Journeys

Journeys are Switchbord’s automation primitive for multi-step conversations — onboarding sequences, abandoned-cart reminders, drip campaigns, automated surveys. Where a Campaign is a one-shot send to an audience, a journey is a graph: a contact enters at a trigger, moves through message and wait steps, branches on conditions, and can reach a goal. This page is the overview. For the graphical editor itself — canvas, node types, versioning — see the Graphical Journey Editor deep-dive.

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How a journey is built

Journeys are authored on a visual canvas (built on React Flow) where you drag, drop, and connect nodes: Edges connect nodes and represent the path a contact takes — a single node can branch into multiple edges triggered by different customer actions (a button click, a keyword reply).

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Real-time execution

Journeys react to incoming webhooks as they happen. When a contact interacts with a message — clicking a button, replying with a keyword — the journey engine evaluates the relevant condition immediately and advances the contact to the next node, without a polling delay.

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Drafts and publishing

New journeys start in Draft mode, where you can build and test the graph without affecting any live contacts. When you publish a new version, you choose whether contacts already partway through the previous version finish it as-is or migrate onto the new logic — so you can iterate on a live journey without disrupting contacts mid-flow.

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Performance monitoring

Every node in a published journey shows live stats: how many contacts entered that step, how many dropped (stopped progressing), and how many converted onward toward a goal. This makes it straightforward to spot the exact step where a flow is losing people.

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Data model

Journeys are stored as journeys records, with contact progress tracked against the definitions in templates (for message steps) and the core conversations/messages ledger for execution history. See Data Model for how journeys relate to templates, campaigns, and the rest of the schema.

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Drafting with Margaret

You can describe a journey in plain language and ask Margaret to draft the graph shape for you — she proposes a structure you review and approve before it’s created, the same draft-and-approve pattern used for templates and replies.

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See also

• Graphical Journey Editor — the canvas, node types, and versioning in full detail.
• Data Model — how journeys fits with templates, campaigns, and the message ledger.
• Campaigns — the one-shot alternative to a multi-step journey.
• Automations — how journeys combine with Margaret’s automation capabilities.