Customer Journey
Description
Customer Journey turns your conversation inbox into your business funnel. Every contact — not every conversation — sits in exactly one stage at all times (for example: New lead, Quote, Customer), keeps that stage even if their conversation closes or they reach out through another channel, and only moves forward when something that actually matters to the business happens: they message you for the first time, a payment link is sent to them, their order is marked as paid, or their conversation closes.
Available to accounts where Reach has enabled this feature. It works both for sales teams (tracking leads through to close) and for support or retention teams (tracking each customer’s status).
Prerequisites
- Customer Journey is enabled account by account — it doesn’t show up on its own everywhere. If you don’t see the stage bar above your inbox, your account simply doesn’t have it enabled yet; it isn’t a bug.
- Configuring the journey (creating, renaming, reordering, or hiding stages) requires a specific permission.
- Moving a contact between stages, on the other hand, can be done by anyone with access to that conversation.
Stage types
| Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Entry | The stage new contacts land in. There’s always exactly one, and it can’t be removed. |
| Won | The goal of the journey. There’s always exactly one, and it can’t be removed. It’s the only stage an automatic event can move someone into directly. |
| Intermediate | The ones each account builds between entry and won — free to name, color, and order. |
| Exit | For contacts who left (e.g. “Lost”). They live apart from the forward funnel, so they don’t skew its numbers. |
| Protected | An optional shield against automatic moves only (never against manual ones). On a regular stage it stops an automatic closure from pulling the contact out; on an exit stage it stops automatic re-entry. |
Procedure: set up your journey
Configuration lives on a canvas where you arrange your account’s stages.
- Pick a starter template:
Sales(recommended),Support,Customers, orCustom(start from scratch). - Name, color, and order your stages — they don’t come fixed out of the box.
- If a stage already has contacts and you want to retire it, hide it instead of deleting it: whoever is already there keeps it.
There are four starter templates. Picking one isn’t final on stage names or colors (you can edit those whenever), but it is on the overall structure — so it’s worth looking at all four before deciding.
Switching templates is only possible before any contacts are placed. Once people are already inside the journey, you can only edit stages one by one (rename, recolor, reorder, hide, add) — the journey of whoever is already inside never resets.
Fields and options: automatic triggers
These are the only 4 events that move a contact between stages without anyone doing it by hand:
| Trigger | Can point to | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| The contact messages for the first time | Entry stage | The front door: no one is left out of the funnel. It’s also the re-entry door — someone in an exit stage who writes again can come back as a fresh opportunity. |
| A payment link is sent | Intermediate stage | Buying intent gets recorded in the funnel without anyone moving anything. If the stage move fails, the link still gets sent. |
| The order is marked as paid | Intermediate or won | The happy ending. It’s the only automatic moment that can take a contact into the won stage. |
| The conversation closes | Exit stages only | You choose whether this counts manual closing, automatic closing, or both. It’s the natural exit for someone who stopped replying. |
Procedure: use the journey in your inbox
With the journey active, the conversation inbox shows each contact’s stage and lets you filter and move them.
- Use the
stage bar, above the inbox, to narrow the list to contacts currently in a specific stage right now (combinable with your other filters).
- Inside a conversation, the
stage chip(under the contact’s name) shows which stage they’re in. Click it to open the selector and move them to another one.
If you move someone out of a protected stage
If you manually try to move a contact out of a protected stage (like “Customer”) into an unprotected one, Reach warns you about the consequence before you confirm — but it never blocks the manual move, it just tells you what will happen next.
Nikki is in Customer, a protected stage. Moving them to Lost will drop that protection: once their conversation closes, they'll automatically move to Lost.
Expected result
Every time a contact changes stage — automatically or manually — an entry is logged with: the previous stage, the new stage, what caused it (automatic entry, re-entry, payment link, order paid, conversation closed, or a manual move with the name of who did it), and when. That same information shows up inside the conversation and can’t be edited.
The conversation expires and the automatic closure tries to move the contact to "Lost," but "Customer" is protected: the move bounces off the shield. The conversation still closes — the contact doesn't move.
Important considerations
- A contact is never in two stages at once — the stage replaces, it doesn’t stack like a tag.
- Closing and reopening the conversation, even through a different channel, does not affect the stage: the stage lives on the contact, not on the conversation.
- Renaming a stage doesn’t rewrite history — each log entry keeps the name the stage had at that moment.
- Two numbers or channels that aren’t unified as a single contact count as two independent journeys.
- No one is ever deleted from the journey: at most they move to an exit stage, never removed.
- Today the journey counts contacts per stage live; it doesn’t rebuild history from before it was enabled, and it doesn’t yet measure conversion, timing, or drop-off between stages (that’s a future phase).
- The stage is viewed and changed directly inside the conversation — there’s no separate screen to manage it contact by contact.
- Up to 20 stages per account, laid out vertically or horizontally.
Best practices
- If your business sells, start with the Sales template (it already ships with entry, intermediate, won, and exit stages wired to their triggers).
- Define your stages and template before contacts start coming in — switching templates afterward is no longer possible, only editing stage by stage.
- Protect your won stage (e.g. “Customer”) so an automatic closure can’t quietly pull someone out of the funnel.
- Check a contact’s log when you need to understand how they reached a stage — it records the exact reason and who moved them if it was manual.
- If you use multiple channels with the same customer, make sure they’re unified as a single contact so you don’t end up with a duplicated journey.
Frequently asked questions
What happens to a contact’s stage if I close and reopen their conversation?
Nothing changes. The stage lives on the contact, not on the conversation — it’s kept even if it closes, reopens, or they write through a different channel.
Can an automatic closure make someone “win”?
No. Closing only ever downgrades: it never leads to the won stage. Winning is always a business event (order paid) or a manual decision made by a person.
Can I move a contact by hand even if they have automations configured?
Yes. Anyone with access to the conversation can move the contact manually at any time, even if automatic rules are defined.
Can I delete a stage that already has contacts?
It isn’t deleted, it’s hidden. Contacts already there keep it; it simply stops being offered for new assignments.
Why don’t I see the stage bar in my inbox?
Customer Journey is enabled account by account. If you don’t see the bar or the stage chip on your conversations, your account doesn’t have it enabled yet — it isn’t an error.