The new era of journey intelligence

Every CX and marketing leader we’ve worked with has faced the same frustration.

You can measure what happens inside your channels—clicks, conversions, engagement rates—but those metrics never tell the whole story. On top of that, the data is siloed within those channels; getting a reliable, accurate view of how it all connects is a constant, complex challenge that eats up time, valuable resources, and budgets. Meanwhile, customers research elsewhere, compare competitors, and make decisions long before they reach you. They also leave quietly, and you’re left wondering why.

Even the most advanced first-party analytics and customer journey tools stop at the edge of your owned data. But today, that’s not where most decisions happen. In fact, our data shows that 70–90% of the customer journey takes place outside a brand’s owned channels.

Think about it: As a consumer yourself, how do you find, research, and compare products or services before making a purchase? By the time you go to buy, you’ve most likely already made an informed decision from a diverse set of sources. It’s unlikely that your journey, from start to finish, was neat, predictable, or contained to one brand’s controlled environments—and it’s guaranteed to be unique from the path of any other customer.

That’s the invisible majority of the journey, and it’s where most brands lose visibility, opportunity, and competitive edge.

Over the past several years, our work with organizations across industries has revealed a clear pattern: Despite heavy investment in data, personalization, and CX strategy, most companies still struggle to connect the dots.

According to Alterian and CX Network’s 2024 research report:

• 76% of CX professionals cite siloed data and lack of integrated systems as their top barrier

• Only 9% say they understand their customers’ journey behavior very well

This gap between perception and reality is growing. Data fragmentation makes it nearly impossible to see the journey as customers actually experience it. As Alterian CEO Bob Hale put it in the report:

A focus on short-term metrics, such as conversion rates, rather than taking a holistic view of the entire customer journey, can further contribute to this limited understanding.

Bob Hale | CEO, Alterian

When different teams work from disconnected data, each sees only a narrow, siloed view—isolated steps in the process. A comprehensive evaluation of the customer experience, however, requires a broad perspective—one that follows the customer from first impression to final decision, across every brand and channel they encounter.

At Alterian, we’ve spent decades helping organizations get closer to their customers. Our heritage in campaign management and journey orchestration taught us how to design and deliver relevant, timely interactions, earning us repeat recognition as a Leader in the Forrester Wave™ for Customer Journey Analytics & Orchestration Platforms.

But even as first-party analytics and journey orchestration improved, one question kept resurfacing in our client conversations: Why can’t we see more?

Marketers and CX teams have advanced tools for analyzing what happened within their own systems, but little understanding of what shaped those outcomes. Data silos, technical friction, and tagging dependencies meant teams couldn’t easily connect behavior across the broader journey.

We saw the same frustration across sectors—from retail to financial services, healthcare, telecommunications, and niche industries alike. Everyone wanted to know: What happens before customers reach us? Where do they go after they leave?

These recurring questions became the foundation for something new.

The idea behind Journey Insight started with a simple realization: You can’t fix what you can’t see.

Traditional analytics stop at your data boundaries. We wanted to remove those boundaries entirely—to help brands understand their customers’ journeys not just with them, but within their entire market.

So, we asked: What if you could see your customer’s interactions with your brand, but also with your competitors? What if you could visualize how people move across categories, compare products, and make decisions, all without requiring any tracking tags or technical setup?

From there, Journey Insight was born.

Journey Insight removes the barriers that have long limited CX and marketing insight.

• Analyze real customer behavior at scale. Journey Insight’s unique data is built from billions of digital interactions from millions of customers across 300+ markets. For reference, most customer research surveys use a sample size between 300—1,000 respondents.

• Never-before-seen market-level views. See not just what your customers do, but how your journeys compare to competitors’.

• No tags or approvals required. Instant access to market-wide visibility—no implementation bottlenecks, no security audits.

• Anonymized and permissioned data. Every insight is built from privacy-safe, fully compliant third-party data sources, future-proofed for a cookie-less world.

• AI-powered, actionable insights. Our advanced, proprietary models analyze the data for you to identify the patterns, overlaps, and opportunities that drive performance.

Unlike tools that analyze your first-party data, Journey Insight offers the missing breadth: external insights provided uniquely by our extensive third-party data. It complements your existing analytics stack by adding clear context for how and where customers evaluate and make decisions within your market. Beyond your brand, which competitors do they interact with? What other major influences—like community forums, comparison sites, or content creators—impact their behavior?

Among many other attributes, Journey Insight analyzes metrics like traffic trends and campaign activity that might confirm or challenge your existing assumptions, research, or findings. Our broad market view also allows users to understand whether results are driven by market-wide changes or are specific to your brand.

Journey Insight is the bridge between what you know—or think you know—and everything you’ve never been able to see.

The pressure on marketing and CX teams has never been greater. Customers expect seamless, personalized experiences across every channel, while organizations must deliver measurable impact on satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue. Yet most are still operating on incomplete insight.

In the 2024–2025 State of Customer Journey Success report:

• 64% of CX leaders said measuring and tracking effectiveness remains one of their biggest challenges

• 27% link retention to revenue to prove ROI, but 23% still can’t demonstrate any financial returns at all

• 76% believe AI will have the greatest impact on understanding customer behavior and shaping CX strategy

Meanwhile, data privacy shifts are accelerating the need for new, compliant ways to understand market behavior. As cookies disappear and walled gardens grow, brands risk flying blind.

Journey Insight solves this by giving you an end-to-end view of customer journeys across the entire market. This shift toward a more comprehensive view of journeys allows you act with confidence in an environment where visibility is shrinking everywhere else.

The practice of customer journey mapping is essential for teams; it provides a simplified overview that teams need to serve as the foundation for understanding and optimizing the overall customer experience. But in the age of AI and connected experiences, teams struggle to grasp the detail or dynamic reality of how customers behave and lack visibility into external touchpoints.

Journey management brought progress—but the next leap forward is journey intelligence.

Journey Insight represents the evolution from standard analytics to true intelligence. It builds on Alterian’s decades of expertise in real-time CX and customer journey orchestration, expanding the view beyond owned data to include the broader digital ecosystem.

Armed with quantitative evidence on customer journeys across your brand and your competitors, teams can confidently identify and prioritize the most impactful opportunities for improvement. These custom, actionable insights eliminate the guesswork and allow marketers, CX, and support to focus on optimizations that resonate with your audience and drive key business goals and KPIs.

Example use cases for Journey Insight

• Increase customer lifetime value (CLTV) – Identify upstream influence points where loyal customers begin their journeys. Adjust campaign timing and messaging to reinforce brand value earlier in the decision cycle—before competitors gain attention—to extend engagement and repeat purchases.

• Reduce business costs – Identify high-volume, high-cost journeys. Leverage real-time journey orchestration, like Journey Action, to encourage lower cost solutions that prioritize digital-first, self-service resolution.

• Drive revenue generation – Use Journey Insight’s visibility into drop-off patterns to pinpoint friction in the digital journey. Improve conversion paths—such as simplifying checkout or clarifying CTAs—to recover lost revenue and increase conversion rates.

• Identify competitive opportunities – Analyze competitor exposure within your customers’ journeys to reveal missed influence moments. If competitors frequently appear before your brand in discovery or evaluation stages, retune your paid search and content placement to intercept those high-intent moments.

• Improve customer acquisition – Benchmark which referral sources or content types most effectively drive first-time visits in your market. Rebalance your channel mix—shifting investment toward high-performing digital channels and away from underperforming ones—to reduce cost per acquisition and accelerate growth.

Journey Insight provides a first-of-its-kind view across your brand and competitors with actionable insights based on intelligent AI analysis. By executing these strategic actions for activation, organizations can move from reactive optimization to proactive, evidence-based decision making—turning insight into measurable business value.

We built Journey Insight to make the invisible visible. This innovative new tool gives every brand the power to see the full story of their customers’ journeys, not just the fragments within their own channels.

The best way to understand it is to experience it firsthand.