The customer journey is rarely linear. Customers engage with businesses across a multitude of channels creating a complex web of touchpoints that can happen in any order. In the past, deciphering these intricate paths was an intensive process. However, the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is ushering in a new era of precision, efficiency, and predictive power in customer journey mapping.
“A major challenge in customer service”, according to John Finch, CX Portfolio Lead at RingCentral, “is simply understanding a customer’s journey from start to finish. Often, solutions are siloed. For instance, a customer might contact the call centre, then be transferred to billing or another department. Once that initial contact centre interaction ended, the issue is often considered solved, leaving businesses in the dark. We didn’t truly know if the problem was resolved, if the customer would call back, or even what was discussed in those subsequent conversations”.
Having a holistic understanding of the entire customer journey changes everything. Finch adds, “AI gives us the ability to see every customer interaction, tracking it seamlessly no matter where it’s transferred within the organisation. As a call progresses, AI can ascertain specific information from the conversation, upload it directly into the CRM, and track customer sentiment. This also helps us understand the issue’s disposition: is it genuinely closed or still open? With this insight, we can proactively reach out to customers if needed, or anticipate potential callbacks from frustrated individuals. This is the fundamental shift from past limitations to current capabilities”.
Traditional methods and tools
Customer journey mapping has primarily relied on a combination of manual methods and rudimentary tools. Businesses often employed workshops and brainstorming sessions with internal teams, drawing on anecdotal evidence, sales data, and customer service logs. Surveys and interviews with customers provided qualitative insights into their experiences, while focus groups offered deeper dives into specific pain points or preferences.
These traditional approaches, while foundational, harboured significant limitations. They were inherently time-consuming and resource-intensive, often producing static maps that quickly became outdated. The reliance on qualitative data and self-reported experiences meant a high degree of subjectivity and potential for bias[i].
Critically, these methods struggled to process the sheer volume and velocity of modern customer data, making it difficult to identify subtle patterns, uncover hidden touchpoints, or predict future behaviours. The inability to dynamically adapt to evolving customer behaviours was a major hurdle, leading to a reactive rather than proactive approach to customer experience management.
Overcoming the challenges and unlocking new benefits
AI aims to address these limitations by bringing scalability, objectivity, and predictive capabilities to customer journey mapping. It can process vast quantities of diverse data points in real-time, identifying patterns and correlations that are impossible for humans to discern.
Finch points out, “AI significantly enhances customer interactions in several ways. For example, we launched a new capability in February that acts as a single-skilled agent, drawing from a knowledge base to provide business information. This digital worker represents the company with a specific personality, answers basic questions, and intelligently transfers calls to the right departments or people, like customer service or billing. This eliminates the need for an employee to handle initial queries and avoids the frustrating ‘doom loop’ of traditional IVRs, where you’re stuck pressing zero or can’t reach anyone after hours. Essentially, it provides a 24/7 ‘front door’ for your business”.
The application of AI to customer journey mapping and analytics promises substantial benefits, according to Jesse Angle, Co-Founder and CEO or Rapid Innovation[ii]:
- Comprehensive and dynamic mapping: AI can create far more intricate and accurate journey maps, reflecting all actual touchpoints, not just the hypothesised ones. These maps can be continuously updated in real-time as customer behaviour evolves.
- Identification of hidden pain points and opportunities: By analysing sentiment, engagement patterns, and conversion rates across touchpoints, AI can pinpoint precise moments of friction or delight that might otherwise go unnoticed. What’s more, AI can help businesses understand the different components of the conversation itself.
- Personalised customer experiences: With a deeper understanding of individual journeys, organisations can tailor communications, offers, and support to specific customer segments or even individual customers.
- Proactive problem resolution and predictive analytics: AI can forecast future customer behaviour, identify customers at risk of churn, or predict the likelihood of conversion, enabling proactive interventions
- Operational efficiency: Automating data collection and analysis frees up human resources to focus on strategy, innovation, and direct customer engagement.
According to Finch, applying AI techniques to journey mapping enables proactive outreach to resolve a customer’s issue. “If a customer’s issue isn’t fully resolved, even after being transferred to, say, the billing department, AI can detect negative sentiment from that interaction. This could trigger an automated prompt for an agent to make an outbound call, follow up, and ensure the customer is satisfied. So, even if an interaction technically “ends” when the customer hangs up with billing, AI can proactively re-engage to ensure everything is resolved to their satisfaction”.
Data fuelling the AI engine
The effectiveness of AI in customer journey mapping hinges on access to rich, diverse datasets. Key data types include:
- Behavioral data: Website clicks, page views, search queries, app usage, conversion events, cart abandonment.
- Interaction data: Email opens and clicks, chat transcripts, call center recordings, social media interactions, CRM notes.
- Transactional data: Purchase history, order details, returns, payment methods.
- Demographic data: Age, gender, location (where ethically and legally permissible).
- Sentiment data: Customer reviews, social media mentions, survey responses, net promoter scores (NPS).
- Offline data: In-store visits, point-of-sale data (for multi-channel businesses).
This comprehensive data is typically collected from various sources[iii]. Web analytics platforms, such as Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics, provide insights into website and app behavior. CRM Systems like Salesforce and HubSpot are crucial for managing customer interactions and profiles. Marketing Automation Platforms, including Mailchimp and Marketo, track email and campaign performance. Social Listening Tools capture social media mentions and sentiment, while call centre software records interaction transcripts and conversations. Lastly, Transactional Databases house all purchase-related information.
The future
The future of AI in customer journey mapping is incredibly promising. Finch says, “We anticipate hyper-personalisation at scale, where AI dynamically adjusts content, offers, and support in real-time for truly individualised journey optimisation, moving beyond just segment-level personalisation. We’ll also see proactive problem resolution: AI won’t just identify pain points, it’ll predict potential issues before they arise, allowing us to intervene and prevent customer dissatisfaction. For example, if many customers start having a similar issue, AI can flag it as an escalating problem, categorize it, and help determine how to address it”.
“We also expect omni-channel journey orchestration, seamlessly integrating data and insights across all online and offline channels to create a truly unified and consistent customer experience, regardless of the touchpoint. This includes ensuring visibility across voice and over 20 other digital channels. Furthermore, predictive churn prevention will become even more accurate with sophisticated AI models identifying at-risk customers, allowing for targeted retention strategies. Finally, we foresee deeper voice and conversational AI integration to capture more nuanced customer interactions and provide immediate, context-aware support within the journey through voice assistants and chatbots”.
AI-Driven Insights and Human Expertise
The balance between AI-driven insights and human expertise in customer journey management will evolve into a powerful synergy. AI will increasingly handle the heavy lifting of data analysis, pattern recognition, and prediction, providing an unparalleled level of detail and foresight. It will serve as the ‘eyes and ears of the organisation, continuously monitoring and reporting on customer journeys.
By embracing AI strategically and thoughtfully, organisations can move beyond static journey maps to truly dynamic, predictive, and personalised customer experiences, ultimately driving greater satisfaction, loyalty, and business growth.
[i] https://heartofthecustomer.com/journey-mapping-tools-dont-address-the-most-critical-challenges/
[ii] https://www.rapidinnovation.io/post/ai-agents-customer-journey-mapping
[iii] https://superagi.com/case-study-how-ai-journey-orchestration-boosted-customer-satisfaction-and-efficiency-at-ibm-and-american-express/