Journeys

A long errand is rarely a single flow. An onboarding is usually split into a personal-data flow, a documents flow and a signature flow, chained with Jump To nodes. That is three flows for you and one errand for the customer, who has no way of knowing how much is left.

A journey puts those flows in order and gives them names. It says which steps the errand has, which flows belong to each step and what each step is called, and with that the Customer Portal shows the customer where they are: Step 2 of 3 · Documents.

You manage journeys under Conversational → Journeys.

A journey is a display layer. It does not change how the conversation runs: moving from one flow to the next is still done by the Jump To node, in the same conversation. Creating, editing, turning off or deleting a journey never interrupts or reroutes a conversation in progress.

What a journey is made of

Entry flow. The flow the customer comes in through, which is the flow of the link you share. It has to be in step 1, and it is fixed when the journey is created: it cannot be changed afterwards.
Steps. Each step has a name, which is what the customer reads, and one or more flows. A flow lives in a single step.
Excluded flows. Flows that are reached from the entry but are not a stage of the errand: a menu, a goodbye, an error flow. While the conversation is in one of them, the indicator is hidden.
Mode. Sequence or Checklist: it decides how the flows of one step are counted (see below).
Enabled. The switch that decides whether the journey is shown to the customer.
Funnel. An optional list of goals used only by Conversation Insights. It changes nothing the customer sees, and it is explained in Journey Funnel.

How to build one is in Building a Journey, and what it takes for the customer to see it is in Rules and Status.

Web channel only

The indicator exists only in the Customer Portal, in both of its modes: chat and wizard. A journey has no effect on WhatsApp or email, even when its flows also run on those channels.

What the customer sees

Where it appears

Chat mode. A full-width band right below the header with the logo and the name. It stays in place while the customer scrolls through the conversation and never covers the messages.
Wizard mode. A band below the wizard header and above the content of each screen. The thin progress bar at the top is still there (see The wizard bar).

It does not appear on the start screen, on the error screen or during the handoff to an agent. It appears with the first bot message, because that message is what says which flow the conversation is in.

Sequence mode

The customer reads their position and the name of the step: Step 2 of 3 · Documents. On the right there is one tick per step. Ticks up to the current step are filled with the theme's main color and the rest stay pale. There is no percentage: the customer is counting steps, not continuous progress.

Hovering, tapping or focusing a tick with the keyboard shows the name of that step, so the customer can see what is left without leaving the conversation.

In this mode, several flows in one step are alternative branches. The customer goes through one of them, for example individual or company, and none is counted on its own.

Checklist mode

In this mode, the flows of one step are items that all have to be done, for example one flow per document. When the current step has two or more flows and the customer has already been through at least one of them, the indicator changes:

On the left, the position with the step name stays: Step 2 of 3 · Documents.
On the right, there is one tick per flow of the current step, in the order you configured them. A tick fills once the customer has been through that flow; the flow they are in right now counts as done.
Next to the ticks goes the count: 3 of 5.

Each tick shows the name of its flow when tapped. If a flow has no name, its tick is still drawn but says nothing. The customer is never shown a flow's id or alias.

In this layout the ticks of the other steps are not shown. A Checklist step with a single flow, or one the customer has not been through yet, looks the same as in Sequence mode.

"Done" means the customer entered that flow, not that they finished it. The tick fills as soon as the first bot message from that flow arrives.

The names the customer reads

The step name is the one you write in the journey. Names that only repeat the position are hidden so the number is not printed twice: Step 3, Paso 2, Stage 4 or a bare number. The customer sees only Step 2 of 3, with nothing about what the step is. Step 2: Identity is shown. Give each step the name of its stage.
The name of each Checklist item is the flow's name in the Bot Builder, as it was the last time the journey was saved. If you rename a flow, save the journey again for the customer to see the new name. That name stops being internal: write it for the customer.
None of them is translated. The fixed text, Step 2 of 3 or Paso 2 de 3, follows the portal's language; the names are shown as you wrote them.
A single-step journey shows no Step 1 of 1 and no ticks, only the name of the step.

How it moves forward

The portal has no "next step" button of its own for the journey. When a Jump To takes the conversation to another flow, the URL, the conversation and the session stay the same. The indicator updates with the next bot message, which already comes from the new flow.

The indicator shows where the conversation is, not how far it has got. If the flow sends the customer back to an earlier step, for example because a document was rejected, the indicator goes back with them.

Nothing special happens when the last step ends: the indicator stays at Step 3 of 3 until the conversation ends. If the customer starts over, the band disappears until the first bot message of the new conversation.

The wizard bar

Wizard mode also has a thin progress bar at the top of the screen, with or without a journey:

Without a journey, it estimates progress inside the flow, and when a Jump To moves to another flow it switches to an indeterminate animation (see Customer Portal).
With a journey, it measures the whole errand: the steps already behind plus the progress inside the entry flow. It never leaves the slot of the current step, so it does not contradict the counter, and it never moves backwards, even when the counter does.

The portal only knows the entry flow from the inside. That is why the bar does not advance within the later steps: it stays at the start of the step's slot. While it knows another flow still follows, it does not go past 90% either.

When nothing shows

The customer never sees an error or a partial indicator. If something fails, they see the same screen they would see if the journey did not exist:

The link is not the entry flow's link. The journey is looked up by the flow the customer opens. If you share the link of a flow that is in step 2, that customer sees no indicator.
The journey is turned off.
The journey does not pass its rules, or two journeys share the same entry flow. See Rules and Status.
The conversation is in an excluded flow, or in one that is in no step. The indicator hides while the conversation stays there and comes back when it returns to a flow of some step.
The journey takes more than 5 seconds to build, or fails for any other reason. The flow is served without the journey: a broken journey never stops a conversation from starting.

The portal reads the journey once

The portal receives the journey once, when the flow is opened, and does not ask for it again during the conversation. Whatever you change in a journey reaches a customer the next time they open or reload the page.

Journeys and Conversation Insights

Besides the indicator, a journey is also used for measuring. Conversation Insights can draw one funnel across all the flows of its steps, following the list of goals you define for it. That funnel works even when the journey is turned off or does not pass its rules: the report only uses its steps and its list of goals. It is explained in Journey Funnel.