Leadership Series
Elevating Journey Maps toCustomer Journey Intelligence
Why There's a Shift to
Customer Journey Intelligence (CJI)
Single source of truth. A unified customer journey framework that integrates qualitative research, CX & Ops data and business metrics.
AI-ready opportunities. CJI surfaces high-impact moments across the journey where AI can positively impact both customer outcomes and workflow efficiency.
Informed decision-making. Less reliance on surface-level VoC metrics and legacy behaviours, and more weight on evidence to drive action.
Faster prioritisation. Clear visibility of root causes and moments-that-matter helps de-risk investment and secure resources.
Team alignment. An end-to-end, evidence-based view that breaks down siloed problem-solving and connects fragmented journey stages.
Evidence-Based and Actionable
Customer journey mapping has been the go-to method for helping organisations understand their customers’ experiences across their end-to-end journey. Customer Journey Intelligence (CJI) is the next evolution.
As customer behaviour shifts and our data, technology and ways of working become more sophisticated, journey maps need to evolve. From a static artefact to utilising them as a live strategic tool that reflects real-time changes in customer behaviour and business context.
More than ever, journeys need to be built on customers’ lived experiences to understand the ‘why’ behind behaviour, the root causes of problems and the moments-that-matter.
Our CJI approach is evidence-based and actionable — triangulating qualitative, customer-led research, VoC and operational and business data into a unified customer journey framework — a single source of truth that informs prioritisation, strategy and decision-making.
From Journey Mapping
Journey Mapping
Journey mapping, whilst a static artefact, remains a valuable CX tool. It helps organisations:
- Visualise the end-to-end journey across channels and touchpoints
- Pinpoint friction, pain points and breakdowns in the experience
- Build shared empathy among leaders and teams and align on prioritisation of improvements
Scenario: Journey Mapping
For example, a broadband provider created an internal journey map before activating its VoC surveys. The map visualised the high-level steps, touchpoints and communications in the issue-resolution process. This exercise made breakdowns visible, created alignment around the problem and sparked conversations about solutions.
But here's the problem—
The mapping didn’t reveal the root causes of failure from the customers' perspective. The real issues lie in the resolution hurdles, the frustrations along the way, the multiple channel handoffs, the departments involved, the system workarounds, and the total time to resolve. These are the critical pieces of evidence leaders need to drive measurable improvement and deliver genuine CX uplift.
To Customer Journey Intelligence
Customer Journey Intelligence (CJI)
Even with CX metrics in place, many organisations still struggle to prioritise effectively. Which problems matter most? Which fixes will deliver the greatest customer and business impact?
This is where customer journey intelligence takes the discipline further. It goes beyond orchestrating channels and touchpoints to surface the lived experiences behind the numbers—the 'why' of customer behaviour, the root causes of breakdowns, and the moments that truly matter. In short, it provides a unified, evidence-based journey framework.
Delivering the Greatest Strategic Impact
Journey intelligence integrates three layers of data into a unified Customer Journey Framework, so leaders can quickly identify which improvements will deliver the greatest strategic impact:
- Qualitative research — customer interviews, contextual inquiry and emotion mapping to uncover unmet needs, expectations and root causes.
- Customer & operational data — NPS/CSAT trends, digital analytics and call-centre resolution rates to validate. patterns at scale
- Business data — cost-to-serve, churn, revenue, share of wallet and upsell/cross-sell to link journeys directly to financial performance.
Scenario: Customer Journey Intelligence
The Customer Journey Intelligence method triangulated customer interviews, digital behaviour, call-centre data, churn metrics and root-cause/thematic analysis and mapped the intelligence into a unified framework.
This process revealed that while outage frequency contributed to switching, the speed and ease of resolution were the stronger drivers of dissatisfaction and churn.
The priority shifted from a capex-heavy network fix to operational/product improvements: faster diagnosis, proactive notifications and seamless resolution. That’s the difference CJI makes—it provides the evidence leaders need to prioritise with confidence, de-risk investment, and deliver measurable CX uplift and business performance.
Discover how our Customer Journey Intelligence: 8-Week Sprint can support your strategic goals.