Welcome to Journeys, the new automation tool built by charles. This guide will walk you through the basic principles and explains the steps how to create your first Journey. So let’s get started.
Trigger
Every Journey starts with a trigger. This trigger can have multiple different types — for now, let’s focus on message triggers:
Message trigger If a Journey has a message trigger, it will start when a customer writes a specific message. You can configure the Journey to either be triggered when some keyword is sent by your customer or when an entire sentence is sent.
The Journey
Once triggered, a Journey can have multiple different purposes. Let’s look at a simple one for now. Let’s assume you want to find out more about your customer and store this information somehow in charles.
Messaging
Sending messages in Journeys is as easy as writing your friend a WhatsApp message. Simply add a message node to the canvas, connect it to the trigger and start typing. Use emojis and variables to make it feel personal 🤓.
Once you asked a customer a question, you can either provide them with pre-defined quick reply buttons to answer the question or store the response in free text. Let’s look at quick reply buttons first.
For each message node, you can add up to 3 quick reply buttons. These buttons make it playful and interactive for your customers to answer questions. An example would be to ask for their gender to only recommend fitting products in the future.
Once you ask the question, you want to now store the response in some way. Journeys offers two ways to do that. The first one is the tag node.
Tagging
If you want to store the response as a tag that you can use in the Campaign Audience Builder, add a tag node to the canvas. Clicking on it will reveal the configuration panel. Here you can choose to add an existing tag to your customer or create one on the fly and add it to the customer.
Storing free-text responses
Another option next to tagging is to store the response in a custom property. To do this, create another message node and ask a question, for example, as for their pet’s name 🐶. Next, click on the gear icon on the left. Here, you can now choose a custom property where to store the response.
Note that the next node will only execute once the customer has responded to your question. The first answer that they give will be stored.
Conclusion
Congratulations! You just built your first Journey. Now it’s time for you to discover what else you can do with Journeys and explore all the features. If you have questions, you can always consult our product guides or ask your Customer Success Manager for support 💛