Journey States

A journey state is one state a consumer can occupy inside one journey.

What you can do with a journey state

• tableLifecycle Map · Journeys

Its journey states— 17

• EstablishedThe settled position of this path: the relationship is current, and every other state is measured as a departure from here.
• At riskThe first departure from settled — still active, but on a trajectory the path exists to interrupt.
• Likely to lapseA position reached by prediction rather than by elapsed time: the only forward-looking state on this path.
• LapsedThe position the lookback window confirms. Recovery from here is no longer retention but win-back.
• ReactivatedThe position a returned person holds before the path will count them settled again.
• UnknownThe path's origin: a person in the addressable market the brand has never reached, so nothing about them is on record yet.
• AwareFirst contact has landed and nothing has come back: the person has met the brand and not yet acted on it.
• InterestedA hand has been raised: something volunteered, or a request to hear more, so the path now has a name to work with.
• EvaluatingThe brand is one option among several being compared, and the path's job here is to be the one that survives the comparison.
• IntentAn act that points at one product or service: started, not finished, and the position this path loses most people from.
• ConvertedThe path's end: booked or purchased, with fulfilment still ahead. Where acquisition hands the person to onboarding.
• CommittedWhere this path picks up: the commitment is made and what was promised has not yet been delivered.
• OnboardingDelivery has happened and the person is being brought into the relationship that follows it: the account, the preferences, the first value.
• ActiveThe path's destination: the person acts through an authenticated account, and the retention machine takes over from here.
• KeptWhere this path starts: a relationship that is current and used, with nothing yet said about it to anyone else.
• AdvocatingThe person has referred, reviewed or spoken for the brand where others can hear it, so growth is arriving without spend.
• Never activatedDelivery happened and the account never did: the relationship that was promised has lapsed before it was ever used, and win-back is the only way back.

Why it matters

What goes wrong without it, as the commitments that license this kind say it, each standing on its sources.

• A journey is a state machine, not a funnel pictureA funnel diagram names stages and says nothing about how anyone moves between them, so it cannot be validated, queried or executed. A state machine names the legal moves and what triggers each, which is the difference between a journey a system can run and a journey a deck can show.
  State Chart XML (SCXML): State Machine Notation for Control Abstraction · Declaring the Grain · Statecharts: a visual formalism for complex systems
• A declared path must be walkableEvery other check asks whether a relationship is well formed: typed, bounded, licensed, inverted. None asks whether anything travels it. So the model could pass every check with a verb declared for thirty-eight kinds and asserted by none, and say nothing - which is what happened. A reader meeting that has no way to tell a deliberate absence from an oversight, and neither does the author six months on. The distinction is schema completeness against population completeness: the first was already enforced here and the second had no instrument at all. It matters most where a claim is a chain rather than a link. Performance asserted from delivery alone, with no step that reaches a person, is the specific failure measurement standards exist to prevent, and it is invisible to a check that only reads one edge at a time.
  Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL) · Outcomes and Data Quality Standards