Starting an Airkit Journey is an Event. It is triggered regardless of the channel used to begin any individual Journey.

For example, a Journey might begin either when a new user navigates to a particular web link or calls a certain phone number. In either case, the same Session Started Event would be fired.

Working with Session Started Events

The Session Started Event is accessible in the Connections Builder, under Global -> Session Started. Examining the Session Started Event opens the Action Builder in the Inspector. This Action Builder is used to define the Action Chain that will be fired when a Journey begins.

Note that the Session Started Event comes out of the box with a small Action Chain already built out. First the Set Variable Action defines the Actor variable, then the Initialize Actor Action initializes the Actor. This out-of-the-box Action Chain streamlines the process of Actor initialization, which is particularly valuable in cases where a Journey begins with an incoming phone call or text message. For more on the importance of Actor Initialization, see Actors and Conversations with Actors.

Accessing information collected at the start of a Journey

Session Started Events do not have any associated Event Variables. Any information collected automatically collected at the beginning of a Journey is instead found under session.start, a global namespace accessible through the Journey.

For more on what information is automatically collected at the start of a Journey, see Standard Journey Data.