When testing or observing customer journey behavior, an interaction that is expected to end up associated with one stage, sometimes ends up associated with a different stage. This is expected behavior, though it is important to understand why.

For any given interaction, it is possible that a customer can be eligible for multiple stages. However, the interaction must be assigned a single journey stage. To reconcile this, the journey portions of the Next-Best-Action Strategy Framework will assign the stage that is farthest along in the journey, or the stage that is furthest to the right. For example, if an interaction is eligible for both stages 1 and 2, the interaction will be assigned to stage 2, as it is further along in the journey.

Additionally, this determination accounts for the “Complete” (last) stage. The last node in the Journey Visualizer can sometimes be confusing, since it is represented slightly differently from the other nodes. You may think that it does not have any data, when actually the data is represented in the last node. This most commonly occurs when the last stage is the recipient’s first interaction, as there will be no line connecting the last node to any other.

If there are no criteria defined in the last stage, this will always be the stage assigned for the interaction, since the default behavior is to return true. To avoid this scenario, be sure to define criteria in the last stage so that it properly restricts eligibility for journey completion.

For more information, see Specifying entry criteria for customer journey stages and Associating actions with customer journey stages.