The idea of customer experience (CX) as a business practice relies heavily on being able to understand and track customer journeys. And that can be tricky because there isn’t a standard definition as to what a journey consists of. For example, inside a contact center the journey is perceived in terms of the steps a customer takes to achieve a particular result. Sometimes that is broadened out to include aspects of the customer’s history, especially when the business wants to use historical data to craft an offer or change a tactic.
In an ideal scenario, though, the customer journey can be thought of as the extended lifecycle that a customer and business pass through over a long term—from prospect through repurchase and advocacy. And it’s in this context that journey management becomes the core of enterprise CX efforts. To create experiences that generate growth and revenue, a business must have a broad contextual framework to analyze customer behavior. Otherwise, different teams approach customers as in the parable of the blind men and the elephant: one perceives a rope, another a tree, another a spear, and so on. Without context, you cannot build a holistic picture of what you are dealing with.
When we first began evaluating customer experience management (CXM) software in our Buyers Guides in 2022, we had to develop a framework for defining what exactly that category meant: what does it logically include, what do buyers want from it, how are these products organized, etc. We organized that framework around five core functional areas related to the mechanics of delivering customer experiences. The current rendition of the framework was used to evaluate over 40 software providers in the 2025 ISG Buyers Guides on CXM, Journey Management and Knowledge Management, here. One of those areas was Customer Journey Management, which, I must admit, was pretty aspirational back in 2022. The logic in including it, even at that early stage, was twofold—there were some providers that included mention of the idea and associated it with some product features, even if it was somewhat basic. Second, it seemed obvious that the development of CX platforms was going to require some mechanism for businesses to track and design the pathways their customers would use.
Things look a little different after our 2025 evaluation of the space. The most surprising thing I learned from our assessment was how far journey management (as a product description) has come in a very short time. Even in 2024, the majority of tools that used the term “journey” in their descriptions were rudimentary at best. Not in 2025. This year I was genuinely surprised at the strides that have been made in tools that help businesses understand the pathways customers use to engage with them. And how the product segment is changing from one that describes what customers do to one that orchestrates what they do.
So, a few thoughts on what is changing, why it is happening, and where I think it is likely to go:
What is changing. Enterprises have more data to work with, that data is more readily available in real time, and they have tools that make it easier to extract meaning from it. Where a few years ago a journey was analyzed using traditional predictive models based on assessments of likelihood to churn or to buy, now we have generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) that takes into account a wider spread of customer aspects and can recommend specific intercessions. The advancements in analytics allow businesses to simulate many possible pathways at scale, with artificial intelligence (AI) to add context that users can understand and take action on. When you combine the power of predictive analytics, GenAI and data systems like CDPs, you can draw a clearer picture of what customers are doing versus what you want them to do.
The idea of a journey has always meant different things depending on where you stood in the business. For contact centers, a journey begins when a customer calls and ends when the issue is resolved. Marketers tend to see it more broadly, as a lifecycle with many phases. What seems to be happening is that the two views are merging, with CX teams including both points of view to use the idea of journeys as a way of determining the best set of outcomes and then putting incentives in front of customers to take pathways that make sense for the business.
Why this is happening. I think practitioners are reckoning with the fact that when you add multiple contact channels, you create a fragmented view of the customer experience. Pathways into a business are no longer linear, making it harder to maintain the context between segments. You can still “handle” each interaction as it proceeds, but if you want to really understand what is happening before and after that interaction, you need to build functional bridges between the different systems (and teams) that hold bits and pieces of relevant information.
Fortunately, the move to omnichannel is paralleled by the emergence of more sophisticated information systems like CDPs and data hubs that are directly tasked with managing customer information about transactions and histories, which can now be augmented with AI-based sentiment analysis. Now we can track what people do, what results from that activity, and how people feel about it all. As a result, pathway analysis is more than just a snapshot of what happened; it becomes a roadmap to iteratively improving it.
Where this is going. The next phase of development will have two flavors. One is to take existing tools that are primarily aimed at contact centers and wrap them together as analytic packages that directly address journeys and distinguish journeys from mere pathways. These tools will nudge contact center operators away from seeing journeys simply as a set of steps customers take and help them see the bigger picture ramifications. Locally, in contact centers, I think the likeliest outcome is that they will use journey tools to optimize the costs associated with different contact channels. 
The second flavor is what we see in broader CXM, where journey tools take what the contact center delivers and help sales, marketing and service coordinate offers and pathways to create opportunities for growth and revenue that take place outside of specific interactions.
When I think about the ongoing evolution of contact center and CX technology, nothing stands out for me as much as this change in attitude from reacting to interactions to orchestrating desired outcomes.
What you should do. Enterprises should see this transition as an opportunity to derive real value from traditionally cost-centric operations. Journeys (and their management) are a powerful tool for understanding behavior and creating positive experiences that generate revenue. By 2027, one-third of enterprises will be using AI applications to map and manage customer journeys that integrate sales, service and marketing processes. And take a look at the 2025 ISG Buyers Guides on Customer Journey Management and CXM and see how the software providers are rated and ranked. I recommend that businesses create cross-functional teams to first define and then measure the many journey options they present to their customers and then use modern CX software tools to optimize those journeys.
Regards,
Keith Dawson
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