How to Manage

Customer Journeys
Optimizing Customer Experience Across
Touchpoints And Channels
 Table of Contents
Why Customer Journey? ................................................................................................................. 3

Process Overview: How to Map, Build and Optimize Customer Journeys .......................................... 6

1. Customer Journey Exploration ................................................................................................................ 7

2. Customer Journey Mapping .................................................................................................................... 8

3. Building Connected Records of Customer Data .................................................................................. 11

4. Customer Journey Orchestration ......................................................................................................... 12

5. Customer Journey Optimization ........................................................................................................... 15

Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................... 18

About Usermind .......................................................................................................................................... 18

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 Why Customer Journeys?

Customers have changed the way they research,

IN A DIGITAL WORLD,
interact with, and buy from companies. That’s why it’s
JOURNEYS ARE ESSENTIAL
critical to understand how to reach your customers at
FOR MANAGING CUSTOMER
the optimal moment, with the right messaging, on the
RELATIONSHIPS.
correct channel.

W H AT I S A C U S T O M E R J O U R N E Y?
A customer journey is the series of interactions relevant for the customer or company to achieve a
business outcome. A customer’s journey is made up of all the interactions they have with your products
or services, across all touchpoints and all channels. A well-executed customer journey must be delivered
seamlessly, personalized to the individual customer, contextual, and informed by data from the customer’s
past history with your company.

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 WHY ARE CUSTOMER JOURNEYS W H AT I S T H E B U S I N E S S I M PA C T O F A
S T R AT E G I C? S E A M L E S S C U S T O M E R J O U R N E Y?
Because of typical company team structure, Across industries, successful projects for optimizing
customer interactions are spread out across different the customer experience typically achieve revenue
teams within a company and disparate systems. The growth of 5 to 10 percent, and cost reductions of
customer’s journey is impacted by multiple teams, 15 to 25 percent within just two or three years.
and often data about a customer’s full interaction (McKinsey & Company).1
history is spread out among disparate, disconnected
systems. And because each team usually has their
own set of goals, performance metrics, and systems,
analytics about end-to-end processes that support
customer journeys are often disconnected, too.

But your customer doesn’t care whether they’re

interacting with Marketing, Sales, or Customer
Success — they want a seamless experience, across
all their interactions with your company.

Customer journeys transcend teams. For example, a

journey for customer onboarding for a new software
product might include interactions with Marketing,
Sales, and Customer Success teams, as well as
analytics gathered by a Product team and insights
delivered by an Engineering or Data team. When silos
exist between teams and data, disparate analytics
and a lack of context often lead to poor customer
experience.

When valuable context and historical state can be

passed from system to system, and used by any
team to personalize and drive engagement, the
customer experiences a seamless journey.

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 “CUSTOMERS WITH THE BEST
EXPERIENCES SPEND 140%
MORE THAN CUSTOMERS WITH
THE POOREST EXPERIENCES.”

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW 2

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 Process Overview:
How to Map, Build, & Optimize Customer Journeys

S O H O W D O Y O U G E T S TA RT E D I N M A N A G I N G A C O M P L E X,
C R O S S-S Y S T E M C U S T O M E R J O U R N E Y?
Here at Usermind, we work with clients across the full spectrum of customer journey maturity, from
companies who are just getting started thinking about customer experience to companies who have
already bought or built a Customer Engagement Hub to orchestrate seamless experiences across systems
and channels. Regardless of where your company falls on the curve, here is a five-step process for how to
get started managing customer journeys.

THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY MANAGEMENT PROCESS

Customer journey Customer journey Building connected Customer journey Customer journey
exploration mapping records of customer data orchestration optimization

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 1. Customer Journey Exploration

Before you dive into journey mapping, it’s
important to define your business objectives,
take stock of current challenges with existing
systems and processes, and determine key
metrics and ROI for your plan.
Critical questions to ask before
planning new journeys:
What is my business objective for this
proposed journey?
What internal systems touch the customer’s
experience? Which systems are gathering
signals or creating data about the customer?
What are the challenges in my current
systems and processes?
What business outcomes am I hoping
to achieve?
What are the ROI and key metrics for
success?

BUSINESS INTERNAL CURRENT BUSINESS ROI & KEY

OBJECTIVE SYSTEMS CHALLENGES OUTCOMES METRICS

Once you know what you’d like to achieve — and how you’ll determine successful impact or outcome — it’s time
to start mapping your current customer journeys.

DON’T KNOW WHERE TO START?

Focus on improving a common customer journey like customer

onboarding, online trial optimization, lead-to-opportunity, or
upsell and renewal.

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 2. Customer Journey Mapping
Customer journey mapping is a methodology and activity that supports strategic and operational management
of the customer experience. To understand the customer journey, most companies start with a map based on
current customer experiences.

While you may not have a complete picture of your customers’ multiple end-to-end journeys, it’s likely that
you have relevant data in systems like your CRM, marketing automation platform, and other customer-
facingsystems. Use data where you have it — in channels and systems — to inform the stages of your customer
journey map, based on evidence from existing customer experiences.

Where you don’t have customer data, look at the questions below to get inspired, and also to align with the
business objectives you determined in Step 1 of this process.

DON’T KNOW WHERE TO START?

The most actionable customer journey maps are built from actual
data about your customers’ interactions with your company.
Usermind can help you connect all of your customer data sources to
immediately see where people engage, convert, renew, and get stuck.

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 Once you have an idea of your current customer journey, you can map out the new experiences you’d
like to build, across systems. Here is the set of questions we ask our clients when they’re determining
what journeys to build.
WHO IS THE CUSTOMER?
WHY IS THE CUSTOMER
BUYING?
WHEN DO CUSTOMERS
WANT YOUR PRODUCTS
OR SERVICES?
WHAT INFORMATION DOES
? THE CUSTOMER NEED?
WHERE DOES THE
CUSTOMER WANT TO
INTERACT WITH THE
COMPANY?
Usermind: How to Manage Customer Journeys
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Identify your key personas. Then clearly define each
persona’s needs, expectations, and relative importance at
each stage of the customer journey.
How are consumers finding your company and products?
Why do they purchase from you vs. a competitor? What is
your customer’s pain point? How can it be alleviated with your
solution? What business outcomes and benefits impact their
decisions? Are there specific emotions you want to evoke?
How do you determine when your customer is ready to buy?
What needs are met by each specific touchpoint? Are there
stages where ownership of the customer journey shifts
between teams or systems? Is the handoff seamless?
Do you have the appropriate content to address buyers’
questions, in the format they prefer? Beyond specific
product data, do you offer other useful information like
how-tos, details about payment or plans, shipping, returns,
or other material?
Can your customers engage wherever they prefer, across
devices and channels? Are your systems integrated to
detect signals and action, wherever it occurs, and tie it back
to a connected customer record?
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 E X A M P L E J O U R N E Y M A P | O N L I N E T R I A L O P T I M I Z AT I O N
Here is an example map of a customer’s journey during an online free trial. We’ve indicated the customer’s
path, the systems that impact the customer journey, and the teams who manage the systems and individual
touchpoints in the end-to-end process.

Customer acquisition. Trial optimization.

WEB & USAGE MARKETING SALES SUPPORT FINANCE

VISITS SITE

VISITS SITE
AGAIN

TAKES FREE
TRIAL

FAILS TO
ADOPT

ENCOUNTERS
ISSUES

COMPLETES
TRIAL

CONVERTS

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 3. Building Connected Records of Customer Data

To get a single, 360-degree view of your According to Gartner, a CDP should:

customers, data must be integrated from all
of your systems and channels, and mapped
from all systems into a unified record. To
orchestrate journeys, you have to know where
a customer is across all of your systems and
what communications have taken place.
Leading-edge companies aggregate and
define this data in a single view with a
Customer Data Platform (CDP).
Be manageable by a marketer (and not require an IT analyst)
Focus on known customers and prospects who have opted
into something or anonymous visitors to your site
Unify customer data from disparate sources, linking identity,
behavior, purchases, and demographics together in a
single record
Activate data by creating actionable customer segments
Support real-time data streaming to take immediate action,
such as enabling site personalization or triggering emails

H O W D O Y O U G E T Y O U R D ATA I N T O A C D P?
Companies usually take one of two approaches to consolidating and acting on customer data: an IT-led
data warehouse (on Teradata, in AWS, or in a home-brewed solution) or a marketing-led CDP from a vendor.
Most CDP vendors, including the CDP in Usermind’s Customer Engagement Hub, have standard adapters to
bring in data from custom applications, SaaS apps, on-premise systems, and other sources.

For companies that have not yet built or bought a platform to integrate and unify customer data from
disconnected systems, we have good news: A good CDP doesn’t require IT or engineering help to set up.
There are prices of all ranges to meet various business sizes. Implementation can usually be done in a
matter of weeks.

If you’re at a stage where you’re still not ready to build or buy a CDP, don’t worry — your path to managing
customer journeys doesn’t stop here. You can still orchestrate pieces of your customer journey within your
CRM, marketing automation, and other systems. Even with partially connected records of customer data,
you can move onto the next step: orchestrating customer journeys.

DON’T KNOW WHERE TO START?

Usermind automatically builds a searchable customer data platform from all the integrated data
from your systems. With Usermind, you can automatically map historical data and real-time
signals from your CRM, marketing automation, databases, analytics platforms, and other SaaS
apps into a connected customer record. This record powers orchestration across channels.

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 4. Customer Journey Orchestration
Working with clients of our Customer Engagement Hub, we’ve established best practices for
orchestrating customer journeys.
BASELINE YOUR JOURNEYS
First, take stock of your existing customer journeys,
and benchmark your customers’ current behaviors,
conversion rates, Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and
other success metrics. We work with our clients to
do this before implementing any new business logic,
to establish a baseline for the business outcomes
of customer journeys, and to understand where
customers currently get stuck.
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B U I L D S TAT E F U L J O U R N E Y S T O
MEASURE ACTION AND INACTION
Automating responses to customer interactions is
great (e.g., triggering a sales email when someone
downloads a whitepaper). But ideally, companies
need the ability to orchestrate complex journeys
across systems based on omnichannel signals. For
example, if a customer filed three support tickets in
the last two weeks, you might want to provide a more
high-touch customer service experience compared
to a customer who has only filed one ticket in the last
six months.
Beyond trackable customer events, companies also
need the capability to orchestrate journeys based on
a customer’s inaction or abandonment of the product
or service.
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 PERSONALIZE JOURNEYS ON
B E H AV I O R
Gone are the days of segmentation based on simple
demographics or one-point behavior. New-school
personalization provides promotional offers or
content based on historical data, current status, and
end-toend customer experience — a customer’s full
journey leading up to the current touchpoint.
S U P P O RT M A N U A L, T H R E S H O L D,
A N D M A C H I N E L E A R N I N G-
DRIVEN RULES
Most CRM and marketing automation systems
support business logic and rules based on
manual input, data fields, demographics, and
other information. This is a great approach for
segmentation, but doesn’t work so well for delivering
1:1 experiences.
The more complex your customer journey is — the
more channels and systems and teams involved —
the harder it is to quantify customer experience at
scale. Because of this, we recommend supporting
machine learning-driven and threshold rules, as well.
Building threshold rules based on historical trends
Usermind: How to Manage Customer Journeys
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(e.g., usage, latency, and other historical customer
context) adds a new dimension of personalization
to your customer journeys. For example, you can
deliver a different experience to two customers
who may be at the same touchpoint in their journey,
but have had drastically different experiences
leading up to this stage. This creates more relevant
experiences that take a customer’s full interaction
history and current context into consideration when
delivering a next best action.
At scale, it’s not realistic to write rules across
systems that will take every variation on customer
behavior into account. Rather than writing
individual rules across systems, a good Customer
Engagement Hub will operationalize your machine-
learned models. For example, if you’ve built a model
based on historical customer data that helps predict
customer churn, you can publish that model in
Usermind journeys. The model will recommend the
next best action for each customer, and Usermind
will facilitate the model’s recommended next best
action for each customer, within the context of their
journey, across systems
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 B U I L D E N D-T O-E N D E X P E R I E N C E S,
WITH SEAMLESS HANDOFF BETWEEN
TEAMS AND SYSTEMS
An example of an end-to-end orchestration would
be to pause promotional emails during a customer
service escalation, then acknowledge the escalation
resolution and support ticket status the next time that
customer logs in.

This can be achieved by integrating all your systems

and business logic, or through a readily available
Customer Engagement Hub like Usermind. The
advantage of using a Customer Engagement Hub is
that business logic and data aren’t siloed by systems
and teams — and with customer journey analytics,
Dont send marketing
emails for new app to
you can see the business impacts of end-to-end
download
processes, over time.

Download
personal banking
mobile app

When customer logs in

on the web, acknoweldge
and provide status of
support ticket

Had issues
with paying a
bill. Contacted
call center.

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 5. Customer Journey Optimization
Customer journeys aren’t static, cookie cutter processes. To provide seamless customer experiences,
at scale, you have to continuously test and optimize touchpoints, messaging, and processes.
Customer journeys are iterative; it’s important to try new processes, analyze the results, and adjust
accordingly.

C U S T O M E R J O U R N E Y O P T I M I Z AT I O N
Iterative approach

I T E R AT I O N I T E R AT I O N I T E R AT I O N

1 3 4
I T E R AT I O N

STEP 2 STEP 1

Take Monitor
action & analyze
2-3 WEEKS 1-2 WEEKS

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 J O U R N E Y O P T I M I Z AT I O N
TECHNIQUES
Cohort analysis. Cohort analysis is conductedby
comparing an optimization you did recently to
what you did in a previous given time period —
for example, month-over-month analysis. This
approach is valuable to see how changes to a
customer journey have impacted a specific segment
of customers, but it doesn’t control for other events
that happen over time. So while it doesn’t give an
apples-to-apples analysis of both versions of the
journey, it can be valuable when experimentation
with two versions doesn’t make sense for your
business, or when you don’t have a high enough
volume of customers to achieve statistical
significance from other testing methods.

A/B/n testing. A/B or A/B/n testing takes a more

scientific approach. One randomized group will
receive the control experience, and the other group
or groups will receive the new iteration or iterations.
The key to successful A/B/n testing is to have a
clear hypothesis about a given change that can
either be proven or disproven. Simply put, you Machine learning. Machine learning requires data
have to be very specific about what you’re testing scientists and engineers, but it can make a huge
— and test with enough customers to achieve impact on business outcomes. With aggregated
statistically significant results. You also have to be data about your customers, your data team can build
able to analyze the results to see whether your new models of what customer behavior looks like, and
iterations have achieved the desired glean insights for where tomake improvements in the
business impact. customer journey.

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 Optimization Example
What channels work best for a welcome campaign?

What is the timing between outbound touches?

Should we upsell products/services when customers call support?

When should we trigger NPS surveys

Best Practices
Get buy-in from stakeholders to experiment

Definte KPIs of success

Rank order the hypotheses you want to test

Test one hypothesis at a time

Wait for statistically significant results to conclude

positive/negative impact

Repeat

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 Conclusion
There are two mega shifts happening in the world
of online business. First, consumers now expect a
relevant, seamless, contextual customer experience,
delivered seamlessly across channels and devices.
They want an ongoing, meaningful relationship with
brands. Second, the number of applications, systems,
databases, channels, and analytics necessary
to deliver and improve that seamless customer
experience has exploded. As more businesses make
the shift toward digital operations and a subscription-
based economy, managing customer relationships
has become a complicated technology problem.
Usermind provides the first vertically integrated
solution for managing real-time, behavior-driven
customer journeys. With Usermind’s Customer
Engagement Hub, you can easily deliver
personalized, datadriven customer experiences
across touchpoints and channels.
Because Usermind is built for the business
user, any team can create rules, workflows,
and automated interactions, without coding or
extensive engineering projects.

CUSTOMER JOURNEYS ARE

THE ESSENCE OF MANAGING
CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS.

1
“The CEO Guide to Customer Experience.” McKinsey Quarterly. August 2016.
www.mckinsey.com

2
“The Value of Customer Experience, Quantified.” Harvard Business Review. August 1, 2016.
www.hbr.org

ABOUT USERMIND With Usermind’s customer journey analytics,

companies can get insight and immediately
Usermind’s Customer Engagement Hub helps
implement new processes to drive engagement,
companies deliver highly personalized, data-driven
retention, and revenue. To learn more, visit https://
customer experiences. With codefree integration, a
usermind.com and connect with us on Twitter,
unified record of customer data, and cross-system
LinkedIn and Facebook.
data mapping, companies can orchestrate customer
journeys — omnichannel customer experiences
EMAIL
based on a customer’s current context and full
sales@usermind.com
interaction history.
REQUEST A DEMO AT
usermind.com/demo

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