overwhelming for the customer journey optimization team, so they might approach it by segmenting their customers and looking at the customer journey by segment. Another approach is to just look at the most common paths and make sure those are optimized.

Customer journey optimization efforts result in improvements to, or the elimination of, pain points caused by web pages, store policies, customer service practices, email content, app design, and more. The confusing product page mentioned above would be redesigned in a truly effective customer journey optimization initiative. No touchpoint should be off limits. But this can be difficult due to the potential number of departments involved. For this reason, customer journey optimization projects need executive backing to ensure organizational alignment.