Most banks still measure success by products sold and problems solved. But customers measure success by how well their bank anticipates their needs—even before they ask. There is a 123-point difference in Net Promoter Score (NPS) between customers who strongly agree that their bank “knows them” and those who strongly disagree. Customers define personalization as banks respecting their privacy, offering products that fit their needs and actively resolving issues. The biggest gaps? Loyalty programs and truly personalized interactions—two areas where banks have the most room to win trust and grow share of wallet.
But for many banks, making customers feel understood is easier said than done. Siloed, unactionable data and disconnected channels keep valuable insights out of reach, making it nearly impossible to see the full customer journey in real time. The result is missed opportunities for proactive engagement—and a widening gap between what customers expect and what banks deliver.
Here’s the challenge: banks can’t fix what they can’t see. Cracks in the customer experience (missed payments, stalled applications, unresolved service requests, etc.) often go unnoticed until they drive attrition. To close those gaps, banks need visibility into the full customer journey. That’s where customer journey analytics (CJA) comes in. CJA gives leaders a holistic view of how customers move across channels and highlights the friction points that erode trust. Gartner® shares insights on journey analytics in the 2025 Hype Cycle™ for Banking Customer Experience, noting that “Bank CIOs can use the Hype Cycle to learn about the technologies and strategies necessary to illuminate customer journeys and deliver a personalized experience that drives revenue.”
Rethinking Customer Engagement Strategies in Banking
According to Gartner, “Consumers expect personalized, customer-centric engagement, and banks need to deliver it—challenging strategies that take a business-centric approach to customer experience.” Convenient interactions and fast problem resolution are table stakes. To stand out, banks must go further—anticipating unspoken needs, delivering proactive support and offering personalized value at scale.
That requires transformation in customer experience (CX), and every vendor promises their technology will do it: AI agents, customer data platforms and digital servicing, to name a few. But it’s difficult to discern the hype from reality, not to mention predict when those technologies might mature and pay off.
That’s where the Gartner® Hype Cycle for Banking Customer Experience provides critical guidance. Gartner says that pressure to match the customer experience from digitally native banks and technology companies outside the banking industry has heightened the need to harness data to understand customer needs across entire journeys. Doing this well requires more than surface-level reporting; it demands analyzing customer context and intent across channels. CJA is emerging as a core capability, enabling banks to integrate cross-channel behavior and pinpoint the friction and opportunities that truly shape customer trust and loyalty. Rethinking Customer Engagement Strategies in Banking
According to Gartner, “Consumers expect personalized, customer-centric engagement, and banks need to deliver it—challenging strategies that take a business-centric approach to customer experience.” Convenient interactions and fast problem resolution are table stakes. To stand out, banks must go further—anticipating unspoken needs, delivering proactive support and offering personalized value at scale.
That requires transformation in customer experience (CX), and every vendor promises their technology will do it: AI agents, customer data platforms and digital servicing, to name a few. But it’s difficult to discern the hype from reality, not to mention predict when those technologies might mature and pay off.
That’s where the Gartner® Hype Cycle for Banking Customer Experience provides critical guidance. Gartner says that pressure to match the customer experience from digitally native banks and technology companies outside the banking industry has heightened the need to harness data to understand customer needs across entire journeys. Doing this well requires more than surface-level reporting; it demands analyzing customer context and intent across channels. CJA is emerging as a core capability, enabling banks to integrate cross-channel behavior and pinpoint the friction and opportunities that truly shape customer trust and loyalty.
What Is the Gartner Hype Cycle?
A Gartner Hype Cycle is “a graphical depiction of a common pattern that arises with each new technology or other innovation.” Released each year for a broad range of topics, a Hype Cycle is an analysis to help you understand the risks and opportunities of innovation. When might your business be adopting a technological application too early or too late Giving up on it too soon or hanging on too long?
Every Hype Cycle includes five phases:
The innovation trigger
A potential technology breakthrough kicks things off. Early proof-of-concept stories and media interest trigger significant publicity. Often no usable products exist and commercial viability is unproven.
The peak of inflated expectations
Early publicity produces a number of success stories — often accompanied by scores of failures. Some companies take action; many do not.
The trough of disillusionment
Interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver. Producers of the technology shake out or fail. Investments continue only if the surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters.
The slope of enlightenment
More instances of how the technology can benefit the enterprise start to crystallize and become more widely understood. Second- and third-generation products appear from technology providers. More enterprises fund pilots; conservative companies remain cautious.
The plateau of productivity
Mainstream adoption starts to take off. Criteria for assessing provider viability are more clearly defined. The technology’s broad market applicability and relevance are clearly paying off.
Customer Journey Analytics: The Early-Mainstream Advantage in Banking CX
The Hype Cycle for Banking Customer Experience discusses technologies and business practices shaping CX in banking. Among these, Gartner identifies CJA as an early-mainstream, high-benefit technology and predict that CJA in banking will reach the plateau of productivity (i.e., become mainstream) in less than two years.
In the Hype Cycle, Gartner defines CJA as “a technology application used to track and analyze customers’ and prospects’ interactions with a bank across multiple channels, providing a holistic view of customer experience. CJA includes channels with human interaction (e.g., a call center) and those that are fully automated (e.g., a website or mobile application). It also includes physical channels (e.g., a branch), and those that provide customer assistance (e.g., live chat and co-browsing).”
According to Gartner, CJA is a strategic priority for a variety of internal roles (e.g., executives for customer experience, operations, IT) as leaders strive to better understand the customer journey across all phases: buying, onboarding, using and advocacy.
Why Journey Analytics Matters Now
At CSG, we know banks have the data to deliver personalized experiences. What they don’t often have is visibility into where customer experiences are breaking down. When customers stall in applications, abandon digital tools or call support in frustration, most banks don’t see the full journey behind those actions. Without that view, it’s impossible to anticipate needs or fix issues before customers switch.
We believe CJA closes this gap. By mapping and measuring each phase of the journey, CJA reveals friction points and uncovers what drives conversion, loyalty or churn. Unlike siloed reports, it connects context, behavior and intent across channels into one view leaders can act on.
For marketing teams: CJA shows how customers research mortgage or savings products online, so teams can personalize offers and improve conversion rates.
For CX and support teams: CJA highlights patterns, like “clients who use the cash management dashboard being more likely to call their relationship manager.” With these insights, teams can anticipate needs and deliver proactive, digital-first outreach.
For IT teams: CJA delivers out-of-the-box visibility without months of custom integration work. By saving time otherwise spent building and connecting internal tools, IT can focus on higher-value support—pinpointing where customer experiences are breaking down (such as failed logins, slow application processing, or dropped mobile sessions) and guiding the business on where to prioritize fixes and investments.
CJA gives banks the intelligence to move from reacting to problems after the fact to predicting and preventing them in real time.
How CSG Powers Customer Journey Analytics for Banks
CSG is recognized in both the Gartner® Hype Cycle for Banking Customer Experience and the 2025 Gartner Market Guide for Customer Journey Analytics & Orchestration, which we believe validates our expertise in helping banks transform engagement.
CSG Xponent is a customer experience platform that connects your systems, helping you anticipate customers’ needs and deliver the right message at the right time, in the right channel to build loyalty and prevent churn. Its core capabilities span journey analytics, real-time orchestration and omnichannel communication.
With CSG Xponent Journey Analytics, you get actionable insights to help you interpret mountains of data. It analyzes customer activity, helping you understand how individual customers experience your bank at every touchpoint and what impact those interactions have. Then you can determine which experiences and business processes need improvement. This discovery-based approach moves beyond reports to show how customers truly experience your bank today. Armed with this visibility, you can anticipate needs, resolve issues proactively and optimize journeys in ways that reduce operational costs, prevent churn and strengthen customer loyalty.
Banking Success Story: Turning Data into Action
To see the impact of journey analytics in banking, consider this example from a top 10 U.S.-based retail credit provider.
Siloed systems made it difficult for the provider to understand why operational and customer care costs were rising, while the customer experience was staying flat. CSG helped integrate more than two dozen siloed systems and analyze customer journeys using current-state analytics. Through discovery, customer journey data analytics revealed previously undetected friction points, such as inconsistent messages across channels and mistimed, confusing payment communications (which caused payment delays and support calls).
With these insights, the credit provider’s CX team took several action steps to improve data management, communication processes and customer journeys:
- Unified and structured their historical data for a 360° view
- Aligned communications across email, SMS and phone
- Simplified payment reminder and onboarding journeys
The brand achieved these outcomes:
- Increased 7-day payment rates and payments captured
- Decreased support call volume and operational costs
The bottom line: CJA can help businesses like this one (and yours) turn fragmented data into actionable insights, driving both customer satisfaction and business performance.
Seize the Strategic Moment for Customer Journey Analytics
Want to learn more about CJA? Download the 2025 Gartner Market Guide for Customer Journey Analytics & Orchestration and explore the latest insights, vendor landscape and recommendations for building a future-ready CX strategy.
Gartner, Hype Cycle for Banking Customer Experience, 2025, Jonathan Jackson, Uri Lerner, Jeff Casey, 7 July 2025
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner and Hype Cycle is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from CSG.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
