How do I set up my customer journey?

The customer journey is your main pipeline, the one new contacts start in, and it also creates tasks automatically for every contact you can reach. You set it up once, and from that point on every new contact with a phone number or email walks through it without anyone building anything by hand.

Before you press the button

Open TMS, then Setup, then the Journey tab. There is no one-click way to install our standard steps as they are: every journey is drafted for your business first, and you review and edit every step before anything is written. From the moment it's on, every new contact with a phone number or email gets the journey automatically, including someone who just texts you, not only people you add yourself. A web chat visitor who hasn't shared either gets no tasks yet, and joins the journey the moment they add a phone number or email.

Draft your journey with AI

1. Click "Tailor it to my business". This writes nothing yet. We take the standard steps and suggest which of them to keep, which to reword so they sound like your business, and which you don't need, using what you've already told us about your business and what you've written in your knowledge base.
2. You get your steps as a list, each folded to one line with its name, how many jobs it has, and what it was before ("Was: ..." or "Unchanged: ..."). A step we suggest removing stays on screen, crossed out, with one line saying why it doesn't apply to you, and a "Keep this step" button if you disagree. A step we suggest adding is marked as new.
3. Click a step's arrow to open it, or "Expand all" at the top right to open every step. A step opens up into its own jobs, 1 to 5 of them, each edited on its own: a job title, instructions, priority, and how many hours it's given. A step you add with "Add a step" opens straight away so you can name it. A folded step says "Needs a fix" when it is the one stopping you from publishing. Use "Add a job to this step" or the trash icon on a job to add or remove one, and move where the line falls between a lead and a customer with the flag you can move, "Start customers here" on any step.
4. Every job has a tick, "Show this job to the customer on their status link and portal". If you've never marked a job visible before, we suggest it on for the jobs at steps after the lead line, because those are the customer's own progress, and off for the ones before it, because you're still winning the work at that point. If you have already chosen which jobs your customers see, we keep exactly what you chose. Either way you can change any of them right here, and whatever the ticks say when you confirm is what gets saved.
5. Every job also has a "Who does this" choice, the same three options as "Who does a step" below: a person does it, AI drafts it and a person reviews, or AI finishes it on its own. Pick it right here in the diff, and describe what the AI should write or do underneath it when you choose either of the AI options.
6. When it looks right, click "Publish N steps, M jobs", where N and M are the counts the button shows (it says "1 step" or "1 job" when there is only one). Nothing is written until you do. If the button is greyed out, the note beside it says why, for example "Add at least 3 steps to publish." It goes into your main pipeline if you already have one with no stages in it. If you have no main pipeline, it goes into your pipeline named "Customer journey" and makes that your main pipeline, or, if you don't have one by that name, into a new main pipeline called "Customer journey", so you never end up with a second journey beside it.

If your business profile doesn't have enough filled in yet for a useful suggestion, you're told to fill in your business details under AI settings first, rather than getting a generic result.

Your draft is saved as you go

Your draft is saved to your account while you work on it, a moment after each change, and a draft the AI writes is saved the moment it appears. Under the steps you see "Saving…" and then "Saved". If you leave the page, lose your connection or your login runs out, the draft is still there when you come back to the Journey tab. The main journey and each service's journey keep their own draft. If something goes wrong while you install, your draft stays on screen with a message, so you can try again.

Publishing a journey deletes its saved draft. Discard removes your draft straight away. Click Undo on the message that appears to bring it back. If another admin changes the same draft at the same time, you're told "Someone else changed this draft. Reload to see their changes." Reload the page to pick up their version. Customers never see a draft.

Edit your live journey

To change a journey your customers are already on, click "Edit journey", either on the Journey tab or on that journey's own tab under Pipelines. Your current steps and jobs open as a draft, exactly as they are, marked "Draft. Customers still see the live journey until you publish." Nothing reaches a customer until you click Publish.

Under the steps, "Review and publish" lists what you changed: each step you renamed, added or removed. If people are already in the journey, it also tells you who would miss a change, because each customer moves forward from the step they are on and never goes back:

• A new step placed above where customers are standing is skipped for them. You see "3 customers are already past where this new step goes, so they will not get it."
• A step moved from ahead of customers to behind them is skipped for them. You see "Moving these steps means 2 customers may skip a step."

New customers, and anyone still before the change, get the new order in full. Installing leaves everything you did not change exactly as it was, including any step or job setting you did not touch.

Step and job settings

Open a step's "More options for this step" to set its category, badge colour, icon, default due time and priority, aging weight, dormancy threshold, default snooze and how many times it repeats, with the same limits a step has always had. Open a job and then its "More options" to set how often it reminds people ("Remind every (hours)"), how the customer is told when the AI finishes it (email, text message or WhatsApp, and the WhatsApp template), and whether the AI may look things up on the web. Each box starts with what the step or job has today. Only a box you change is saved when you publish. If you clear a box, the setting is cleared.

A staff job reminds the person it's assigned to, in the app, once a day. A job that asks the customer for documents, a signature or a payment, and that the customer sees, reminds the customer by email, at most once a day, in their morning. A staff job nobody is assigned to sends no reminder until someone is. Built-in reminders are on Pro and up. On a plan without them, the box shows a Pro badge and can't be changed. If your business already has its own reminder rule that notifies your team about tasks, that rule reminds the assigned person instead. If it has its own reminder rule for the customer, or Stage reminders switched on, the customer gets those instead of the built-in email. Built-in reminders do not show on the Automations page: you set and clear them in the job's "Remind every (hours)" box.

To get ideas for a step, press "Suggest jobs" on a published step. Tick the jobs you want and press "Add these jobs". They join the step as jobs you can edit, and nothing is saved until you publish. A step you added in this draft can't ask for suggestions until it is published.

If somebody renames, moves, adds or removes a step after you started your draft, Publish stops with "This journey changed since you started. Review the changes first." and changes nothing. Look at the journey on its tab under Pipelines, then click "Start again from the live journey" to rebuild your draft from it. That replaces the edits in your draft, so you are asked to confirm first.

Once you install, only your customers who are ready to start get tasks right away, at their first stage; the confirmation tells you how many. Each later stage opens for them the same way it does for every new contact, once the stage in front of it is done or skipped.

Publishing a journey sends no email to your customers. Step emails are off until you switch them on. Open a step and switch on Email the customer when they reach this step. The switch appears on every published step on the customer side of your journey except the first, on Pro and up. When a customer moves into that step, they get one short email from your business saying they've moved to the next step, with a private link to their status page. It goes out once per customer for each step, never to someone who has unsubscribed, and it carries the same footer and unsubscribe link as your other emails. Your customer's status page always shows where things stand, with or without the email.

A step that asks your customer for documents, a payment or a signature already emails them, so it never sends a second email. On that step the switch shows off and greyed out, with "This step already emails the customer when it opens, so no separate step email is sent." If you move a customer into such a step by hand, an email rule you switched on earlier for it still goes out for that move.

If you also add your own email to a step, your customer gets one email, not two: yours, and not the step email. The switch then says "Your own email on this step goes instead." You can still turn the switch off. An own email that is set to wait does not replace the step email, because the two would not go out at the same time, so your customer gets both. If your own email is switched off, the step email goes out as usual to customers who reach the step after that. A customer who already passed through the step while both were on does not get the step email afterwards.

A text or WhatsApp message switched on for that step waits. If the request can't go out, for example the customer has no email address, their address can't be emailed, or your email sending is paused, the text goes out instead, about a minute later.

Each step email is an ordinary automation named "Step email" and the step's name: open the Automations tab to change its wording or delete it. Step emails from before this change keep working and are named "Milestone email" and the step's name. The switch turns those on and off too.

Who does a step

Every job in every step has a "Who does this step" choice, three options:

• A person does this step (the default). Nothing is generated.
• AI prepares a draft, a person reviews it. Once a customer reaches the step, the AI prepares a draft within a few minutes and it waits on the task for a person to review. The step does not need a due time for this. A person reviews the draft, edits it if needed, and either approves it (which finishes the step) or rejects it and does the step themselves. Nothing counts as done until a person acts.
• AI does this step on its own. It runs within a few minutes of a customer reaching the step, even if the step has no due time. The AI writes the work and marks the step done itself, with nobody reviewing it first. The moment it finishes, the next step unlocks exactly as if a person had finished it, and it shows up in your activity log so you can see it ran. Since nobody is reviewing it, only turn this on for a step you're confident the AI can finish correctly every time. If the step also asks the customer to confirm it, the AI prepares the work and leaves it for your team to review instead of finishing it alone; a person finishes the step once the customer has confirmed.

If the AI can't produce work it can use, it tries again about half an hour later, up to three tries in all. A draft your team rejects is not redrafted on its own: open the task and press "Generate a draft" to ask for another.

After the third try the AI stops and hands the step to your team. The task moves to Now on the customer's Tasks tab, joins the queue like any other task, and is marked "AI couldn't finish, needs a person". The AI does not pick it up again, so a person finishes it. You can also have a rule react to this, see How do I send an automatic text, email or task when something happens?

Either AI option can also see what this same customer's earlier finished steps already produced: the team's approved drafts and the notes staff wrote when completing those steps, up to the last five of each. That way it does not repeat work already done or ask for something already answered.

If the step is also shown to the customer, finishing it by either AI option sends them a short update with a link to their page, by the way you chose for that job. See How do I set up a pipeline for how my customers move through my business? for the choices.

Change this per job in the editor: open the job and pick from the three under "Who does this". It's Person for every job unless you change it.

Jobs that ask your customer for documents

A job can be a task your team does, or it can ask the customer for something. A job that asks for documents lists the document types it needs, picked from your own list (see How do I set the list of documents my team can request from a client?).

When a customer reaches that step, we email them a request for those documents straight away, with nobody pressing a button. It is the same request your team sends by hand with "Request documents": if the customer already has a request open, the new documents are added to it rather than starting a second one, and if it already asks for all of them nothing more is sent. The request gets the same reminders as any other, and if you switch on "Move on when all are in", the job finishes itself once every document has arrived.

A customer with no email address on file gets no request. Instead the job gets a comment from Peakify that says "No email on file. Collect these documents in person.", so your team knows to ask another way.

The request goes out when a customer arrives at the step, so customers who were already standing at a step when you added a documents job to it are not asked until you choose to send it to them too. A job your team adds to one customer by hand never sends a request on its own. Moving customers with "Start at journey stage" counts as arriving, so its warning tells you when the step you picked sends a request.

Document requests are on Pro and up, like document types.

Jobs that ask your customer to pay

A job can also ask the customer for a payment. Give it an amount, a currency (Canadian or US dollars) and, if you like, a message.

When a customer reaches that step, we send them a payment request for that amount straight away, the same request your team sends by hand, tied to that job. When you mark it paid, the job is completed for you and the customer moves on to the next step.

We don't send one when:

• the job has no amount. It stays a job for your team: open it in your workspace and click "Send (their name) their payment request" to type the amount and, if this job has its own invoice, its pay link;
• the customer already has a payment request open, so they are never billed twice at once;
• you have no pay link or bank details saved under Payment instructions;
• the customer has no email address on file. The job gets a comment from Peakify that says "No email on file. Ask for this payment in person."

Payment requests by hand are on every plan with Team management, Starter included, and so are payment jobs.

Add a document, payment or signing job to a step

Open a step in the journey editor and click "Add a job to this step". A small menu offers four kinds of job:

• Staff task: a job your team does, as before.
• Ask for documents: pick the documents from your own list. If the one you need is not there, type its name under "Add a new document type" and click Add. It joins your list and is ticked for this job. Switch on "Move on when all are in" and the job finishes itself once every document has arrived. On the Starter plan this one is greyed out and says "Available on Pro and up", like document requests everywhere else.
• Ask for payment: type an amount, choose Canadian or US dollars and, if you like, a message. The amount follows the same rules as "Request payment" on a contact: up to 999,999.99, with at most 2 decimal places. Leave the amount empty and the job stays one for your team: it reads "Send (their name) their payment request" and opens the payment request form.
• Ask to sign: see the next section. On the Starter plan this one is greyed out and says "Available on Pro and up", because signing happens in the client portal. Ask for payment works on every plan.

Jobs that ask your customer to sign

An "Ask to sign" job takes an agreement. Click "Upload agreement" and pick a PDF of up to 4 MB. Its file name shows with "Replace" and "Remove" beside it. Nothing else is accepted, so a Word file is refused with a message saying agreements must be a PDF.

With an agreement, the customer is invited to the client portal when they reach the step, reads it there and signs by typing their name. Your business keeps a record of who signed which file and when. See How do I get a customer to sign an agreement?. Without an agreement, the job keeps the one-tap Confirm on the customer's status link, as before.

Typed-name signing suits everyday service agreements. This is not legal advice and the rules differ from place to place. For a contract that needs witnesses or formal signing, use your own signing tool instead.

Ask the customers already at a step

Asks go out when a customer reaches a step. After you publish, if a step with a document, payment or signing ask has customers standing in it, the page offers a button under "Customers already at these steps": "Also send to the 2 customers already at this step". Customers who reached the step before its ask was added have not been asked, and anyone already asked is skipped. Click it and we ask them now, then say how many were asked. If you just added the job, we first add it to each of those customers' open jobs for the step, and any other job you added to that step, the same way the journey does when someone arrives. A customer who has the job set to skip, or who already has a job that comes after it in the step, is left out, and the message says how many. On the Starter plan it sends payment asks only. It asks up to 100 at a time, so click again if it says there are more. Anyone who was already asked, or whose open request already covers the job, is left alone and is not counted as asked. Skipping the button is fine: those customers are simply not asked.

On the Starter plan

Starter has one customer journey. The AI still drafts it for you, and you still review and edit every step before it's installed, but every job on Starter is done by a person: the two AI options above come with Pro and up, so a Starter draft never offers them. A second journey also needs Pro and up; on Starter, trying to add one says your plan allows up to 1 pipeline.

Once it's set up

The Journey tab becomes a summary: how many stages, and how many customers are still waiting for their tasks to be generated.

If you built your main pipeline's stages yourself, that is your journey too: this tab shows it as set up, and tailoring starts from your own stages.

If none of your steps are visible to customers, the tab says so and gives you the number: "0 of your 22 steps are visible to customers". That matters because a customer who opens their status link or signs into the portal sees only the steps you've switched on, so with none on they get an empty page. Fix it with Edit journey: open a job and switch on "Customer sees this", then publish. Or tailor the journey below and set them there.

Under the summary is a card headed "The address your customers use". That's your own customer page: a customer opens it, types the email address you have for them, and we send them a link to their own progress. Press Copy and put it wherever your customers look. If you haven't claimed a web address yet the card says so and points you at Settings, then General. Read How do my customers check where their job is? for what the customer sees when they get there.

The same "Tailor this to my business" button stays there for good, whether or not customers have started the journey. It works exactly as above, except it starts from the steps you actually have rather than the standard ones, so anything you renamed is what we suggest changes to. You'll see every change first, and you can keep any step we suggested removing. Beside it, "Edit journey" opens your steps as they are, for changes you make yourself (see "Edit your live journey" above).

Once customers are walking through your journey, here is exactly what confirming does and does not do. A step you keep, or reword, stays the same step: everyone standing in it stays where they are, and your new wording is what they see from then on. A step you add is created for everyone already in the journey too, so a job for it appears on your team's list for each of them. Removing a step is the one thing that can be turned down: if anybody is standing in it we keep that step and say so, naming it and how many people are in it, and every other change still goes ahead. Move those people to another step, then remove the step with Edit journey.

One thing worth knowing about a step you do remove: the jobs already created from it stay on your team's list. Close or cancel them under Tasks if you no longer need them.

One name can only move from one step to another in two saves. Every step in a pipeline needs its own name, so if you give a step a name another step is still using, even one you are removing in the same change, we say so and nothing is saved. Give it a name nothing else uses, save that, then rename it.

Messages on a step

Each step you have already published has a "When a customer reaches this step" section. It lists the automatic messages that go out the moment a customer arrives at that step, each with Edit and Turn off. Choose Add, then Send a message, to set up a new one for that step; it opens the same form as the Automations tab, already set to that step. A step you've just added shows "Publish first to add messages" until you publish it. On the Starter plan the section shows an upgrade note instead. Every message still appears on the Automations tab too.

Your automations move with your steps

Automations that run when a customer reaches a step are attached to the step itself, so changing your steps has to deal with them. Before you confirm, the draft tells you three numbers: how many of your automations stay with their step, how many point at a step you're removing, and how many aren't attached to a step at all.

A step you keep, even under a new name, is still the same step, so it keeps its automations working, with nothing for you to do. An automation pointing at a step that really is removed is switched off rather than deleted, so it can't run for a step that no longer exists, and we name it for you once the change is in. Switch it back on against a step that still exists whenever you like, on the Automations tab. Automations that aren't attached to a step aren't affected either way.

To rename a step, reorder it, remove it or add a new one at any time, use Edit journey, here or on the journey's tab under Pipelines. A task's due date isn't set until the task before it in the chain is completed; this happens automatically as your team works through the journey, there's nothing to configure for it.

What the AI can tell your customers

This is on for Pro and up, and not on the Starter plan or the free plan. When a customer your AI can be sure of asks "what happens next" or "where do I stand," the AI already knows the answer from your journey:

• the stage they are on right now, and the date they reached it
• the documents you have already received from them
• what you are still waiting for from them, such as a document to send or a step to confirm
• their next appointment

The AI is sure of a customer only when they write on WhatsApp or by text from the number on their contact record, saved with its country code, or when your own website has signed them in on your chat. Anybody else, including Messenger, Instagram and email, hears none of this, see How do I set the AI's tone and what it can and can't say?.

Only a stage on the customer side of your journey is ever named, past the "Start customers here" line on this tab. A stage before that line is how you win the work, and the AI never mentions it, its name, or that it exists. Money is never part of it: the AI never states an amount owed, a payment, an invoice or bank details, and offers the status link or your team instead. This is separate from a job's own "Show this job to the customer on their status link and portal" tick above: that controls what a customer sees on their own status page, this controls what the AI itself is willing to say out loud in a conversation. The AI never mentions an internal task name, who on your team is working it, or any other customer's information, whichever stage a customer is on.

Give a service its own journey

If your business sells more than one kind of work, for example a one-time job and an ongoing contract, they don't have to share the same steps. Pick the service from the list at the top of this screen, which shows every service you have set up, and draft its journey the same way you drafted your first one. When you install it, a pipeline named after the service is created for you if it doesn't have one yet, and from then on it's an ordinary pipeline you can rename under Pipelines, change with Edit journey, or tailor again from here. When you pick a service at the top, the card below names that service's journey, so you always know which one you are changing. The AI is told which service the journey is for: its name, its description, your notes for it and the questions you ask customers about it, all from Settings, so the steps fit that service rather than your whole business, and a revise keeps to that same service. When you draft a new service's journey, the AI is also told the stage names you already approved on your other services, so it reuses "Quote sent" instead of inventing "Estimate delivered" for the same idea. It's a suggestion, not a rule, so you can still rename anything.

Once a customer's service is known, whether they told your AI in a conversation or your team set it on their contact page, they follow that service's journey instead of your general one. A brand new customer who hasn't done anything yet follows their service as soon as it's known, and follows it again if you or the AI correct it before they've done any work, so a first guess is never stuck. Once they've finished a step, or moved past the very first one, they stay on the journey they're already on even if their recorded service changes later, so nobody's in-progress work gets pulled out from under them. A service with no pipeline of its own, or with a pipeline that has no jobs in it, changes nothing, your customer stays on your general journey.

Giving a service its own journey is on Pro and up. See How do I set up a pipeline for how my customers move through my business? for how to create that second pipeline and choose its service.

Tell the AI what to change

Once you have a draft, whether it's brand new or an update to your current journey, a box appears under the preview: "Tell the AI what to change." Type what you want, in your own words, things like "combine the two check-in stages into one" or "cut this to six steps," and click Revise. You'll see your old draft next to the new one before anything changes, so you can compare them side by side. Click Keep to carry the revised version forward, or Discard to go back to what you had. Nothing is written to your actual pipeline until you click Publish, exactly like a first draft.

Suggested automations after you install

Right after you install a journey, on Pro and up, a card called "Suggested automations" appears underneath. It drafts a handful of follow ups for the steps and jobs you just set up, for example sending a text or email once a task like "Review documents" is finished, or turning on "finish this job automatically once every document is in" for a job that already asks for documents. Every suggestion starts unticked. Tick the ones you want and click "Turn on selected" to switch them on right away, or click "Not now" to hide the card without turning any of them on. If you want one later, you can still build it by hand: a rule under How do I send an automatic text, email or task when something happens?, or the "Move on when all are in" switch on the job itself, in Edit journey. On the Starter plan, and for any business whose automations plan does not include adding new rules, no card appears at all.

Test run: see what a customer would get

On the Pipelines tab, every journey has a "Test run" button. Press it, choose "A new customer" or search for one of your own customers, and press "Run test". You see each step in order: the jobs that would open and who does them (your team or the customer), what would go out by itself (a document request, a payment request, an agreement, a message from a "When a customer reaches this step" rule), and anything that would be skipped, with the reason. For example: "Document request: not sent (no email on file). Staff collect in person." Other reasons you may see are no phone number, the customer has unsubscribed or is blocked, they already have an open payment request, you have not added payment instructions yet, or your plan has no client portal.

A test run never creates a job, never sends anything and never changes your customer. It shows the journey as it is published today, so publish your edits first to see them. If your business has email sending paused, the test run says so: emails and requests show as not going out. Daily sending limits are not checked here. "A new customer" is treated as someone with an email and a phone number who has not unsubscribed.