Getting Going with Journey Management is the Hardest Part!

2025 has kicked off with a bang for us at inQuba. We are deeply immersed in delivering several very exciting project for clients and there is a big focus on making sure all the journey projects that are underway translate into tangible outcomes.

 We have been reflecting that certain of our clients are significantly more mature in their execution of journey management projects than others and often when we engage clients for the first time, they seem overwhelmed with how to get going with Journey Management. I use the term Journey Management to include both Journey Analytics as well as Journey Orchestration – lets say a journey centric approach to running businesses.

 To truly deliver business impact there are three vital elements to  succeed and they are illustrated below:

Given the relative complexity of the broader journey management space, the three elements need to come together to ensure success is achieved. If any of the three elements is missing, it will result in a failed project – similarly when the three components work in concept, incredible results can be achieved.

 Within the context of delivering a journey management project, there are several elements that are required to be able to deliver success and as an organisation matures, those elements evolve and are built on, starting with basic journey management and journey nudges and progressing to sophisticated concepts such as profitability and the application of personalised AI.

 Often when clients approach us, they are in a situation of having very little customer connection due to their simple, non-personalised unidirectional and strictly sequenced (and often boring) communications. This is the world of blast communications that ignores customer context and are largely ineffective.

Objectives evolve as the maturity of a service provider evolves. These can be categorised as follows:

Objective 1 – Deep Customer Connections

The first objective is to move from cold unengaging communications to rich customer connections enabled through high degrees of personalisation and full awareness of customer context. We achieve that through appropriately timed personalised bidirectional dialogues

Objective 2 – Optimised Journey and Customer Profitability

The next phase that clients should aim for is journeys that have been optimised, operating across the business and that deliver increased levels of goal achievement. This means that journeys are further segmented, filtered and there is additional levels of personalisation. There is equally a focus on customer profitability.

Objective 3 – AI Enabled Customer Engagement

Once journeys have been optimised through linear rules and understand the analytics, it is time to unleash AI on the complexity of journey management to further optimise the very many variables that drive customer success

The three tiers of objectives are outline below:

Objective 1 – Deep Customer Connections

 The base components are as follows:

• It is critical to be able to track interactions regardless of channel and being able to ingest data from various channels to build up coherent journeys
• Equally important is tracking what is happening with backend systems such as payments systems, workflows, transaction systems and CRM systems
• A key tenant of the inQuba methodology is that every journey has a Start and the journey will end with Goal achievement or Drop Off
• Once the journeys have been fully analysed and understood, it is necessary to bring about nudges in each of the channels to drive customer behaviour across channels requiring omnichannel engagement
• A key enabler is the ability to identify when customers have stalled on a customer journey (they have become idle) and to nudge them forward along the journey with omnichannel engagements

 Objective 2 – Optimised Journey and Customer Profitability

Once the first objective has been mastered, it is time to move onto the components to deliver on the second objective as follows

• Integrating the dialogues to interact with backend systems to have real time context
• Introducing the ability to have individual journeys have attributes that allow them to be filtered and segment depending on context
• Increasing the sophistication of goals to not only consider that a goal point is reached by also tracking the feelings and feedback from customers in reaching those goals (for example the customer opened an account and was highly satisfied)
• Managing customers across journeys (in instances where the customer can choose to be on multiple journeys for one service provider)
• Summarising journeys and producing life stage journeys that reflect the summarisation of multiple detailed journeys

Objective 3 – AI Enabled Customer Engagement

 The ultimate phase of engagement is to use AI to further optimise journeys. The key capabilities are as follows:

• Making use of Agentic AI to determine the answer to numerous questions like “how do I increase goal achievement” or “how do I increase customer profitability”
• Applying generative AI to be able to achieve intelligence agent conversations that are context aware, appear intelligent and emotionally engage customers

 The progression through the continuum is illustrated below:

When overlaying business value on the above maturity matrix, it plays out as follows:

As the concepts in this newsletter have unfolded, there is more and more to consider (and the impact is greater). However, to ensure that corporates are not overwhelmed by the customer journey approach, it is important to start with a narrow scope, defined objectives and a set of challenges that can be overcome to achieve results. Only one each level of maturity is achieved should the next level be undertaken.

The above approach ensure that an organisation has a logical entry point but also that the stay on track with journey management.

I trust that you have enjoyed the input, perspectives and experiences in how to start, progress and optimise Customer Journey Management. Please share your perspectives – it would be great to hear from you.

 Have a brilliant week ahead and as always enjoy the journey

 Trent