Modern businesses spend tremendous time and resources every year – mapping, analyzing, and optimizing the customer journey. They want to understand the paths their customers take to purchase products, learn which channels, offers and treatments are most effective at certain stages, and understand where individuals get “stuck”, and drop off the grid completely.

In this eBook, Pegasystems’ Matt Nolan and Nicholas Gent of Comet Global Consulting, a Merkle Company, explain how organizations must enable journeys that balance customer needs with a variety of corporate objectives including customer acquisition, growth, retention, and risk mitigation. In essence, trying to predict and script out these modern, complex journeys beforehand is impossible –effectively scripting a “journey to nowhere”. Instead, the optimal customer journey must be dynamic – flowing and changing with the customer, and at the same time maintaining accountability to the business. As an individual interacts across channels, the organization must constantly learn, reading and reacting to that customer’s signals, resisting the temptation to push them, rather than guide them. The best journeys – those that are both profitable and sustainable – shape a relevant, timely, and consistent experience for the customer, while also furthering the brand’s business goals.