Open World CX | Challenges to Achieving Multi-Path Completion
Greg Kihlstrom
Helping F1000 Brands Prioritize & Act on MarTech, AI Adoption & MOps Decisions || Consultant, Advisor, Author & Speaker || MBA, Pursuing a Doctorate
Marketers and CX Professionals: What can open-world gaming teach us about how to create a 1:1 omnichannel customer experience for our brand?
Creating 1:1 journeys is not without challenges
TL;DR: Enabling multi-path completion for your customers sounds great in your strategic planning PPT, but behind the scenes it can look more like a traffic jam than a branching narrative. Three obstacles show up on every attempt to turn “choose your own adventure” into “choose your own checkout.”
Let's explore some of these challenges.
Siloed operations and data
When channel owners hoard their own tools and data, a customer jumping from app to store is effectively starting over each time. Industry analyses note that most organisations still run channels “within technology silos,” with “little to no consideration for blending management or analytics between them.” CX-focused researchers add that closing those silos requires a truly centralised data layer; without it, the dream of a seamless path collapses into a patchwork of half-finished journeys.
Legacy systems that can’t keep up
Eight-figure core platforms built for single-channel workflows don’t suddenly become omnichannel just because a mobile app appears out front. An IDC survey of global banks found that institutions still anchored to mainframe-era cores “have difficulty enabling the kind of integration required to engage customers on all the channels they use today.” Broader tech audits echo the point: fragmented catalogues, independent sales systems, and aging CRMs “lack integration and a 360-degree customer view,” blocking any hope of consistent functionality across channels.
The sheer cost of consistency
Even when the architecture is theoretically capable, achieving the same polish on every path is neither cheap nor quick. Sustaining full parity demands “significant investment in technology and continuous process refinement,” which quickly becomes resource-intensive for all but the most well-capitalised brands. McKinsey’s benchmarking underscores the bill: customers use three to five channels per journey, forcing companies to fund, staff, and monitor each of them to the same standard.
Until data silos are dismantled, legacy cores modernised, and budgets aligned with the true cost of multi-path quality assurance, omnichannel ambitions will remain concept art. The good news: each of these roadblocks is solvable—but only when treated as an integrated programme, not a series of disconnected upgrades.
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How These Challenges Are Solved in Open World Gaming
Game studios face the same headaches brands do—multiple systems, legacy code, and an audience that can smell a broken loop from a mile away. What sets the successful open-world titles apart is the engineering discipline they’ve evolved to keep every possible path coherent, rewarding, and bug-free.
Modular systems keep the narrative intact while players wander off-script
Rather than hard-coding a single “golden path,” designers break quests, spaces, and AI behaviours into self-contained chunks that can recombine on demand. Modular game design frameworks recommend dividing the world into interchangeable “modules” that can be swapped or extended without rewriting the whole storyline. In Skyrim, that modularity lives inside Bethesda’s Radiant Story system, which drops objectives, NPCs, and rewards into whatever cave or city the player just discovered—no matter whether they arrived via stealth, sword, or sweet-talk. Because every module obeys the same rules for dialogue triggers, enemy spawns, and quest flags, the overarching plot stays coherent even as the player zig-zags across Tamriel.
Advanced AI and procedural design keep every route equally rewarding
Radiant AI doesn’t merely shuffle quest locations; it monitors the player’s past choices and surfaces content that fits their emerging playstyle—stealth fans get more burglary gigs, battlemages more dragon-slaying —so no path feels like the “budget” option. Academic work on procedural quest generation shows how rule-based systems track world-state and character desires to spin new objectives that still make narrative sense, ensuring each branch pays off with appropriate loot, dialogue, and world impact.
Iterative testing keeps balance and consistency from collapsing
Open-world quests rarely ship the way they were first sketched. Studios run continuous play-throughs—internal, automated, and beta-community—to uncover edge-cases where one path trivialises the game or another dead-ends the story. Industry guidance calls quest design an “iterative process,” emphasising rapid cycles of prototype->test->tune to maintain parity across branches. Large publishers layer in automated telemetry dashboards that flag performance or difficulty spikes the moment a new module is integrated, letting designers patch imbalances before launch.
By treating quests as Lego bricks, empowering AI to slot those bricks into place dynamically, and refusing to declare “done” until thousands of play-hours prove every branch holds up, open-world teams neutralise the very challenges that trip up omnichannel CX projects. The lesson for marketers is clear: modular architecture, smart orchestration, and relentless iteration turn a tangle of possible journeys into a cohesive, satisfying whole.
How These Challenges Are Solved in 1:1 Omnichannel Customer Experience
Open-world designers fixed their maze by hard-wiring three disciplines—modularity, smart orchestration, and relentless play-testing. Marketers borrow the same playbook. When done well, a shopper can hop from an email to a kiosk to a smartwatch and still feel as if they never changed lanes. The plumbing that enables that illusion comes down to three moves.
A single source of customer truth
Customer-data platforms (CDPs) vacuum click-streams, point-of-sale swipes, and loyalty-program stats into one profile, then feed that profile to every channel that asks nicely. Gartner frames CDPs as the software layer that “unif[ies] a company’s customer data from marketing and other channels” to time messages and offers correctly. The approach is no fringe experiment: the CDP market is forecast to jump from USD 3.28 billion in 2025 to nearly USD 13 billion by 2032, a 21 percent CAGR that signals mainstream adoption. Deloitte’s research adds a cautionary footnote—brands that stall on data mastery fall behind CX leaders at an accelerating clip—so the “unified data” project is less optional than existential.
Cross-channel orchestration that respects context
Once the data are in one bucket, orchestration tools decide which lid to lift next. Platforms such as Adobe Journey Optimizer let marketers drag-and-drop events, decision splits, and channel actions so each profile moves along its own route—email today, push tomorrow—without losing place or relevance. Braze’s 2025 engagement review echoes the same playbook, touting AI-driven targeting and pathing that “maintains absolutely engaging relationships” at scale. The net effect is the CX version of Skyrim’s quest marker: wherever the customer pops up next, the system remembers what has already happened and what should happen next.
Continuous testing to keep every path polished
Technology alone doesn’t guarantee parity across lanes; teams still need to poke at each endpoint until something squeaks. Industry guidance now treats automated, end-to-end testing as table stakes for omnichannel CX. Cyara calls continuous test cycles “essential to proactively identify defects ahead of impact.” Experience-optimization vendors go further, arguing that competitive advantage flows to firms that weave experimentation and analytics into everyday decision-making, rather than reserving A/B tests for the quarterly growth-hack meeting.
Unifying data prevents channel amnesia, orchestration tools act as the real-time traffic cops, and perpetual testing keeps every route from turning into a pothole. Together, those three disciplines let customers finish the same job along whichever path suits the moment—no rage-quits, reloads, or queue-reroutes required.
In the next edition, we're going to look at how multi-path completion applies to building our 1:1 omnichannel customer experience
➡️ Want to explore more? This is what I do: I work with organizations to build better omnichannel experiences. Let's talk about it.
References
https://blog.cloudsense.com/mastering-omnichannel-strategies-challenges-and-benefits
https://cyara.com/blog/future-omnichannel-testing-ongoing-trends-2024/
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Greg Kihlstrom, love this. Open world CX often becomes "traffic jam adventure" rather than true choice. Gaming solved this better than most marketers have - we could learn something there.