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Journeys in Customer Experience Programs

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About Journeys in Customer Experience Programs

We can learn a lot about how to help our customers by tracking their journey. Rather than just collecting feedback with no context, we can research a specific process and figure out which milestones in the journey create the least friction for our customers, and which ones need to be adjusted. In Customer Experience programs, it’s easy to set up the journey you want to track, with both pre-made templates and completely customizable journeys available to create.

Example: Think of a customer’s journey at an airline. There’s check-in at a kiosk. There’s security, boarding, and baggage claim. You may give your customers an initial satisfaction survey at the kiosk in the beginning, then text or email them for feedback about the last milestones at the end of their experience. CX Programs allow you to track this journey from start to finish, from distribution to reporting.

We recommend setting up your journey when you first create your Customer Experience program, before you distribute your surveys.

In the guidance along the top of a program overview, there's a message saying to create journeys

Attention: If you edit an existing journey after you’ve collected data, you may negatively impact the rest of your program.

Step 1: Creating a Customer Journey

Attention: The steps to create a Customer Experience program journey are different from other Qualtrics journeys. Please stay on this support page to learn more about Customer Experience program journeys.
Qtip: You can only have 1 journey per program. Journeys can have up to 20 milestones.
  1. After creating a Customer Experience Program, go to the Journey tab.
    Creating a journey on the journeys tab
  2. Choose how you want to map your journey:
    • Choose a template journey: Choose from a list of common customer journeys, as defined by industry experts.
    • Manually create your journey: Start from scratch. Create your own stages for a unique journey.
  3. If you chose to use a template, select an industry.
    New window that opens if you select a template
  4. Select the journey or customer lifecycle you want to use.
  5. Click Create.
Qtip: If you chose to manually create a journey, you won’t have steps 3-5. Instead, you’ll go straight to the next section.

Step 2: Customizing a Journey

If you chose to manually create a journey, this is the step where you’ll create your milestones.

If you’re creating a journey from a template, this is where you can view the milestones of your journey and edit milestones as needed.

  1. Name or rename your journey.
    Creating journey milestones
  2. Choose the core metric you’d like to track across all journey milestones. Your options include:
    • CES (1-5 or 1-7)
    • CSAT (1-5 or 1-7)
    • NPS (0-10)
    • Custom: Define a custom metric by typing the metric name directly in the metric box.
      typing a custom metric name
  3. If desired, you select the calculated metric you’d like to report on (e.g., average).
  4. For each milestone, provide a name.
    adding and defining milestones
  5. Select the project that contains journey data for the milestone. This can be a survey or an imported data project.
  6. Choose the field for the milestone. This can be a question from a survey, or a field from an imported data project.
  7. Enter the target value for this milestone.
  8. You can rearrange milestones by clicking and dragging the icon to the left of the milestone name.
  9. Add milestones with the plus sign ( + ) and remove milestones with the minus sign ( – ).
  10. Click Next.
  11. You can track up to 3 additional metrics for each milestone by clicking Add metric under the milestone name.button to add additional metrics under a milestone
  12. Configure the metric details:
    • Metric: Choose the metric to measure (CSAT, CES, NPS, or enter a custom metric).
    • Aggregated metric calculation: Choose the calculated metric (e.g., average).
    • Survey question / field: Choose the survey question or imported data project field that corresponds to the metric.
      Qtip: For each milestone, you cannot select a different project from the one you chose for the core metric. However, you can select a different survey question or field.
  13. Add metrics with the plus sign ( + ) and remove metrics with the minus sign ( – ). You can have up to 3 additional metrics for each milestone.
  14. Click Create journey.

Step 3: Editing a Journey

It’s common to edit a journey after it’s been created. You may identify additional milestones later down the road, or change the metrics you’re measuring.

button to edit a journey

  1. Click Edit journey or Add a project for this milestone to edit your journey configuration. See Customizing a Journey for more information.
  2. The Go to survey links can be used to easily navigate to the project(s) that make up your journey.

Step 4: Making Sure Embedded Data is Set

Once you have your survey projects connected to different milestones, embedded data will be added to the survey flow for you. This embedded data is important to determining that each milestone (or stage) is identified correctly.

If you are setting multiple milestones in the same survey, you will have to edit your survey to identify each milestone.

See Setting Up Surveys for Journeys for a guide on how to best create your survey. You have 2 options: 1 survey for each milestone and every milestone all in 1 survey.

Stage embedded data in survey flow

Qtip: If you’re using an imported data project for a milestone, see this section instead.

Once your surveys are created, see the Programs page on how to add new or existing surveys to your Customer Experience Program. (This step is optional and not required to make journeys work.)

Add project button bottom-left of program opened, reveals a menu with the two options listed below

Using Journey Data

Once you’ve set up your journeys and collected data, you can create dashboards full of journey data. See Configuring Dashboard Data for Journeys and Journey Chart Widget for more details.

Journey chart widget shows each journey's performance on the same metric as a dot on a larger line graph

You can also see high level response rates for your journey surveys on the Journeys tab of your Customer Experience Program. This will show you the number of recent responses you’ve collected, what type of project you’ve mapped to each milestone, and whether those projects are actively collecting data.

Journeys page of a program

FAQs