Your Journey Map Is Lying to You (Here’s What to Use Instead)
Stop Mapping, Start Seeing
You Think You Know Their Journey
You spent three weeks in a windowless conference room with a cross-functional team, fueled by bad coffee and dry bagels, sticking colorful Post-its to whiteboards.
You mapped the touchpoints, pain points, and emotional arcs.
You used the fancy frameworks.
You debated customer personas.
You ran empathy exercises.
You felt aligned. Empowered. Enlightened.
And then you never looked at it again.
Because that map? It wasn't alive.
It was a time capsule.
A beautifully crafted piece of fiction based on a moment in time.
Static. Stylized. Sanitized.
And in the age of AI, it's almost useless.
Because Your Customers Don’t Behave Like That Map
They don’t follow a clean path from awareness to consideration to purchase.
They bounce between channels, abandon carts, reappear two weeks later, chat with support, and then call because the chatbot didn’t help.
The old journey maps were built to represent.
But they weren’t built to respond.
📌🚀 Make faster, smarter CX decisions in under 10 minutes—free for a limited time.
Say goodbye to overwhelm and hello to crystal-clear prioritization. Download your free set of 32 GenAI prompts right now. Prioritize smarter, communicate better, and achieve tangible results—starting today.
You’ll get plug-and-play prompts to:
✅ Rank initiatives by ROI, urgency, and feasibility (Prompt #7 = game changer)
✅ Clarify impact and align projects with business goals (Prompt #2 delivers fast insights)
✅ Run feedback sessions that surface real customer pain points
✅ Write persuasive stakeholder emails that get CX projects prioritized
✅ Adapt on the fly when customer needs or business priorities shift
Use these prompts with your favorite AI Chatbot to evaluate, prioritize, and communicate your CX initiatives more effectively. Let’s make prioritization less stressful and more actionable!
“These prompts gave us clarity in a single meeting that we’d been chasing for weeks.” - B.D. Sr. CX Manager
Here’s the opportunity: Customer Journey Analytics.
You can stop guessing.
You can stop assuming your customers follow the paths you planned. Because now, with AI and modern analytics platforms, you can actually see what they’re doing—click by click, call by call, session by session.
Customer Journey Analytics tools digest billions of data points across your actual channels.
They reveal the real journeys, including the dead ends, rage clicks, support loops, and last-ditch escalations.
Not the polished version.
The real one.
The messy one.
You can:
See the top three paths leading to checkout abandonment.
Track where customers give up during onboarding.
Surface the most common behaviors of customers who churn within 30 days.
Spot journeys that start in your mobile app and end in your call center.
Identify bottlenecks across different user cohorts—new users, high-LTV customers, or first-time buyers.
Compare successful vs. failed journeys and pinpoint what makes the difference.
This isn’t a prettier map.
It’s a smarter one.
One that updates every day.
One that adapts to behavior shifts in real time.
One that helps you make smarter decisions faster.
Want To Get Serious About Customer Journey Analytics?
Start With This Playbook
1. Rethink the Purpose
Don’t create maps to decorate slide decks.
Create them to answer real questions.
Like: Why did our conversion rate drop 5% last week? or Why are Gen Z customers abandoning support chats twice as often as others?
Define 3-5 business questions and build your journey analytics strategy around answering them.
2. Connect Your Channels
Most customer friction happens between experiences.
Start by integrating web, app, call center, and chatbot data.
Then bring in things like IVR paths, email interactions, loyalty program actions, and even survey feedback.
If it’s a customer touchpoint, it belongs in the map.
3. Use AI to Surface the Signal
You don’t need a data scientist to build custom models.
Tools like Pointillist, Quantum Metric, Contentsquare, or Glassbox now highlight top drop-offs, rage-click areas, and delay points out of the box.
Look for platforms that offer built-in AI to cluster behaviors, flag anomalies, and predict drop-off risks.
4. Create a Habit of Action
Insights mean nothing if they don’t change something.
Make journey reviews part of your sprint cycle.
Assign owners to fix pain points.
Track progress. Revisit weekly.
If you’re not acting on your journey data within 7 days, it’s already stale.
5. Give Teams Direct Access
Don’t keep the insights siloed with analytics.
Let product managers, designers, marketers, and ops teams explore the journeys themselves.
Teach them how to ask better questions.
Encourage "data walkthroughs" where teams investigate real user paths together.
6. Test and Validate
Once you’ve identified friction, use A/B tests or user experiments to confirm your assumptions.
Did the new FAQ widget reduce calls?
Did changing the CTA copy improve progression rates?
Measure and close the loop.
7. Tell Better Stories
Don’t just share dashboards.
Use real user stories and behavior heatmaps to bring the journeys to life.
Help teams visualize what it feels like to be a frustrated customer 4 clicks deep with no resolution.
If Your Journey Map Lives In Powerpoint, It's Not A Tool. It's A Tombstone.
Customer Journey Analytics is the upgrade we’ve been waiting for.
Real-time.
Behavior-based.
AI-assisted.
Cross-channel.
Outcome-oriented.
Ask your team this week: What journey behavior surprised us this month? And what did we do about it?
Better yet—log in, pull the data, and see for yourself.
7 Customer Experience Analytics Platforms
Customer journey analytics tools come in many shapes and sizes—ranging from deep enterprise-grade platforms to nimble, mid-market options.
This table highlights seven top solutions with varying strengths, helping leaders choose the right fit based on their business size, CX maturity, and integration priorities.
Genesys Cloud CX(Pointillist)
Genesys, with its acquisition of Pointillist, offers a powerful journey analytics module focused on omnichannel orchestration, real-time analytics, and deep call center integration. While its market share is smaller than Adobe or Salesforce, it is highly specialized for enterprises needing advanced journey analytics, especially in customer service-heavy sectors
Strengths: Real-time, cross-channel journey analytics, AI-driven insights, strong call center and voice analytics, scalable for global enterprises.
Adobe Journey Optimizer
Adobe is consistently recognized as a leader for large enterprises, offering deep cross-channel analytics, robust integrations, and advanced AI-driven insights. It has a massive enterprise customer base and is widely adopted across industries
Strengths: Real-time analytics, predictive insights, seamless integration with marketing and personalization tools, global support.
Qualtrics
Highly rated for enterprise use, especially in B2B and B2B2C, with strong surveying, journey orchestration, and analytics. Qualtrics is a Gartner Magic Quadrant leader and widely adopted by large organizations
Strengths: End-to-end experience management, advanced analytics, robust integrations, and compliance features.
Insider
Trusted by global brands, Insider excels at cross-channel journey orchestration and AI-powered personalization, making it a strong enterprise contender.
Strengths: Unified data platform, robust automation, extensive integrations, and strong AI capabilities.
cxomni
cxomni is designed for enterprise CX management, offering powerful data aggregation, omnichannel listening, and AI-based sentiment analysis. It is well-suited for organizations seeking deep journey mapping and feedback analytics.
Strengths: Advanced journey dashboards, emotion and sentiment mapping, flexible integrations.
Amplitude
Amplitude is a leader in product and event analytics, offering strong segmentation and journey visualization for digital-first enterprises.
Strengths: Cohort analysis, experimentation, integrations with marketing and product stacks.
Mixpanel
Mixpanel is widely used for marketing and product analytics, with customizable enterprise plans and strong cross-channel tracking.
Strengths: Real-time analytics, flexible segmentation, affordable for mid-to-large enterprises.
Did I miss any?
What Successful CX Leaders Do on Sundays
DCX Links: Six must-read picks to fuel your leadership journey delivered every Sunday morning. Dive into the latest edition now!
👋 Please Reach Out
I created this newsletter to help customer-obsessed pros like you deliver exceptional experiences and tackle challenges head-on. But honestly? The best part is connecting with awesome, like-minded people—just like you! 😊
Here’s how you can get involved:
Got feedback? Tell me what’s working, what’s not, or what you’d love to see next.
Stuck on something? Whether it’s a CX challenge, strategy question, or team issue, hit me up—I’m here to help.
Just want to say hi? Seriously, don’t be shy. I’d love to connect, share ideas, or even swap success stories.
Your input keeps this newsletter fresh and valuable. Let’s start a conversation—email me, DM me, or comment anytime. Can’t wait to hear from you!
— Mark
www.marklevy.co
Follow me on Linkedin
Thanks for being here. I’ll see you next Tuesday at 8:15 am ET.
👉 If you enjoyed this newsletter and value this work, please consider forwarding it to your friends and colleagues or sharing it on social media. New to DCX? Sign Up.
📌🚀Grab my Free CX Leader’s Guide to Organizational Buy-In
Ready to cultivate a customer-obsessed culture? A CX Leader’s Guide to Organizational Buy-In is your playbook for ensuring that every department—customer service, sales, product, tech, finance, HR, and beyond—puts customers at the center of everything it does.
Learn how to rally every department around customer obsession, click the button below to get started:
✉️ Join 1,200+ CX Leaders Who Get the DCX Newsletter First
Human-centered insights. Plug-and-play frameworks. Smart tools that actually work.
All designed for CX pros who want to build with purpose—and deliver with impact.
👉 Subscribe today and get the tools to elevate your strategy (and your sanity).
This article is an absolute goldmine. Saved down to my favourites for when I need it!
For consideration, an idea to add to the customer journey mapping sessions is to bring a few real customer in there to test their initial reaction to the "future process" prototype and reiterate quickly.