2023: The Year of the Customer Journey

We’re calling it now. We predict 2023 will be the “Year of the Customer Journey”. What does that even mean, you ask? Read on to learn more.

Loretta Doria

Let’s start from the beginning.

Customer Relationship Management (or CRM) is the business strategy that aims to understand, anticipate, manage and personalize the needs of an organization’s current and potential customers. The goal is to optimize profitability and customer satisfaction by focusing on customers rather than products.

This type of strategy can entail changes in processes, tools and technology, and even company culture. In other words: It’s an organization-wide strategy — NOT just the job of one team.

So, what does CRM have to do with customer journeys?

In order to truly organize around your customer, it’s critical to start with a customer journey map. This is a visual representation of the path of interaction the customer takes, as well as their goals, motivations, needs, and feelings at each stage.

A customer journey map can highlight points of friction and frustration to focus on fixing as well as peak experiences to anchor around amplifying.

This type of strategy can entail changes in processes, tools and technology, and even company culture. In other words: It’s an organization-wide strategy — NOT just the job of one team.

The challenge most organizations face

As an agency whose roots are implementing and running CRM programs for businesses ranging from newly founded startups to enterprise-level orgs—the challenging pattern we see many teams fall into is they tend to plan individual touchpoints versus thinking about full multi-touch and multi-channel journeys.

Even those who have beautifully documented journey maps can often fall into the rut of planning individual touchpoints—especially as teams scale and positions become more specialized.

A customer journey map can highlight points of friction and frustration to focus on fixing as well as peak experiences to anchor around amplifying.

This type of strategy can entail changes in processes, tools and technology, and even company culture. In other words: It’s an organization-wide strategy — NOT just the job of one team.

The good news? The solution is simple.

Devising a cross-channel journey map is a step you can easily add to your planning process to ensure all initiatives start with an intentional and comprehensive blueprint.

At Ragnarok, our briefs always include a journey map. Our team uses LucidCharts for mapping, but FigJam and Notion are also popular with our clients. While it’s an extra step, we find that it’s well worth the time.

The journey map ensures that even if we’re just creating a single touchpoint today, we’re doing so with an eye to the overall customer experience and thinking holistically about all the channels we are (or aren’t) using. In fact, in many cases, by documenting our journey, we discover new opportunities to drive more or better results, or sometimes gaps in thinking or data that can be addressed sooner rather than later.