Journeys overview

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys helps you visualize and automate the journey that your customers take as they engage with your product or services. A simple customer journey could include a short interaction, such as a single email campaign where you send them product or service information and include a link to your website for more information. A complex journey might include the full process from discovery, through nurturing, and on to identifying qualified leads.

Trigger-based vs segment-based

There are two types of journeys:

1. Trigger-based journeys that react to customer action (for example, filling out a form or registering for an event).
2. Segment-based journeys that target customers that share certain attributes (for example, loyalty club members in the state of Washington).

The journey life cycle

All journeys have a life cycle: they're created and then published, once published they complete or can be stopped. A journey moves through these stages or states as shown in the diagram below:

Legend:

1. Automatic transition to the next state when required system actions are complete.
2. Automatic transition to “Completing” when journey stops accepting new customers, journey has expired, or a new version is published.
3. Automatic transition to “Completed” when all customers in the journey have completed their journey.
4. Automatic transition to “Live” when the scheduled start time is reached.

Details of journey states

The following table shows additional details about journey states and the transitions between them.

State	Definition	User actions
Draft	When a journey is created in the journey designer and saved, it’s in Draft state.	You can edit and update the journey as needed in this state. The journey isn’t active, and no customer can participate in this state. Publish: Moves the journey to the Publishing state. Copy: Makes a copy of the journey (the copy is a new journey in Draft state).
Publishing	An intermediate state when Publish is selected. The journey is validated and if errors are found, it reverts to Draft state. If everything is okay, the journey moves to the Live state.	No user actions are possible in this state.
Live	The journey is Live (or running). A trigger-based journey accepts and reacts to triggers and lets customers who raised the trigger enter the journey. A segment-based journey processes the segment and lets the members enter the journey. (A journey may be Live and still not let new customers enter if the scheduled start time of the journey isn't yet reached.)	Edit: Goes into the Live edit state where the journey can be edited. Stop: Stops the journey. Copy: Makes a copy of the journey (the copy is a new journey in Draft state).
Completing	A journey in this state doesn’t allow new customers to enter but lets the current customers already in the journey finish. This state is reached for many reasons, such as when it’s past the journey’s scheduled end time, the journey has finished all its recurrences (for a repeating journey), all members of the segments have entered the journey (for a one-time segment-based journey), etc.	No user actions are possible in this state.
Completed	The journey has finished its run. This state is reached when all eligible customers have completed their journey.	Copy: Makes a copy of the journey (the copy is a new journey in Draft state).
Stopping	The journey is being stopped. No new customers are accepted, and current customers are being removed from the journey. As this action may take some time, it’s possible that some customers may still complete their journeys before the journey is stopped.	When there’s a backlog of messages due to high volume, those messages are deleted immediately and aren’t sent. This greatly reduces but doesn't always prevent messages from being delivered (some messages may have already been sent to the intermediate providers who will still deliver those messages even though journey has been stopped). No user actions are possible in this state.
Stopped	The journey has stopped. No new customers are accepted and there are no customers in the journey.	Copy: Makes a copy of the journey (the copy is a new journey in Draft state).
Live, editing	A new version of journey is available that can be edited. The current version of the journey is still live and accepting customers.	Publish: Publishes the new version of the journey. The previous version of the journey moves to the Stopping state. All new customers are accepted in the new version. (Discard): The new version is discarded and focus returns to the current version of the journey that’s still Live.