In the recent Getting Started with Journey Orchestrator: Confidently Build Your First JO Program webinar, you all brought amazing energy and tons of great questions! We couldn’t get to everything live, so we had our resident JO expert,
Check out the full webinar recap here!
Now, let’s dive into your questions:
Q: Can you generate an audience from PX users even if those users are not contacts (or People) in Gainsight CS?
A: Those users must exist as People in Gainsight CS in order to be used in a program.
Q: Is the Gainsight CTA always for internal tasks? ex: prompting a CSM to follow up? Or what’s an example of the CTA being used for a customer, if that happens?
A: CTAs are only visible internally, but they can trigger customer-facing actions as part of the workflow. If you want something explicitly visible to the customer, that’s usually done via Success Plans or engagements (in-app/email), not the CTA itself.
Q: How do you define someone as a decision maker?
A: Anyone who can approve, spend or allocate budget is usually considered a decision maker. Titles often include VP, C-level, or department head.
Q: What are the usual/best practices in terms of timeline activity creation for these JO-driven emails?
A: At a minimum, I log most scheduled, operational, survey, and release communications to the Timeline. A good rule of thumb is “if it’s not on the Timeline, it didn’t happen.”
Q: When choosing a CTA as a trigger, can you use CTAs that you've already made?
A: I don’t see any reason why that wouldn’t work, though I haven’t personally tested it. You’d likely need to incorporate a CTA query within your audience query to filter by specific CTA types, reasons, name keywords, or statuses.
Q: Any considerations about the duration of the program? If I want to build a full digital journey for a subset of customers from welcome to project-end survey, and projects can run for up to 12 months, should I break down the journey or is it okay to have a single program?
A: Generally, I recommend not building a program larger or more complex than you’d feel comfortable troubleshooting.
Q: Is the audience status reportable by person?
A: I haven’t found a way to report on audience status at the person level. The AO Participant activity report can show when someone completes a journey, but it also includes all prior participant actions leading up to that point.
Q: When a segment for the audience is not in the list needs to be created, can you show what that process looks like? Also when would you use Data Designer vs. Segment creation?
A: A segment is essentially a pre-built single-object query. I use them frequently for simple, one-time sends.
Data Designer, on the other hand, functions like the Rules Engine—it allows you to create a persistent object from the resulting dataset (whereas the Rules Engine typically stores results temporarily for action processing).
Segments are best for quick, one-time sends based on connected lookup objects, while Data Designer is ideal when you need to explore, refine, or reuse data across multiple programs.
Here’s a quick overview of the segment creation process.
Q: Would you mind going over the CSV file and where to get this after a program is launched? I have to clone some programs month to month so i would love to see where to find this and how to load
Here’s a quick walkthrough that should cover what you’re looking for.
Added note from our PM Vijay: You can export the CSV file by clicking the Export button in the top right corner of the participant grid after selecting the Audience Synced count.
If your new program includes additional sources, remove the following columns: Participant ID, Participant State, and Participant Type. The column names and count must match exactly. If applicable, rename the Company ID and Recipient Email Address columns to align with the field names used in the previous source.
Q: What about tracking email replies, is that feature getting added?
A: Email reply tracking is on our roadmap. I don’t have an exact date yet, but it’s something we’re actively working toward.
Q: In my experience, there are occasional scenarios where customers ask us to add additional users to an adoption program I’ve already built. However, there isn’t a straightforward way to add a one-off customer to an existing program. This usually forces me to duplicate the program and manually upload the customer via CSV. Do you know of any workarounds to handle these one-off requests more efficiently?
A: I handle one-off or backfill sends the same way. If the program is query-based, I typically clone it and adjust the audience query to target the specific person or people in question.
Added note from our PM Vijay: You can upload up to five CSV files within the same program. The key limitation is that the number of columns and column names must match those in the main source exactly.
If your new program includes additional sources, remove the following columns: Participant ID, Participant State, and Participant Type. Also, if applicable, rename the Company ID and Recipient Email Address columns to match the field names used in the previous source.
Q: How do you use the different email template versions in your program?
A: Are you referring to using different template variants, or to updating a template over time? Feel free to let me (
Q: Do you have other webinars or specific courses we could sign up for to go further?
A: Our Digital Journey course within Gainsight University is a great place to start.
Q: Do you have any tips on how to organize your email programs? Do you delete programs once they've ended?
A: I use Queue Monitoring Reports and a dedicated dashboard to manage my JO queue. These reports help me track how many programs are active and support periodic Active Program Audits. Reports built off the Advanced Outreach object are especially useful for this.
Q: Can a quick survey be embedded in the email itself (vs. a link sending the recipient out to a survey)?
A: You can embed a question directly in the email template, and recipients can respond inline. However, even inline responses will trigger an external survey session to open in a new window. This ensures that the response is properly tracked and associated with the recipient’s record in Gainsight.
Q: Did you say that you can create an email template through Gainsight Assist (the outlook plugin)?
A: Yes — when creating an email template, you can choose where it’s available for use. Simply select Gainsight Assist as one of the “Available In” options to make the template accessible through the Outlook plugin. Here’s a quick clip.
Q: Difference between One Time vs Multiple Times in Evaluate element?
A: One Time runs the evaluation criteria once per participant.
Multiple Times reevaluates participants over several days to check whether they meet the criteria within the defined evaluation period. Participants who never meet the criteria are dropped at the end of that period. When evaluating over multiple days, JO performs these checks approximately every 11 hours.
Here’s a video overview.