Addressing situations outside of your user journey

The important thing to understand about your user journey is that it starts with each individual user.

Whether they start their journey on January 1 or August 5, you want to take them on exactly the same journey through onboarding, ramp up, and so on.

And because the journey is designed around them, you can give them the same week-by-week experience, no matter the time of year.

But what about things you can't control? Let's look at a couple of things that sit outside your user journey and how to address them.

Seasonal events and sales

You can't move your big sales events for each individual user – and you definitely can't move Christmas. So any communications you send out at these times of year need to be considered separately.

The key here is that, just because an event is happening, it doesn't mean every single user needs to hear about it.

Now, there's absolutely nothing wrong with sending the same Christmas campaign to one user in the ramp-up phase and another who is already loyal. But you may want to make certain exclusions, like if a user made a purchase in the last three days.

Solving technical issues

If some of your users experience connectivity issues during onboarding, you may want to include a branch in the user journey to address it. But for things that could pop up at any time in the user journey, you'll want to consider them separately.

Here are a few examples for different products:

• Printer – paper jam
• Fitness tracker – inaccurate step count
• Lightbulb – morning routine failed

In these cases, it's a good idea to override your touchpoint policy (TPP) to help solve the issue as quickly as possible.