#744: Journey management and driving business results with Mark Smith and Raymond Gerber, Institute for Journey Management

The customer journey guides the lifetime value of our most important audiences, yet how do we ensure that we are planning, mapping, managing, and optimizing these journeys effectively?

Agility requires a deep understanding of your customer's journey and the ability to adapt your strategies and tactics in real-time. It also demands a willingness to experiment, learn, and iterate quickly, embracing change as an opportunity rather than a threat.

Today, we're going to talk about the exciting new Institute for Journey Management and how it's helping businesses unlock the power of customer-centricity in a complex and ever-changing world.
To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome, Mark Smith and Raymond Gerber from the Institute for Journey Management.

About Mark Smith and Raymond Gerber

Raymond Gerber
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
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.
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. 


Resources

Institute for Journey Management: https://www.i4jm.org/

This episode is brought to you by Kinetic Data. Self-service without compromise. Build powerful self-service experiences across your entire organization without sacrificing speed, flexibility, security, or control. https://kineticdata.com/

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