26 Sep 2024: Introducing staging for Journeys

Raquel Updated by Raquel

You can now safely test and publish Journeys. A new way to make changes without the risk!

We know how stressful it can be to improve a live service. Making changes to a journey while it’s live comes with risks, and no one wants to accidentally disrupt their customers' experience. As a temporary solution, many of our customers have been using separate “staging numbers” for testing. While this works, it’s not perfect — moving everything over can be a hassle. That is why we’re excited to introduce a new way of working with Journeys that makes testing safer and easier for everyone, whether you’re running sophisticated processes or just getting started.

Now, journeys need to be explicitly published to go live, similar to how content management systems (CMS) work. You can keep your changes in draft mode until you're ready, and when you are, just hit the “Publish” button. You’ll have the flexibility to test multiple journey changes at once or publish and test individual journeys.

If you prefer a visual walkthrough, we've got you covered:

Testing Without Going Live

You can try things out and catch issues early, all without impacting your production environment.

You’ll see a new “Preview” button on the list page, where you can choose to test In the Simulator or On WhatsApp. By clicking on On WhatsApp, you can reach out to your line number and interact with your changes in two different versions:

  1. Public Version: this option allows you to test the live version of your journey without applying any unpublished changes. This reflects what your audience is currently seeing.
  2. Unpublished Changes: this option lets you test the latest version of your journey without making it live for your audience. You can do this by either sending !preview on to your line number or enabling the Can Preview Unpublished Changesfeature in the contact profile. And get back to the public version by typing !preview off
Version History

We’ve also improved version history by highlighting the live version of your journey. If there are unpublished changes, you’ll be able to see them clearly by clicking on the dropdown menu near the Journey Name.

How This Changes Your Workflow

In the past, changes went live instantly, sometimes leading to issues being caught too late. With this new feature, you can safely test your journeys in private. Once everything looks good, simply hit "Publish" to make your changes visible to everyone.

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