 In this video, you'll learn about some of the more advanced features of Smapply, the tool that allows you to create customer journeymaps. And I'll give my review on when I think this might be the tool for your next customer journeymap project. Let's show, begin. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the service design show. This is the second video about using Smapply as your customer journey mapping tool. If you haven't seen the first video, check it out over here, where we created a basic journey map in Smapply. In this second video, we're going to look at the advanced features and how to use Smapply on a day-to-day basis to drive customer-centric change and innovation. Just to repeat, this video isn't sponsored by Smapply in any way, just purely my opinion and experience. But I did reach out to Smapply to see if they would be open to giving you a discount to actually try the tool and they did. So if you want to use Smapply for free for a month, email them here and tell them that you've seen this video and they will offer you the paid account for free for a month. There's also a free account of Smapply, which I'm actually using in this recording. The free account has some limitations, but you can get access to the paid account for free for a month. Just email them over here. So just like in the last video, let me share my screen with you and walk you through some of the more advanced features and I think some of the most important features if you want to use customer journey maps on a day-to-day basis. There we go. So this is the map that we built in the first video. Super simple map about going to the zoo. It's not about the journey itself, it's more about learning how to use the tool and the basic element that it gives you. We have a few lanes, we have stages in our journey, we have the customer activities, we have some research data, we have customer needs and we have the emotional journey. Now the first thing that I want to show you is how to work with states. And what I mean with states is if you start using journey maps as an actual tool, you want to know what are the things that people are working on, what are the initiatives, the ideas, the things that are changing in our map. And there are a few ways you can accomplish this in Smapply, let me show you one. Let me add a need in drive to the zoo and I don't know, build excitement. So that's a need I have as an impatient dad when driving to the zoo and let's say we have a project going on that is about building excitement. I could for instance say that I want to make this one green. Now I have a green card in my map and let's say clear navigation that has been marked as done. Let's make this one blue. So this could be a way to indicate what are the parts of the journey that we're working on, what parts have been done, just labeling them. Yeah, it's possible in Smapply and this is a way to do it. The next thing I want to show you is how to work with map hierarchies. Now, this is an uber simple map with just three steps but in reality, if you start creating customer journey maps you'll see that you'll have, I don't know, maybe 20, 30 steps. Things can get complicated really quickly and as soon as you start having over 20 steps in a journey it becomes too usually too complicated to actually use and then you want to break the journey down in smaller journeys. And one of the guests on the service design show said journeys are fractal and I completely agree. So each step in the journey is a journey on its own and what you can do in Smapply is create a hierarchy of maps. Let me show you how to do it. So let's say, buy the ticket, we have a separate journey map where we elaborate on how to buy a ticket and the way you can do that is, say, go to the detailed journey and then make this into a link and I already have a link to a different map. Over there, I've created the different map, click okay and then when I click here, first I'll close this and then you see it becomes a link. Now I can click this and it opens a map, completely different map. It doesn't matter in this case, it's a rival journey and you see I have a completely different map and I can start working on this map as well and within this map there's also a link to a different map so as you can see, you can start building a hierarchy or an ecosystem of maps, which again, if you want to use journey maps on a day-to-day basis, you definitely will need this. Now next, two things that are super, super important. You'll see that you want to at some point start reorganizing things, start adding steps in between, moving steps around it can get messy if you have to do a lot of manual shifting of your information blocks. Now let's say we want to add a step in between driving to the zoo and parking the car. It's really easy, just click over here and then you can add a step and what happens between driving to the zoo and parking the car, getting to the car. Okay, I have no idea. But let's say I want to drive to the zoo over, I've made a mistake and I want to move it to the next step. Super easy, just drag and drop and if you pay notice, everything that happens below this step moves along. So you just drag the top one and I think it's also possible to even drag this one and the top moves as well. This is huge, this is a huge time saver and a must have if you actually use customer journey maps on a day to day basis, perfect. Now the other thing I want to show you is the ability to show and hide lanes. If you click on this icon, one of the options that you'll get is to move lanes up and down, which can be really useful but also to show and hide lanes. Show and hide, perfect. If you're going into a management meeting and if you have a map that's full of research data, images, icons, quotes, stuff like that, a huge map, if you show it to your manager and he has three minutes time to actually make any sense of it, this won't work. So this allows you to decide which information do you want to show when and to who and it's showing and hiding information lanes is huge and it's great that Smapply has this feature. All right, so the next thing we need to talk about is Smapply works with personas. Personas are an integrated part in the tool and I had to create a persona to actually create this map. I'm the unpatient dad. We're not going to go into how Smapply uses personas but there are there and the interesting thing is that Smapply allows you to have multiple personas in a journey map, which if you think about it could be useful for instance, showing the journey of multiple customers, the emotional journey of multiple customers, different types of customers but also to show how the staff experiences, how is the employee experience versus the customer experience? What is the employee need versus the customer need? So using multiple personas in your map can be useful depending on your situation. So yeah, it's interesting that it's in there. I talked about showing maps to your manager. Now you could of course set in the link to the map Smapply allows sharing maps but they also have the option to export not in the free version, but they have some templates and when you export a map, here's an example of what it might look like. This is what you could get and of course you can show and hide certain lanes to get the export you need. So it's good that it's in there. Now talking about sharing, this is also a feature that's not available in the free version but like I told you, you can get access to the full version if you email Smapply using the information that's down below in the show notes. Sharing is huge and Smapply allows you to really easily invite collaborators to a map to leave comments on a map so that people can communicate about what's going on over here. Collaboration, if you've been following along with this series of video, collaboration is maybe not the number one priority but it's the second priority of good customer journey mapping tool. You have to have the option to collaborate on a map and of course Smapply has that. Now let's talk about pricing for a second. Like I told you Smapply, if you look under the website go to pricing Smapply has a free trial for 14 days and then they offer packages starting at 25 euros a month so you can start cracking right away or just start for free for 14 days. So far we've looked into Smapply and using the tool what are the features, how could you use them, what are the benefit. Now let's look at some of the pros and cons and when I think Smapply would be a suitable tool for you as a customer journey as a customer experience professional. Let's start with the things that I like about the tool. I like that it's really geared towards customer experience professionals. You can see that the tool has been made by people who are actually doing this themselves by practitioners. The tool has everything you need. What's especially useful is that it's really easy to drag stuff around, to move stuff, to reorganize things, to add things, to remove things because if that's hard, if those basic functions are cumbersome, after a week you won't be using, you won't be updating your map anymore. So Smapply makes that really easy and I like it so that's a big plus. Also the tool offers a lot of guidance with tool tips. They have a huge learning library, they are releasing videos on customer journey mapping so that can be great. If you're sort of starting out with customer journey maps and you want to get into that even further they offer a lot of help and guidance so that's good. And also the other feature that's super useful is the ability to show and hide lanes as you'll see you'll need that as soon as maps start to evolve. Now, two things that I would like to have seen in Smapply and I haven't found them, maybe I haven't looked in the right places but I haven't found a version history so that you can see how a map has evolved over time. That's especially useful when you're collaborating on a map, you wanna see what James and Jane have changed or added to the map if they have changed anything. So I haven't seen that feature would be nice if it was there. And another thing that would have been a nice to have would be the ability to combine different types of metadata in one lane. So images, text and files all in the same lane rather than just in separate lanes. This is just a decision they made making the tool. I'm okay with that, you can use and work in that way but it would have been nice and maybe still something that they will add in the future but if you can combine different content types in the same lane. Now, when would I recommend using Smapply? To be honest, if you're a customer experience professional if customer journey maps are a thing that you take serious in your business it's hard not to recommend Smapply. It has everything you need and I think it's much smarter tool compared to using whiteboard tools like Mural and Miro. Smapply is just a dedicated journey mapping tool and it's a tool that allows you to use journey maps the way they should be used and that is to drive customer-centric change and innovation on a day to day basis. So if that's you, if you recognize yourself as somebody who wants to do that definitely give Smapply a go because it's one of their best tools out there. Have you used Smapply in the past? What was your experience? What did you like about it? What didn't you like about it? Leave a comment down below. I'm really curious to hear your experiences. If you haven't tried Smapply yet don't forget that you can get a one month free trial to get access to all the features if you just email Smapply at this email address and tell them that you've seen this video. Now, if you want to learn how to create customer journey maps that make an impact that are not just a pretty picture on the wall make sure you check out this next video because that's what we explain over there. Thanks for watching and see you in this next video.