The Renaissance of Customer Journey Analytics
Customer journey analytics (CJA) is discussed far more often than it is deployed. The technology isn’t new; pioneers like ClickFox (now BryterCX) and Thunderhead (now part of Medallia) introduced it two decades ago.
As the name suggests, customer journey analytics connects related interactions within the same customer journey. Sankey-style diagrams help visualize actual customer paths across channels and over time, mapping each experience or job to be done. The real value lies in linking data across touchpoints and, more importantly, acting on it.
Despite its apparent necessity, CJA has remained under-deployed for years. Implementation often required a fair amount of professional services, and providers struggled to move beyond generic value propositions to concrete use cases. As a result, customer service practitioners—already overwhelmed with more data than they could effectively use—were left uncertain about its practical value. Go-to-market challenges were further compounded by the solution’s multiple potential buyers.
A wave of acquisitions in late 2021 and early 2022 reshaped the CJA space:
BryterCX (formerly ClickFox) → acquired by IgniteTech
Pointillist → acquired by Genesys
Thunderhead → acquired by Medallia
By 2024, the market completely shifted. In a reversal of fortune, CJA has become a top investment priority for customer service organizations. Providers have responded by modernizing—and in some cases, rebuilding—their products to simplify deployment and use. The renewed momentum makes the prior period feel like a CJA "winter."
More importantly, two critical business challenges have emerged, both ideally addressed by CJA.
Businesses have been expanding digital pathways and adding channels, giving customers the freedom to choose any. Without guidance, many end up hopping between multiple channels to resolve their customer service request. Worse, a growing number—uncertain about the fastest or simplest option—try several channels simultaneously. This is a huge issue: many cross-channel journeys require too many interactions, and the cost of multitouch resolutions erases the efficiencies of digitization while degrading the customer experience.
The second challenge is balancing self-service and human support. Too many self-service journeys escalate to an agent only after frustration has set in. Businesses, under pressure to shift more interactions to automation, struggle to identify which interactions or segments to push to self-service. After implementation, they need a way to continuously monitor and fine-tune the balance between automation and human intervention. In both cases, tracking journeys and identifying what Gartner calls “doom loops” is essential.
Today, CJAs are offered by leading providers of Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) and Voice of the Customer (VoC) solutions, alongside a vibrant cohort of pure-play specialists. The industry is focused on simplifying deployment, democratizing access, and ultimately closing the loop—using journey analytics to shape actual customer journeys. Reflecting this shift, Gartner now calls its latest Magic Quadrant "Customer Journey Analytics and Orchestration," while Forrester has dropped "analytics" entirely, naming its Wave "Customer Journey Orchestration."
This article was originally posted on No Jitter.