Customer journey management is a strategic management task. For this reason, adesso recommends that company management embraces this task and also takes a leadership role in this regard. This change is the result of the digital transformation that companies are currently facing. It is important to include requirements like the quick development of products and services in corporate digital strategy to improve the way that customers and interested parties are addressed. But this will only work if employees throughout all departments and all levels of hierarchy work together on a joint digital transformation project with the same goal in sight. The customer journey and customer journey management are therefore becoming the central factors in the success of a company’s digital transformation.
The first companies have already begun consolidating areas of responsibility at the level of company management for customer journey projects that have been launched in marketing and sales. One reason for this is that there is often a diverse range of uncoordinated individual initiatives launched to generate customer-focussed offers and solutions. Initial successes are often followed by new challenges: not all of the relevant information and data about customer interactions is continuously available to all specialist departments or is available via a centralised solution that constantly consolidates the knowledge gained and makes it available for analysis. If companies do not have a 360-degree view of the customer, projects fall behind expectations.
Only by removing data silos and organisational challenges, which are some of the largest obstacles in the way of establishing a strategic customer journey management system, will companies be able to ensure that customer-focussed action is being taken at every stage of the customer journey. A consistent understanding of customer journey management, and centralised management and coordination are the key to this.