Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast features a discussion I recently had with Ray Gerber and Mark Smith, Co-Founders of the Institute for Journey Management (I4JM). We talk about customer journeys, where most people go wrong with them, some examples of customer journeys done right, where AI fits into all of this, the backstory to the Institute for Journey Management, the problem they are trying to solve, and their plans for the coming year.

Disclosure: I’ve known Mark and Ray for sometime now and have a huge amount of respect for what they have achieved in the past and what they are aiming to do with the I4JM. As they were setting up the I4JM, they invited me to become a Founding Member. I accepted.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – CX is reaching a tipping point – Interview with Jonathan Rosenberg of Five9 – and is number 563 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Mark and Ray:

• The Paradigm Shift from “Managed” to “Customer-Managed” Journey: The core philosophy is that customer journeys are not prescriptive business processes but are instead owned and driven by the customer. Successful firms organize themselves to help customers along their journey, moving from a controlled process mindset to one of “experience enablement.”
• The Journey Management Adoption Gap: Despite witnessing massive value and organizational alignment benefits, the founders express frustration that only 1-2% of companies are effectively implementing true journey management, indicating a significant untapped competitive advantage.
• Journey Management is a Cross-Organizational Practice, Not a CX Silo: The function often fails when it is siloed within an underfunded CX department. It must be viewed as a long-term, cross-functional, and cross-departmental investment in process and technology to deliver value.
• AI Accelerates the Framework, But Doesn’t Replace Prediction: Generative and Agentic AI are powerful for creating a framework for interaction but are not a substitute for traditional predictive machine learning, which is essential for regulated, bias-free, next-best-action orchestration.
• Beware of Automating Bad Experiences: Introducing AI and automation without a proper journey management framework in place risks “automating the wrong thing”—speeding up and amplifying existing points of friction or poor service.
• Immediate AI Value is Internal: For the near-term (2-3 years), the most significant ROI from AI/Generative AI in the journey space is expected to be internal, improving employee productivity (e.g., building journey atlases, hierarchical topic models) before maturing for the end consumer.
• The Long-Term Game is Key to Massive Value: Investment in customer-centricity and journey management delivers returns over a long time period. Business leaders must adopt this long-term view to achieve the documented growth rates—potentially double the competition—that the practice offers.
• The Need for Industry Standardization: The Institute for Journey Management was founded to combat confusion created by vendor silos and varying definitions (e.g., mapping, analytics, orchestration). Its goal is to set industry-wide, vendor-independent standards and definitions.
• Prove Tangible Value to the Brand: A major focus of the Institute is generating validated case studies, ROI tools, and benchmarking capabilities to provide irrefutable, tangible proof of the value that journey management delivers to both customers and brand profitability.
• Education Targets the Senior Leader and Practitioner: The Institute serves two primary audiences: senior leaders who require education on how journey management drives P&L and growth, and practitioners who need training, materials, and certifications to effectively implement the cross-functional practice.
• Ray’s best advice: Understand your customer needs, wants, and expectations holistically, instead of looking at micromoments within touch points.
• Mark’s best advice: Think of journeys as a tool to improve your business.
• Mark’s Punk CX brand: a beer brand in Boston, called Treehouse.
• Ray’s Punk CX brand: I think we can never forget about the experiences we get on a day -to -day basis from Amazon and Apple.

About

Ray Gerber and Mark Smith, are Co-Founders of the Institute for Journey Management (I4JM).

The Institute for Journey Management is a new industry association with a mission to unite journey management ecosystem members.It brings together business leaders, practitioners, implementers and vendors in a collaborative, non-profit initiative to develop shared knowledge of the business benefits possible from journey management.

Raymond Gerber is Co-Founder of the Institute for Journey Management (I4JM) and Founder of JourneyCentric-CX, where he helps enterprises operationalize customer journeys to drive measurable value. With over 25 years of experience, including leadership roles at Qualtrics, Thunderhead (acquired by Medallia), Pegasystems, and Chordiant, Raymond has been at the forefront of journey orchestration, analytics, and AI-driven engagement. He holds 5 patents in journey analytics and customer experience innovation and has guided multiple SaaS organizations through successful acquisitions.

Mark Smith is Co-Founder of the Institute for Journey Management (I4JM) and Founder of Journey-Smiths, a boutique consultancy helping companies drive value from journey technology. Mark has over 30 years of experience in customer analytics and engagement, including leadership roles at Kitewheel, CSG, Portrait Software and Quadstone – guiding a series of software start-ups to over $100M in exits. He has steered customer analytic products to recognized market leadership positions since the late 1990s, and became a pioneer in the new domains of journey analytics and orchestration in 2013. By training Mark is a statistician, with a PhD from the early days of AI and distributed computing. However he fights against the statistician stereotype and has focused on customer and market alignment for products throughout his career.

Find out more about the The Institute for Journey Management (I4JM), and feel free to connect with Ray and Mark on LinkedIn.

Credit: Photo by Jack Anstey on Unsplash