Contextual and Behavioral Customer Journey Discovery Using a Genetic Approach

With the advent of new technologies and the increase in customers’ expectations, services are becoming more complex. This complexity calls for new methods to understand, analyze, and improve service delivery. Summarizing customers’ experience using representative journeys that are displayed on a Customer Journey Map (CJM) is one of these techniques. We propose a genetic algorithm that automatically builds a CJM from raw customer experience recorded in a database. Mining representative journeys can be seen a clustering task where both the sequence of activities and some contextual data (e.g., demographics) are considered when measuring the similarity between journeys. We show that our genetic approach outperforms traditional ways of handling this clustering task. Moreover, we apply our algorithm on a real dataset to highlight the benefit of using a genetic approach.