Kitewheel’s 2019 State of the Customer Journey report points to steadily increasing adoption by companies of all sizes in both B2B and B2C, across the entire customer lifecycle, in support of improved customer experience

Kitewheel, the provider of the world’s leading customer journey platform, announced the 2019 release of its annual State of the Customer Journey report. Based on almost 5 billion customer journey interactions in 2018 alone and more than 10 billion since 2014, the report reveals that business enterprises in nearly every industry now embrace customer journey management as a standard, shared practice and the key to improving experience through the entire customer lifecycle.

Nearly half of the interactions in the last year were conducted by organizations in which CX functions own customer journey management as opposed to marketing, a jump of 45 percent since 2017. In addition, B2B use of customer journey management grew 341 percent over the prior year, and retail remained a customer journey management leader, surging 172 percent year over year.

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Key findings from the State of the Customer Journey global report include:

• Companies are adopting and deploying customer journey management at an accelerating pace. In 2018, growth of this practice among B2B companies grew 341 percent over the prior year. Growth among SMBs grew 184 percent. The retail industry saw a growth rate of 172 percent, while telcos accelerated their customer journey management efforts by 160 percent and the insurance industry by 133 percent.
• Organizational silos are coming down in support of the customer journey. Nearly half of the interactions recorded in 2018 were conducted by organizations in which CX owns customer journey management, as opposed to marketing, a 45 percent increase from 2017. Companies have extended their customer journey efforts to include the entire customer lifecycle and customer journey management now involves the entire organization, with IT increasingly involved in these efforts, particularly in B2C.

• Customer journey initiatives are maturing, becoming more sophisticated. 2018 was the second year Kitewheel applied its Customer Journey Maturity Model to this data. As it turns out, 90 percent of the customer interactions analyzed in 2018 were carried out by organizations near the top of the maturity scale, with most of the year-over-year movement among organizations moving from project roll-out stages to scaling stages.

• Retail and Insurance organizations are customer journey leaders. Accounting for 82 percent of all the interactions tracked in 2018, the retail and insurance industries represent the cutting edge of customer journey management. In retail specifically, Kitewheel saw a rapid acceleration in the number of customer interactions conducted: That number grew 172 percent from 2017 to 2018, after growing 57 percent from 2016 to 2017.

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“Companies now compete on customer experience and they are now embracing customer journey management as the de facto practice for managing it across the organization,” said Kitewheel President Mark Smith. “Already well established in B2C at the enterprise level, we now see journey management accelerating among B2B and among SMB organizations, with marketing, service leaders and now IT jointly managing all aspects of the customer relationship.”

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