Customer Journey Data: A Puzzle with Missing Pieces

Understanding customer journeys is like assembling a puzzle—except many pieces are scattered across systems, some are shaped differently, and others are missing entirely. Fragmented data, invisible touchpoints, and multi-party service delivery make it difficult to see the full picture.

As services become increasingly digitized, nearly every customer interaction leaves behind a digital footprint. This data holds the potential to reveal powerful insights into how people actually experience services. In theory, we now have more data than ever to understand customer journeys. But in practice, gathering the right data—and making sense of it—is anything but simple.

Part of the complexity lies in how services are delivered today. Gone are the days when a customer journey involved just one provider. Most experiences now span service delivery networks—interconnected clusters of companies or departments working together. For example, a patient might book an appointment through a hospital’s website, but their full journey also includes interactions with general practitioners, lab technicians, insurance providers, and pharmacies.

Even within a single organization, a customer journey can move across multiple disconnected IT systems—patient information can live in separate systems for medical records, appointment booking, lab results, billing, and follow-up care. These systems don’t always “talk to each other,” which means no one has the full picture.

To complicate matters further, these systems often collect and store data in different formats, structures, or levels of detail. This makes it difficult to merge data across systems in a consistent and meaningful way, which can create barriers to building a unified view of the customer journey.

In addition to disconnected IT systems, not all service moments are captured. A face-to-face conversation, a phone call, or even a customer’s emotional reaction to a delay can be critical to their experience—yet these moments often go unrecorded in IT systems. This creates blind spots in journey data that lead to incomplete or misleading conclusions.

Customer journey data often feels incomplete—fragmented across systems, inconsistent in format, and missing key moments of human interaction. But by using the right tools—like CJML, CJA, Process mining, and qualitative research—we can start to fill in the gaps. Only then can we turn scattered data into meaningful insight and deliver better, more connected experiences.