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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. 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. For each milestone, provide a name.
  3. To add more stages to the journey, click Add another milestone.
    Qtip: You can also click the plus sign ( + ) to add a milestone directly below your selection.
  4. Click the move icon and drag milestones to change their order.
    Icons to left of milestones for dragging and dropping

    Qtip: Milestones should be listed in chronological order from top to bottom.
  5. When you’re finished, click Create journey.

Step 3: Mapping Journey Milestones to Surveys

Qtip: If the survey is collaborated with you, you’ll need the Edit Survey Flow and Download Survey Results permissions enabled.
  1. Go to the Journey tab.
    Editing journeys
  2. Click Edit or Add project for this milestone.
  3. For each milestone, select the corresponding survey from the Project (optional) column.
    Choosing surveys for each milestones

    Qtip: You can also edit milestones as needed, renaming them, adding new ones or rearranging them.
  4. When you’re finished, click Update 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