Journey Transitions

A journey transition is one legal move between two states of a journey, and what triggers it.

What you can do with a journey transition

• tableLifecycle Map · Journeys

Its journey transitions— 24

• Established to At riskMoves from Established to At risk. Engagement measurably declines.
• Established to Likely to lapseMoves from Established to Likely to lapse. A model scores the person as likely to disengage.
• At risk to EstablishedMoves from At risk to Established. Engagement recovers after retention outreach.
• At risk to LapsedMoves from At risk to Lapsed. The lookback window passes with no qualifying activity.
• Likely to lapse to LapsedMoves from Likely to lapse to Lapsed. The predicted lapse happens.
• Likely to lapse to EstablishedMoves from Likely to lapse to Established. Retention outreach keeps the person active.
• Lapsed to ReactivatedMoves from Lapsed to Reactivated. A lapsed person returns after win-back outreach.
• Reactivated to EstablishedMoves from Reactivated to Established. A returned person settles back into an active relationship.
• Unknown to AwareMoves from Unknown to Aware. A first exposure lands that can be tied to a person: a paid click, or a first visit to an owned surface.
• Aware to InterestedMoves from Aware to Interested. The person gives something back: a form, an address, a reply.
• Interested to EvaluatingMoves from Interested to Evaluating. Return visits show the brand is being weighed rather than merely noticed.
• Evaluating to IntentMoves from Evaluating to Intent. An account is opened or a partner hands the person across; the comparison has narrowed to one.
• Intent to ConvertedMoves from Intent to Converted. The started act completes.
• Intent to EvaluatingMoves from Intent to Evaluating. The started act is abandoned before it completes, and the comparison reopens.
• Interested to AwareMoves from Interested to Aware. The raised hand goes quiet, and the person is again someone who merely knows the brand.
• Committed to OnboardingMoves from Committed to Onboarding. What was agreed is delivered, and the relationship that follows can begin.
• Onboarding to ActiveMoves from Onboarding to Active. The account is activated and used; the person now acts through it.
• Kept to AdvocatingMoves from Kept to Advocating. A review, a referral or a public word in the brand's favour.
• Advocating to KeptMoves from Advocating to Kept. No referral or review arrives within the window; the relationship is kept but no longer speaks.
• Onboarding to Never activatedMoves from Onboarding to Never activated. The window for a first activation closes with nothing done: what was delivered was never taken up.
• Unknown to InterestedMoves from Unknown to Interested. Someone the brand has never reached arrives already interested, sent by another person: the referral is the first thing known about them.
• Unknown to EvaluatingMoves from Unknown to Evaluating. Someone the brand has never reached arrives on an owned surface already comparing: the visit is the first thing known about them, and it lands mid-path.
• Unknown to IntentMoves from Unknown to Intent. Someone the brand has never reached arrives with intent already formed, handed across by a partner or a platform's own answer: the handoff is the first thing known about them.
• Established to EstablishedA repeat conversion by an account holder in good standing: the stay that is also an act. It is the diagonal of the retention matrix, the move that keeps a person where they are, and the population every rate of leaving is read against.

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
• A move that cannot be counted is a pictureA journey that names its moves and cannot count them is a funnel with arrows: it can be drawn and not measured, which is the failure a state machine was adopted to end. Customer-migration models make the point exactly. A transition rate is the moves out of a condition over the people in it, and the people in it are the fact that put them there; so the events added to give every move a trigger are not extra instrumentation but the missing denominators of rates the model already carried and could not derive. A law that every move has a trigger, satisfied by facts nothing observes, would be the same picture with more arrows.
  Modeling customer relationships as Markov chains · Declaring the Grain · The Goal Question Metric Approach · Counting Your Customers the Easy Way: An Alternative to the Pareto/NBD Model