The customer journey mapping (CJM) platform landscape is an eclectic, innovative market where vendors’ go-to-market strategies and focus vary. Forrester’s ongoing work with CX professionals and CJM platform providers reveals key trends in the use of CJM software across organizations and how these platforms must evolve to keep pace with CX pros’ needs.

CX pros are using CJM software to help:

  • Operationalize CX initiatives and drive action. CX pros want more support from their CJM platforms to help them manage and coordinate changes and tasks across their organization. While a growing number of CJM platforms have integrations with agile project management systems like Jira, few enable bidirectional links that automatically sync changes across both systems to align updates and task notifications. This alignment is crucial if CX teams are to go beyond diagnosing and reporting consumer insights and CX performance results, instead becoming a driving force for business strategy, leadership, and operations.
  • Track and prove the business impact of CX. Currently, most CJM platforms can feed data into journey maps with varying degrees of sophistication. But CX pros want more. They want it to be much easier to integrate existing data into customer journey mapping. More CX pros are using data-driven journey maps as dashboards to provide performance updates across teams. And, as CX leaders feel the pressure to prove the ROI of their CX activities, they need more analytics capabilities like business impact analytics and ROI calculators.
  • Visualize and connect CX with people, processes, and operations across the business. To be more effective, customer journey mapping needs to be the connective tissue between different silos, products, and touchpoints. As more organizations are working to align business outcomes with customer outcomes, CX mapping tools are a valuable resource. CX mapping tools help to inject the customer’s perspective into business processes and operations. To do this more effectively, CX pros need more flexibility to adapt the format and level of detail in journey maps for different audiences.

See Key Trends In Customer Journey Mapping Platforms to find out more.