Critique
When funnels lie
A funnel is a polite fiction. It assumes customers enter at the top and either convert or vanish. Real journeys include retries after payday, WhatsApp help from a cousin, and store visits that never touch your app SDK.
The missing recovery loop
In one telco cohort, digital onboarding looked disastrous until agents’ offline completions were plotted as recovery edges. The “drop-off” was partly a channel change. Path-density views made the loop visible; the funnel had buried it under a red percentage.
Visualization that admits complexity
You do not need a hairball graph. Start with annotated edges for the top three recoveries. Show time-to-recover beside conversion. Leadership can handle nuance when the chart still answers “what should we do Monday?”
A caution
Complexity is not an excuse to avoid decisions. If your journey map requires a legend longer than the insight, you have swapped one lie for another. Critique until the story is short again.