From Journeys to Systems: Rethinking Customer Experience with Knowledge Graphs

Session Track: Data Intelligence

Session Time: 12:30 am - 12:45 am November 7

Session description

Customer journey mapping has become a staple in experience design, but its linear structure and static nature are struggling to keep up with the complexity of modern service ecosystems. This talk introduces an alternative approach—modeling journeys as dynamic, step-centric knowledge graphs. Instead of capturing experiences in flat, sequential diagrams, we treat each step as a node in a live system. These nodes connect to entities (users, systems, documents), link to metrics (wait times, conversion rates), and reflect rules, dependencies, and responsibilities. The result is a multidimensional structure that supports live insights, cross-journey reasoning, and deeper optimization strategies.

Speaker

Ricardo Martins

CEO, Vessel

Ricardo Martins is a specialist in service design, experience research, and systems thinking, with more than 15 years of experience leading projects that connect strategy, design, and data analysis. A former professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), he drives organizational transformation initiatives focused on complex journeys, actionable metrics, and value-driven innovation. Ricardo brings a critical perspective to traditional tools like customer journey mapping and proposes knowledge graph–based approaches as a more robust way to model real-world experience systems.