Customer Journey Data: A Puzzle with Missing Pieces

Getting an overview of a customer journey is like assembling a puzzle where the pieces are scattered around while others are missing altogether. A single journey may involve several departments within an organisation as well as external organisations, making it difficult to capture the complete journey. Fragmented data, invisible touchpoints, and multi-party service delivery make it hard to see the full picture.

As services become increasingly digitized, customer interactions leave behind a digital footprint. This data has the potential to reveal valuable 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 service organizations or departments working together. For example, a patient’s journey may involve general practitioners, hospitals, laboratories, pharmacies, and municipal care services. Putting together the full journey is therefore like assembling a puzzle where the pieces are distributed across many actors and systems.

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 rarely “talk to each other”, meaning that no one has a complete picture of the interactions managed by that organization.

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 touchpoints can be captured. Face-to-face conversations, phone calls, and other offline interactions can be important parts of a customer journey, yet they often leave no digital trace and therefore go undetected in journey data. This creates blind spots in journey data that may 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.