Path Finder in Zoho CRM is an observant tool built to discover and record real-time journeys taken by your customers in your business. With its ability to capture each customer interaction, you can get a comprehensive idea of how your prospects and customers are navigating within your business.  

     Click here to learn more about Path Finder

What is the difference between Path Finder and Journey Builder in Zoho CRM?

Path Finder and Journey Builder are two subsets of an Experience Center toolkit in Zoho CRM called CommandCenter. While Path Finder will help you discover real-time journeys your customers are taking in your business, Journey Builder will help you design and template contextual journeys, thereon. Thus, based on Path Finder's findings, you can orchestrate a forward journey for your customers.
The essence of CommandCenter, as a whole, is to measure and optimize the customer experience through their journey. Let us distinguish them.

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How does Path Finder track journeys?

A journey is a series of interactions your customers or prospects have with your business. Like a breadcrumb trail, Path Finder connects interactions of individual users to form unique paths. So, to identify interactions and track journeys, Path Finder relies upon three important components.

States, Touchpoints, and Identifiers

States- States are like stages in a journey. Customers, as they continue their interaction with your business, move from pillar to post, crossing different steps in your process or products. To take those milestones into account, you configure states.

1. A state can be a step in a process, if you want to trail a journey based on a process.
   For example: "added to wish list," "added to cart," payment information, and so on. Alternatively, a state can be different products in your business, if you want to track journeys across products like laptop, mobile, tablet, and so on.

Note : States in Path Finder are individual entities. One state is connected with the other based on the order of your customer interactions.

Touchpoints- Touchpoints are access points present in your business through which customers engage with you. They can be webform submissions, email correspondences, chat bot initiations, or even a click of a button. Any interaction will trigger the respective touchpoint and thereby the record in that path will be associated with that state.

Limits:

Each state can have up to five  touchpoints and each touchpoint can have up to five identifiers.

1. PageSense solely depends on code snippets to track, while Path Finder can observe and capture interactions through integration-based triggers, APIs, custom signals, or standard triggers in CRM. Click here to learn more about these triggers.
   
2. PageSense provides behavioral reports based on website traffic alone, but Path Finder gathers customer interactions from targeted touchpoints like website, email, call, and surveys, and assimilates the findings to form unique paths.

1. Integration-based Triggers are those triggers that are brought in as a result of integration of different applications from Zoho's ecosystem. You can configure in such a way that any action performed there (say, submission of a desk ticket) can trigger a touchpoint in your Path Finder. Likewise, you can avail the following triggers based out of Zoho app integrations.
           
   
2. Custom triggers  are those triggers you define using targeted  APIs  or using  Custom Signals .  By configuring custom triggers, you can take account of all the interactions happening across your business landscape into CRM. You can log all kinds of interactions, including the ones with third-party applications by means of APIs or Custom Signals. 
   
3. Standard triggers  are those that are present in CRM by default. It includes  record-level triggers  like creating a record, editing a record, or conversion of a record and  interaction-based triggers  like sending an outgoing email, receiving an incoming email, submission of a webform, and so on. While the record-level triggers are acted upon by the CRM users, the interaction-based triggers are activated by real-time customer interactions. 

Notes:

1. To avail interaction-based standard triggers, you must configure email and telephony services in your organization.
   
2. Like touchpoints, the triggers listed in them are also module based. For example, converting a record is a trigger that is available only for the Leads and Quotes module.
   
3. Currently, you can only see those integration-based triggers from Zoho's ecosystem. You can, however, make use of Custom Signals to log signals in Path Finder.
   

How long after configuration will Path Finder start displaying reports?

In this article, you can find detailed answers to the frequently asked questions about Path Finder. We have covered questions about its conceptual and technical aspects. However, should you have more questions, feel free to drop them in the feedback section or write to us at crm-useredu@zohocorp.com