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How to use the Journeys app

Keith Bower

This article walks through how to build a guided onboarding experience that applies itself to the right tickets, emails the new hire a link, and progresses automatically as your team completes the work behind the scenes.

This guide pairs with the video above. Follow the video to see each click in context; use the steps below as your reference and for the few bits the video moves past quickly.

Before you start This walkthrough assumes you already have a New Hire Onboarding ticket form, and a task list with a “New starter laptop” sub-ticket. If you don’t, set those up first — see the Tasks & Sub-tickets guides in the SweetHawk Help Centre — then come back here.

1Connect Journeys (one-time)

Before a journey can be applied to a ticket — whether you do it manually or a trigger does it automatically — the app needs to be connected.

  • In the Journeys app, click Settings.
  • Click Connect to Journeys and complete the connection.
Don’t skip this Until you’ve connected, you won’t be able to apply a journey link to any ticket — manually or via a trigger.

2Create the Journey

  1. In Zendesk’s left-hand apps bar, click the Journeys icon.
  2. At the top of the app’s admin, click Journeys.
  3. On the far right, click Create Journey.

3Add a phase

A journey is made of phases, and each phase holds cards. You can’t add a card until a phase exists.

  • At the bottom-left, click Add Phase and give it a name (e.g. Pre-onboarding setup).

4Add your cards

With a phase in place, click the Add Card button on the right and choose a card type. Every card has a title and description you fill in on the right; some have extra settings.

Information Plain text the new hire reads. Turn on Requires acknowledgement so they must tick to confirm they’ve read it.
Form Collects Zendesk ticket fields when the new hire submits. Use the Search fields bar to find fields (e.g. Employee start date, Full legal name); selected fields list at the top, and you can toggle each one Required on the right.
Checklist A simple list of items the new hire ticks off — just add your checklist items (Task 1, Task 2…).
Article Like Information, but with rich text. Great for a step handled by your team (e.g. “Your new laptop”).
Key setting · Requires acknowledgement For cards the new hire completes themselves, turn Requires acknowledgement on. For a card that’s completed by an internal process — like the laptop being set up — leave it off, so it can be ticked off automatically later (Step 8).

For this example, add four cards: an Information welcome card, a Form card, a Checklist card, and an Article card titled “Your new laptop” (acknowledgement left off). When you’re done, click Save.

5Publish the Journey

A new journey starts as Not published and can’t be used until you publish it.

  • Go back to your list of journeys in the app.
  • On the far right of your journey, click the ⋯ (ellipsis) and choose Publish.

6Email the journey link when it starts

Send the new hire their personal journey link as a public comment the moment the journey starts. First grab the link by applying the journey to a test ticket, then add it to the journey’s action.

First, copy your journey link

Because you connected Journeys in Step 1 and published it in Step 5, you can now copy a ready-made link straight from a ticket — no need to build a URL by hand.

  1. Create a test ticket.
  2. In the apps pane on the right, open the Journeys app, click Apply journey, and select the journey you just created.
  3. Once it’s applied, click the Copy button to copy the journey link to your clipboard.

Then add it to the Journey started action

  1. Open your journey and click Journey settings (top right — next to Preview and Save).
  2. Under Actions, choose the Journey started event, then Add action.
  3. Pick Ticket updates → Add a comment, write your welcome message, and paste the link you copied.
  4. Save.

Optional — use a styled button instead of a bare link

It renders like this:

View your onboarding experience

Paste this HTML into the comment, and swap the highlighted link for the one you copied:

<a href="https://app.sweethawk.com/journeys/portal/your-subdomain/ticket/{{ticket.id}}" target="_blank"
   style="display:inline-block;padding:12px 20px;background:#0a6fff;color:#ffffff !important;
   text-decoration:none;border-radius:8px;font-weight:700;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,
   'Segoe UI',Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;line-height:1.2;box-shadow:0 2px 6px rgba(29,116,245,0.25);">
   View your onboarding experience</a>

→ Replace the highlighted URL with the link you copied from the ticket.

7Start the journey automatically

Now make the journey apply itself when a new-hire ticket is raised.

  1. In your list of journeys, find the Trigger column and click Create trigger.
  2. Click the link that appears (top right) to open the trigger, then edit its conditions.
  3. Change it from the default tag condition to: when the ticket is Created and Form is New Hire Onboarding → Start journey. Save.

From now on, any New Hire Onboarding ticket automatically gets the journey — and the new hire automatically gets the email from Step 6.

8Auto-complete the laptop card when the sub-ticket is solved

Finally, tie the “Your new laptop” card to the real work, so it ticks itself off when IT finishes.

  1. Open the Tasks app and click into your task list.
  2. Click into the New starter laptop sub-ticket task.
  3. Under Actions, choose when this task is completed → Add action.
  4. Pick Journeys → Complete card, then select your journey, the phase, and the “Your new laptop” card. Update.

9Test it end to end

  1. Create a ticket using the New Hire Onboarding form — the task list and journey apply automatically, and the email goes out.
  2. As the new hire, open the email, click the link, log in, and complete the first few cards.
  3. As an agent, solve the “New starter laptop” sub-ticket.
  4. Watch the “Your new laptop” card complete automatically