Top 3 Initiatives to Improve CX and Customer Journeys

Optimizing customer experience (CX) and customer journeys should follow a “business case first, technology second” mindset. CX is the aggregate of interactions a customer has with a brand across touchpoints and environments, while the customer journey is the path through stages such as awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy. Although modern CX is often associated with apps, chatbots, interfaces, or AI personalization, these are only means—not goals. Ultimately, it remains the customer’s journey; companies can only invite customers to continue it by offering a better experience across both digital and analog touchpoints.

Across sectors and channels, three initiatives consistently stand out: convenience, relevance, and trust. Convenience requires reducing friction at the right touchpoints and on the right devices, including emerging channels like voice bots or IoT where relevant. Registration and authentication are pivotal: complex flows can drive abandonment, while smart multifactor authentication, appropriate methods by persona and region, and federation (e.g., social login) can improve usability. Continuous journey analysis is needed to identify and fix convenience gaps.

Relevance depends on personalization and fit-for-purpose data. Machine learning can enable recommender systems and tailored content, but outcomes deteriorate when datasets are insufficient or when marketing data is fragmented across systems. Even then, techniques like clustering, entity matching, and anomaly detection can convert “big data” into “data intelligence.”

Trust hinges on security, privacy, transparency, and clear customer value—beyond compliance demands like GDPR or PSD2. Passwordless approaches can improve both security and convenience, but only when chosen to fit the use case and customer capabilities. These initiatives are ongoing, requiring SMART goals, incremental plans, and cross-functional collaboration spanning strategy, product, engineering, analytics, sales/marketing, agencies, and legal/security.

• Customer experience includes customer journey, touchpoints, and digital or physical environments.
• Customer journeys typically include stages such as awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy.
• Convenience, relevance, and trust are presented as the top three initiatives to improve CX and customer journeys.
• Complicated registration and authentication procedures can scare users away.
• Smart multifactor authentication can be based on biometrics or device identity.
• Authentication methods requiring up-to-date hardware may be unusable for customers in some regions.
• Federation through social logins can increase convenience.
• Recommender systems are described as a major AI use case in marketing and e-business.
• Marketing-relevant systems are often insufficiently connected, leaving data spread across the company.
• Security and privacy expectations matter beyond legislation such as GDPR and PSD2.

• “Business case first, technology second”
• “It is still the customer’s journey—and not the company’s journey.”
• “Great CX is key in this case, and technology might help to achieve this.”
• “It is not a secret that an offer for relevant products and services will create better conversion rates.”
• “Being transparent and offering added values to consumers is crucial in this case.”
• “Two alternative authentication factors, fit-for-purpose dependent on use case and persona, can be a solution.”
• “Finally, convenience, security and privacy can be ‘best friends’ if the right measures are in place, dependent on the use case.”
• “It is good practice to set high-level goals (e.g., business case level), and to check whether they have been achieved—based on SMART goals and/or stage plans that can be set incrementally until reaching the high-level goals.”
• “It is important not to focus on technical topics in isolation.”
• “No company is able to ‘cage’ its customers.”