 So, you're interested in using customer journey maps in your next project? Well, Custulance might just be the tool you need. In this video, you'll learn how to get started and create a basic journey map in Custulance. Let the show begin! Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the Serbs Design Show. This show is all about helping you create organizations that put people at the heart of their business. And if you're watching this video, you probably already know that customer journey maps can be a great way to drive customer-centric innovation. And like any other professional out there, we as Serbs Designers, customer experience professional, should have our own professional tools, right? This is a soldering iron. And so is this. This one is pretty rudimentary. It gets the job done, but it's not the best job you can do. This one is more advanced. I can control the temperature, it's quicker up to speed, it's quicker, it heats up quicker. Now, again, I can get a job done with both of them. But when I use this one, the sort of semi-professional one, the quality of my work will be better, I will be more consistent and I'll get the job done more quickly. So if I would be a professional, if welding, soldering would be my profession, I'd know which tool I'd use. I'd want to use the tool that allows me to deliver higher quality. So why is it that so many Serbs Designers are still using super rudimentary tools when it comes to customer journey mapping? I have no idea, because we have much better tools out there. And one of those tools is Custolence. There's no excuse anymore. Professional customer journey mapping tools should be part of your toolbox. And we've reviewed a few of those tools before. Check out this playlist if you're interested to see which were the other ones. In this video, we're going to look at Custolence and this is a two-part video. In this video, I'm going to walk you through the basic features of Custolence and create the basic structure of a map. In the second video, we're going to look at some of the pros and cons and how you can actually use Custolence on a day-to-day base to drive customer-centric change. Now, if you're interested in how to make a journey map, what steps you should take, this video is not about that. Check out this video over here that will help you to do that. This video is really about how to use the tool. Now, what's good to know is that Custolence started out as an internal project at a service design agency and then later became public. So the people who created Custolence are actually service designers who are designing a better tool for themselves. Now, as you know, I run a course called The Perfect Map with Daniel Joramand and Daniel is one of the people behind Custolence. So I have a personal relationship with the people who've built this tool, but I'm going to give my honest feedback and try to give you the most objective perspective on how to use this tool. I've reached out to the people from Custolence and asked if they want to do sort of a promotion or discount for the viewers of the service design show and they said, of course we do. So if you use this code that is down here or down below in the description, you'll get 10% off of the team license when you sign up for a year. Again, check out all the details down below in the show notes. So let me share my screen with you and jump into Custolence and start creating a customer journey map. So here we are. This is my Custolence dashboard. I'm already logged in. I have an account and you can create a free account just to play around with the tool and see what it's capable of. So you could create the same map I'm going to do over here and I want to show you what the map is that we're going to create. This is what the final result will look like and like in all the other examples, we're going to do the visit to the zoo as our journey. So let's start by creating a new map and we can choose from some templates, tutorial map, vacation travel, elderly need care. There are a few and they are adding more and more templates, but of course we don't need a template in this stage. We're going to start with a blank map. And the first thing we're going to do is give the map our name and that is going to be going to the zoo. So the first thing that we're going to do and that we want to do is to create four information layers. In Custolence they call them lanes and that's basically the only option we have when we have a blank map. So let's add a new lane and then we have two options, new card lane and a new curve lane. Let's start with the card lane and I'll explain the curve lane in a second. So new card lane and we're going to call this card lane phases. Whoa, phases. Perfect. Click here. Then we're going to add another lane, another card lane, which we're going to call customer activities. Then we're going to add another card lane and that's going to be customer needs and the final lane is going to be a curve lane and that is going to be, let's call this the customer emotion or customer experience, whatever you want to call it. So we already have a basic structure of our customer journey, phases, activities, needs and emotions and you can add as many lanes as you like and just to make things a bit more clear, we're going to change the background color. You can see that when I click on a lane, I can pick a different color. So now we have shades of gray, green. I mean, shades of gray is something different. So let's pick this one. Let's pick this one and finally, all right, let's pick this one. So at least we have some visual difference contrast between the different information layers. The next thing we're going to do is of course we're going to want to add information to this map. Now we're going to start with phases as always and we're going to identify three simple phases in our going to the zoo journey and that is before, during and of course you can guess what the final one will be and that is after the visit. We've got, they call them cards in Cosolence, three cards. We can do some basic formatting with the text. We can make the text large. We can make it bold, italic, we can change colors, shapes, we'll get into that in a bit but just let's say everything is bold and everything is large just to make our phases set out a little bit more. There we go. The next thing we want to look at is customer activities. So what do we actually do when we're going to the zoo? Well, before we could say we need to buy tickets, right? And the next thing that's not enduring but let's say drive to the zoo. Now you'll immediately see, hey, this isn't right because drive to the zoo is still in the before stage. Well, one of the super powerful features of Cosolence and I think one of the things that make it one of the best customer journey mapping tools around is the ability to really easily drag and change stages, cards in your map. So I can really easily resize certain cards and create space to do something new. And I can do the same with individual cards below. This is really, really useful. So let's just add two more just because we can. Let's say park the car and during we're going to feed the zebra. There we go. Now the next thing we want to do is describe the customer needs. Again, this isn't about the best perfect journey map. This is just as an example of how to create a basic structure over map. So customer needs when buying the tickets. Maybe it's confirmation, confirmation that everything was processed. Yeah. All right. Driving to the zoo. Maybe the need is to build excitement and park the car could be something like clear navigation, right? Now what about the curved lane? Because this is like the iconic lane that you see in customer journey maps. Maybe this is the distinctive thing of customer journey maps. And we create a curved lane by adding points and then dragging them around. So we can do something like this. And the customer gives us the option to either give a color like we could say this is neutral. This is a positive experience and this is like a negative experience. Now you can be really creative with how you use the curved lane because you can also create a lane for instance for business impact or for required investment or maybe for how much research you've already done. How confident are you that this is actually the need? So you can use a curved lane to display different kinds of information. And the final thing I didn't show is you can also use an icon. There are a few example icons here. So now we have a green smiley face in our curved lane. Now what I always talk about when reviewing these tools is the abilities to add metadata. And that's what we're going to do next. Now Custulance has a killer feature that I haven't seen in any of the other tools so far that we've reviewed. And that is the ability to add sub lanes. Now you'll see in a minute why sub lanes are so powerful. So let's say we have customer activities and we want to add our research data. We want to show proof that we know what customers are doing. So let's call this sub lane research data. And then we could add a card below buy tickets, new text sub card, where we say where did we get information about that the customer is actually buying tickets. We could say looking Google Analytics. Oh man, come on, look at Google Analytics. But driving to the zoo, we could also do something like add an image. So for instance, if we actually did a photo study, then we could take some of those photos of the photo study and add them in Custulance, close it and actually show the customer activities. And the cool thing about it is that you can have multiple sub lanes. So we could say here this is like a photo study, study lane, we could have like this would be, I don't know, interviews. And then you could see how you can enrich your map. And why sub lanes are so interesting is because you can hide them. When you don't need to see this information, when you're presenting this to management and they are not interested in the actual details, they just want a high level overview, you just hide the sub lanes. So sub lanes are really a great way to structure your map and to add metadata. And another way you could use sub lanes, for instance, imagine if you actually start plotting touch points over here, you have a touch point lane, you could divide that lane into different channels, like social media, phone, physical or staff, and then hide those lanes when you don't need them. So at first it might seem like an insignificant feature, sub lanes, but once you start collaborating on maps, once you start actually using maps on a daily basis, which you should do, then you'll see how important it is to have a granularity within your existing map. And the final thing I want to say is that Custolence, we already showed that you can add text, you can add images, but you can also add, for instance, a file, a sub card, where you link to a presentation or a different image or something like that. So you can mix different content types in one lane. You don't have to have separate lanes in your map, you can just use photos, images, whatever you need, you can mix and match content types. Not a lot of tools allow you to actually do that. This is how you create the most basic journey map structure in Custolence. These are the building blocks. In the next video, we're going to look at how to use Custolence on a day-to-day basis to drive customer centric change. So if you want to see that, check out the video over here, because that's where we're going to continue. See you over there.