1. A computer implemented method, comprising: receiving, at an interactive voice response (IVR) system, a natural language query associated with a customer during a customer interaction; identifying, by the IVR system, a customer intent based on key features in the natural language query along with any of past interactions of said customer with the IVR system, customer relations management (CRM) system attributes, and customer segment attributes, said identifying including: converting speech associated with a natural language response of said customer into text, the natural language response received during the customer interaction; determining a predicted identity of the customer based on a gender of the customer and an age group of the customer; accessing a customer relations management (CRM) system to obtain the CRM attributes associated with the customer and the customer segment attributes, wherein the CRM attributes include the past interactions of the customer with the IVR system, wherein the customer segment attributes include attributes associated with the gender and the age group identified based on the natural language response; extracting at least one key feature from the text, wherein the at least one key feature is an identified keyword based on a statistical model; and computing a probability score of at least one intent associated with the at least one key feature, said computing the probability score comprising finding a best match, by a machine learning algorithm, between a first sequence of customer intents immediately preceding the customer intent and a second sequence of customer intents preceding the first sequence of customer intents, wherein the first sequence of customer intents and the second sequence of customer intents are ordered by a time and a date, wherein if the probability score of the at least one intent is greater than a threshold a journey of the IVR system of the customer is optimized and if the probability score of the at least one intent is less than the threshold a standard journey of the IVR system is offered to the customer.