 Hello, good afternoon, my name is Philip Preston and I'd like to welcome you to today's webinar express demystifying and simplifying customer journey mapping organized by CIM Island. Before we get started, I'd just like to go over a few things so you know how the event will work and how to participate. The presentation will last approximately 30 to 35 minutes followed by a short 10 minute or so Q&A session. You'll be able to post any questions you have by typing into the ask a question chat box in the Q&A panel which you'll see on the right hand side of your screen if you're watching on the laptop or across the top of your watching on a tablet or smartphone. You can send in your questions at any time during the presentation and I want to attempt to answer as many as we can during the Q&A session at the end. If you want to share your thoughts on social media, we're using the hashtag CIM events. The webinar is being recorded and we'll share the link to the recording with you over the next few days. And finally, you'll also be emailed a short feedback survey after the event, which we'd love you to complete. It'll only take a few minutes and all survey responses are anonymous, so please do let us know your thoughts. So I'd now like to hand you over to Mary and Norwood, who is our guest speaker today. Thank you Phil and good afternoon everybody. Thank you for joining me on this webinar express hosted by CIM Ireland and delivered by myself, Mary and Norwood. So just a little bit of a background. I run Northwest School of Marketing, which is a CIM accredited study centre and I'm the current vice chair of CIM Ireland board. If anyone's interested in connecting with me or following up on any of the issues raised today, I'm more than happy to connect with you on LinkedIn and you'll find the details on this screen. So before we start, let me just put in a little plug for my adopted home city, Derry, London Derry. I'm based in Northern Ireland's second city and Ireland's fourth largest city. In fact, we are Ireland's only completely wall city and one of the finest examples of wall cities in Europe today and you'll see a photograph on the top left hand side of the screen. If you get a chance to visit Derry when things get better for us, you'll be able to enjoy two really wonderful coastal driving routes that meet here, the Wild Atlantic Way and the Causeway Coastal Route. Thanks to Visit Derry for providing me with these images today and I know some of the team there are on the webinar today. Thank you for joining us. You may also be familiar with Derry London Derry as the home to the Channel 4 series Derry Girls. And on the bottom right of the screen you'll even see a mural which has become a really wonderful, unique tourist attraction here in the city. So you may be wondering why I selected customer journey mapping as the topic of today's webinar Express. Well, there are a number of reasons and the first one I'll just deal with quickly. It's really because I believe that customer journey mapping should be an essential part of every marketers toolkit. It really should be as prevalent as all of those other marketing tools that we're familiar with them. You know, we have the four P's, the seven P's, the eight P's, we even have the four E's. Let me say five I's, ten C's, four C's. And we have SWAT, tools, Sawstack and Racing and lots more. But the thing is customer journey mapping doesn't seem to be as prevalent as those tools. And many marketers I've spoken to about it will usually tell me one of the following when I asked them, you know, do they use customer journey mapping? And some will say, well, I've done customer journey mapping, but I don't know if I'm doing it right. I don't know if I'm doing it the way you would do it or the official way, whatever that way is. Or they might say, I've heard about customer journey mapping, but I really don't have the time or the resources to do it. Or they might even say, I've heard about it, but I haven't a clue. I don't know where to start. And I've also heard it be said that, yeah, I don't think customer journey mapping will work in our organization. So taking all of that on board this webinar express is my attempt to simplify this tool that is customer journey mapping, because I really hope that it will help more marketers to use it and to feel more confident about using it. But there is a second reason why I selected this topic, and that's down to the, I'll not say unprecedented, but if an overused term these days, but let's call it the challenging times that we're all facing just now. And on the screen you'll see a photograph of NI scrubs. This is a group that's based in Northern Ireland that was accidentally started by Clara Maven, who's a social media consultant in the image. Clara had put out a call for help. She needed to find or get her hands on some second hand scrubs. You know the clothing that you'll see on the screen that's worn by key workers in hospital or care settings. She was trying to help her aunt whose hospital ward was running low on supplies. Clara got a great response to that call, and she began driving around the country collecting second hand scrubs. But as she did that, the people she met started to say, well, you know, I can sew, I could help make new scrubs. And overnight they had 80 sewers, and within a week they had 800 people rising to nearly 9,000. And that group collectively delivered nearly 106,000 items to key workers in Northern Ireland throughout the pandemic. Now, that is an amazing achievement, and the speed with which this group was established is equally impressive. It's a truly agile response in very, very difficult circumstances. The pandemic has caused so much disruption. And from a marketing perspective, the disruption has been described as swift, unprecedented and underestimated according to Forbes. And you'll read many articles about this that seem to suggest different ways organizations and brands can take a lead during the pandemic. They always seem to suggest the need to put your customer interests first or to maybe even find ways to help your customers through the crisis. But I was really impressed with what Forrester had to say about marketing in a pandemic. They went further. They suggested that organizations should recalibrate their customer experience CX efforts. A phrase I'll come back to a few times in this session today. And they offered three simple steps to prioritize. Number one, to start with empathy to try to understand your customers in this moment. So that's about proactively reaching out to your customers and engaging in live conversations, not just surveys. They also suggested that you should adopt your customer experience accordingly. And the reason is simple. The CX you may have offered before may no longer be the right CX for now. The third point is to help your employees to deliver a great customer experience despite the crisis. Now, of course, it's important to look after the well being of employees, not just because it will improve the customer experience. But you know, it's the right thing to do because your employees are facing the same uncertainty and anxiety as your customers. I'm sure there have been times over recent months when as a consumer you may have had a poor customer experience. But I suspect that, like me, you were probably quite forgiving and quite patient because you understood the challenges that was faced by many organizations. So that patience isn't going to last forever. And we're starting to see some evidence now emerging that customer behavior and attitudes towards brands are changing. We have a short amount of time available today, so I don't have time to go into this in too much detail. But I do think it's worth pointing out just some of the consumer changes that we are seeing. So the first one is the obvious one, the migration to online shopping, especially by groups that didn't shop online before. The 65 and Overs is a particular group. The need for reassurance about safety measures being put in place by organization. Customers want to find that information easily. The postponement of certain buying decisions. Travel is an obvious one, but there are others and the need to believe that people come first before profit. There's a stat from the Edelman Trust barometer. It says 71% of people say that if they perceive that a brand is putting profit before people, they will lose trust in that brand. We've all been through a lot of change over recent months and I suppose the upshot of all of this is that disruption is continuing at a fast pace. So not being agile is no longer an option. Marketers and organizations, we need to move as quickly as NI scrubs did and we need to quickly address the new needs of customers both emotionally and functionally. So that's a really long winded way of saying that this is the second reason for this topic that as Forrester said, we need to recalibrate our customer experience efforts. But we need to do it in a way that doesn't result in unexpected or unwanted changes. That doesn't leave our customers feeling really frustrated because they can't find the information they need. That doesn't leave them feeling annoyed or inconvenienced. So I believe that customer journey mapping is the key to doing this well. It's a way for organizations to better manage customer experience changes that are required in a more considered consistent and sustainable way. So that's the context for today's session and this is the agenda. I'm going to stick strictly to the title, which is to simplify and demystify customer journey mapping. We're going to do that in three parts. We're going to define it, explain it and illustrate it. And as Phil said, there's going to be some time left at the end for Q&A. So to begin with, let's define what customer journey mapping is. And there are three common elements to customer journey mapping. It's a diagram, it's a process and it's a tool. Let me dig into that a little bit more. As a diagram, a customer journey map is this visualization. And it's designed to illustrate the steps that your customer goes through as they engage with your company or your organization, whether that's a product, an experience online, a retail experience, a service or any combination. And it's also a process. It allows you to step into your customer's shoes. I mean, that's critical. It allows you to see your organization from your customer's perspective. And finally, it's a tool. And it's a tool that I believe should be an essential part of your marketer's toolkit because it allows you to gain insights into your customer's pain points and how to improve those. And also moments of delight, things that you're doing really well that make your customers really happy so that you can learn from that and replicate it. But a customer journey map is also a working document. It's not a static document. It has to evolve the more you learn about your customers. On the screen you'll see a little summary of the characteristics of a customer journey map. So you'll see this table in the middle. A customer journey map is this visualization and it's usually a diagram of the steps your customer goes through as they're interacting with your organization. It's usually a table, but it's visual. It's also driven by a persona. So you should have a persona in place before you attempt to create a customer journey map because it's that persona's perspective's needs and expectations that really drive what you put into each of these boxes. The customer journey map is a process and on the right side of the screen you'll see some elements of what that process probably should be but you'll see that it should be shared. It should be used to help make changes to your customer experience and it should be updated. So it is very much a tool that you can use to recalibrate again in the words of Forrester, your customer experience and to do that in a very consistent, sustainable and considered way. So don't not start a customer journey map because you think you don't have the information or you don't have the skills to do it. Believe it as a tool that will evolve. It will get better and you will develop it the more you use it. And before we go on just let's quickly tackle any confusion because sometimes I hear marketers getting confused with other similar tools but they're actually different tools. So without going into too much detail about this just let's acknowledge that customer journey mapping is different. It's not the same as user story mapping or service blueprint or experience mapping because it focuses on the interactions a customer has with an organisation and it does so from the customer's perspective. So let's start to drill down a little bit more into what customer journey mapping can offer marketers. We've established that it can help us to understand our customer needs by developing this deeper understanding, this deeper empathy with customers. I wonder is that really news to marketers because it's not really what marketing is all about. It's not marketing 101 and on the screen is the CIM definition of marketing. It's a management process. It's responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably. And that emphasises the pivotal role of understanding customers in marketing. But given that so few use customer journey maps how can we say with any confidence that we know if we actually satisfy customer needs? Of course there's research and data that you can use to maybe help you answer that question but I believe the customer journey map offers you a consistent and considered and sustainable. I'm going to keep repeating it. Way to ensure that we do this, that we do identify, anticipate and satisfy customer needs particularly as the customer goes through different interactions that they have with us. Their needs change and so we need to adapt our offering accordingly. And so here's the simplification. Customer journey mapping can supplement what we already know about our customers and also it can reveal what we don't know and that's why it's a useful tool. Often I hear that people don't use customer journey mapping because they think they don't have enough data but the opposite is true. A customer journey map can and should elevate our marketing practice so that we provide our customers with this better and more relevant experience. A single exceptional experience can easily turn into long-term loyalty. Going across the screen from left to right you'll see it's a practical way to manage your efforts to recalibrate your experience. It's a way to help you prioritize what changes matter most to customers. If you're on limited resources and you've limited time, that matters. You need to be able to see at a glance from this visual document where you should focus your efforts and pay attention. And often it's regarded as a cornerstone to customer journey mapping. They need to build teams and they need to remove silos and that often I find can be a block. It can be a reason for not doing customer journey mapping. So I would always recommend that you start customer journey mapping and as the process evolves in a smaller organization in particular you use it to start to gain consensus. But you don't let this be a block. So we've talked about recalibrating the customer experience. So let's now look at what makes for a great customer experience. This information comes from a group called PEGA who recently published some research and they outlined five critical components of a great customer experience. So you'll see on the screen a good customer experience is about speedy service making relevant information easy to find and we've mentioned that a few times. It's about painless interactions, customers feeling understood and also it's about being consistent and connected across channels. And research shows that this is really important because 42% of customers will turn away from a company after just two negative experiences. So if we pick out one of these, the customers feeling understood. I mean that's an interesting one. In PEGA's research they find that brands often fail to act in a way that was customer centric and 68% of organizations surveyed said customer needs will drive their channel focus and they went on to put email, web and digital ads at the top of their planned investments. Why is that not being customer centric? Well, it's problematic simply looking at the stats might help. Email campaign response rates is about 1%. Digital ads were blocked by 26% of all internet users in 2019. So you could argue that customer channel preferences are being ignored and customers may feel that they are being misunderstood as a result. Now, if you think that might be difficult to remember those five elements of a good experience I actually personally find Tempkin's definition of customer experience easy to remember. Tempkin defines customer experience as the perception that customers have of their interactions with an organization and it's based on three things, success, effort and emotion. So success is about the degree to which a customer can accomplish their goals. So for example, that means how easily can a customer find the information that they want? For example about the revised opening hours that your organization might have. How easily can they find information about the safety measures you've put in place or even the click and collect ordering process? How easy can they find information about product availability changes? In terms of effort, that refers to how easy or difficult was it for the customer to accomplish those goals? So was information about opening hours inconsistent? Was the automated message when I call to discover what the opening hours are? Is that different to the website's information? Do you as a customer end up going round in circles on the Facebook page or the website to find out how to go about ordering something? And then emotion is the last part of this. How does the interaction make the customers feel? So am I as a customer left feeling frustrated, angry and patient? Disappointed, like I need to complain? Or do I feel joyful, delighted, impressed, maybe even surprised? So these three components of customer experience from Temkin. I think that can be a really useful list to use once you start mapping your customer journey because you're going to be able to start to assess how well customers needs are met against each of those three dimensions. You know, or alternatively you could use Pegas five components if that's easier. So now I'm going to show you how simple it is, I think, to start creating a customer journey map. But here's a caveat. Come on. There is still some confusion about the best way to create a customer journey map in the academic literature. And this particular article calls on academics, researchers and practitioners to be more consistent to try to help develop more theory and advice around this topic. But look, I think there is a simple straight forward way to create a customer journey map. And that's what I'm going to do today. So here's a deconstruction, I should say, of what a basic customer journey map should look like. Probably would be more of a table than this, but you know, anything works. And you'll see there are three key elements. I've listed them one, two and three on the screen. Number one is the customer under spotlight. So who is the customer that you're mapping their journey of. And we need to know who the persona is, what the scenario or journey that you're mapping is and what are the customer's goals. Number two is all about the experience of that customer. And that's broken down into a number of rows, if you like, the stages that the customer is going through. Stages will reflect different needs. The actions that happen at each of those stages, the touch points that a customer uses to interact with your organization. So that's really about, you know, when do you and the customers meet? Where does that happen? The experience that a customer has and the emotions that they feel once they have that experience. And then the third part of a customer journey map is at the bottom. And these are the recalibration opportunities, the CX recalibration opportunities. That's all about finding the priorities. What you need to fix. Think about the low hanging fruit. What are the things that we can do to fix things, to make the customer experience better? Particularly if you're new to customer journey mapping, looking for the low hanging fruit is a really good way to start. A really good place to start. We'd also want to see some details in this part about who is going to lead those initiatives, who is going to take ownership of them. And typically in the customer journey map, you'll see stages, which I've mentioned, and you'll see these lanes going across from left to right. Now the stages represent the steps that a customer is going to move through as they progress in their journey. And the lanes going across represent the relevant experiences that you're going to try and consider and understand. But look, there's no fixed way to do this. So you can add lanes to a customer journey map without undermining the value of the customer journey map. You could, for example, add extra lanes if you want to add notes about particular challenges or particular ideas that you might have that you want to be considered. So these stages you'll see are broken down into these phases. Now, typically they're broken down into five phases, which would be discovery or awareness, and then you'd have consideration, purchase, retention and advocacy. I mean, and that's useful to have those as stages because it reminds us that customer needs are changing as a customer moves through the journey. But the key is that these stages that go across the top of the customer journey map has to be, you know, this is a working document so it will evolve. These will be refined. The more you become in tune with your persona, the more you build your understanding and empathy of your customer, your customer journey map will evolve. So even if you're not clear about those, the outset, don't let that stop you having a go with customer journey mapping. Now for today's session and for simplicity, given the title of the session, I am simply using three phases before, during and after. And you'll see going across the lanes are more common. Okay, the lanes I've included here are the customer's goals and actions. The sort of thing we're thinking about here is what is it that the customer is trying to achieve during this step or this interaction. This is our way to define and identify what the customer needs are at this stage of the customer journey. And even, you know, if customers have unrecognized needs, can we think about what they are? Can we include them? Touchpoints, what are the commonly used channels by your customers? Now, you can, again, you can expand this as you develop your understanding, as you evolve your customer journey map. You can add more things that maybe you didn't know about before, more touchpoints, but include the ones that you do know as a starting position. In terms of customer experience, I think this is a really important one. How does your customer want to be treated? How do they want to feel? And what do they think? What do they feel about this current interaction? Is this a moment where customers feel happy, sad? Are they satisfied? Do they think that this is a valuable interaction? What are the pain points? What are the frustrations? And usually here we'd see some sort of acknowledgement of make or break moments. So pain points, moments of truth, moments of delight. And then this row where we have quotes. If you have any information that can help you understand what customers are saying about your organization or even this particular interaction, include them. And if you don't have any quotes, maybe even talk to customer facing employees for their observations or even check, you know, any customer service records. Look at your Facebook Messenger messages to see if you can take things from that that might help understand how your customer is feeling. I quite like using emojis at this point to express customer emotion. I think it's a really simple way of doing it. And then along the bottom, as I said before, in the opportunities row, for each stage you're going to try and include the fixes that are needed and who will own that initiative. Now I'm often asked, so I know the basics of the customer journey map, but where do I start? How do I start? And many people will start in the first column, the before. I think that's quite difficult because you're dealing with the unknown. Customers at that point are not actually customers. And I find that this is the phase where the least is known about the personas experience and behaviors. So I always recommend starting in the middle, starting with the behaviors and the experiences that you know most about. And that's likely to involve people that are actually customers. These are people who may have already bought and used your services. So that would be the middle part, wouldn't it? So start in the middle. Start with what you know already. Use any data that you already have to populate that part of the table. And do you know where there's gaps? That's okay. Start to make assumptions. And the working document, it will evolve. And ideally, if you have gaps, then that becomes something that you try to rectify. You try to put in place measures and things that help you close those gaps going forward. It's a working document. It's a tool. It's a fantastic tool. And I did say earlier, you know, customer journey maps can often reveal what we don't know as much as what we do know. So don't be afraid to use assumptions as long as you acknowledge that you're using assumptions as well. Now, I've completed the middle part of this just to illustrate what it might look like. And also to show you, I think it's so easy to start customer journey mapping. And the example I'm using is for a cultural venue. And the persona I have in mind is a history teacher, Heather Martin. I've given her a name. And she has been given some funding to book a trip to a cultural venue, which could be either, you know, a museum or a gallery, to try to bring part of the history curriculum to life for her students. Heather is committing in terms of goals. At this point, she's done a research and she's committing to booking a tour as long as the venue, which is either a museum or a gallery, can reassure her of safety elements. This stage, she's seeking to establish a relationship. She wants to have a conversation. And the touch points that she's using is the website. She's obviously leaving her slightly frustrated email and eventually she phones out of frustration. In terms of the data that can help us to understand that experience, the venue I have in mind really doesn't have a lot of customer data, but they do have some analytics that they could call on to help understand what's going on. The customer experience for Heather is poor. She's frustrated. The process has taken too long. She feels annoyed. She feels frustrated that she can't find information easily. The website lacks personalization. She feels her needs are not being met. She's keen to get the issue resolved quickly. She wants to talk to somebody. She wants to go to somewhere where she can find answers. She doesn't know who to speak to. There's no point of contact for teachers or education organizations. She realizes that she can't actually book a tour online and eventually out of frustration, she ends up phoning. It's not a great start to her interaction. It's not a great experience. Now, in terms of some opportunities, there are opportunities to develop a landing page. It would make sense to me with updated frequently asked questions, put a named contact for education advisors on the website and maybe even use Twitter or Facebook Messenger as a dedicated customer service channel. You could continue to populate the rest of that table in the same way as I've just done the middle bit, especially you can. Just again to help you begin to see where you can start to fix any CX issues you can identify. This is a working document. It will evolve as your empathy grows with the customer. But with this in place, even a sketchy one, you can start to begin and you should always be asking this question anyway, how can we do better? How can we make things easier for the customer, quicker for the customer? How can we improve customer success? You can use it to assess the experience you deliver in terms of effort, speed and success. And finally, you can use it to recalibrate your customer experience. Avoid ad hoc random changes to the experience because that often isn't going to be a good experience for the customer in the end. And instead as Forrester said at the start of this session, plan your changes in a much more considered, and sustainable way. And that requires a plan to line up all the ducks which are on the screen. The customer journey map isn't the plan I should say in itself, it is a precursor to a plan. An excellent customer experience plans might include other things that we don't have time to get into today, such as team empowerment, staff empowerment, removing silos, re-aligning your resources that might even include culture change. And so there you have it, just like a Billy Conley story we've ended up back where we started. But before we do the Q&A, I leave you with my beloved Benny, who I hold up here as an example of a missed opportunity to deliver a great experience. Now that's Benny on the left just to be clear. During lockdown in Northern Ireland, dog groomers were closed. So Benny, being an Alasa Absol, was getting quite wed down with his long, flowing locks. And as a marketer filled with enthusiasm and knowing no boundaries, I, with my high heart, can it be, attitude, took the scissors and clippers into my own hands and I managed to clip one side of him, which is on the other side of that photograph. And I did it in a kind of a, this is just the first layer, I'll tidy it up afterwards way. And I was just about to start the other side when my beloved Benny legged it. And in the process I removed a clump of hair from his right ear, which you can see. If you look closely just in the top left hand corner of that ear is a large part of missing fur. I didn't hurt him, I didn't touch his ear or any part of it, it was just the fur. Now Benny continued to leg it. And I was hearing hows of laughter around the houses. Benny went from room to room hiding from me. And I ended up, you know, I did give up. And his punishment was that he had the shame of having to go for walks half-grimmed. I say half-grimmed, that's probably a really generous description. So when I read on the BBC News app about a hairdresser, a guy called Paul Phillips who owns Chop Hair in Essex, he was offering home hairdressing kits and video consultations. I knew our local dog groomers was missing a trick. I, at that moment, in the moment, had all the confidence of a professional groomer for Crofts. None of the skill, of course. But I would definitely have wrestled my beloved Benny to the ground to give it one more go if a dog grooming business had been able to help me groom this wee rascal. So thank you all for listening very patiently. I can't be seen to favour my beloved Benny, so I hand with a picture of all of our furry family, which I hope makes the day a little bit nicer for you and puts a smile on your face if it's been a tough week. So over to Phil now. Oh, that's really great. Thanks, Marion. We're now going to have a short 5-10 minute Q&A session. As a reminder, you can still submit your questions via the chat box in the Q&A panel. OK, our first question, some of these questions, Marion, actually were coming in fairly early on during the presentation. So the furthest stuff that you talked about quite some time ago. Anyway, first question. You mentioned that when organisations feel they don't have enough data, the opposite is often true. Could you give some examples of data you think organisations commonly overlook they might help with customer journey mapping? Sometimes whenever we talk about, whenever we look at customer journey mapping, we hear organisations talking about the importance of things like CSAT scores or customer effort scores or net promoter scores and things like that. And often the organisations I'm talking to on a regular basis don't have that kind of information. So it is possible to look at things, as I've mentioned earlier, you know, the analytics that you might have if you have a website or a Facebook page and even looking at those interactions that are more common, which are the customer service interactions and trying to get a sense on whether or not customer service analytics are thrown up anything that will point to pain points or point to things that you're doing well with customer experience. So that's where I would start. It's what you already have and try and put it together to use in a customer journey map. That's also another advantage of the customer journey map is that quite often this data is quite spread out. It's quite disparate and the customer journey map helps you bring it together. Also observations, I would say, is another source of data on a practical level. Observations, again, it's a starting point. If you have staff that have regular interactions with customers, you should be asking them, what are customers saying or how do you think customers are reacting to this service that we offer? What do you hear from the customers that they're happy about or that annoys them? So that's where I would start, looking at your customer service and trying to gather observations from your customer-facing teams. Another question. How does this process align with the accepted knowledge that prospects don't interact with your company until they have about 70% of the way through their buying journey? How can we as marketers influence this untouched part of the customer journey? Well, I guess there's a couple of things I would say about that and that is that the customer journey map is not designed to influence the customer journey, it's designed to represent it, if that's helpful, and putting together a customer journey map. There's two things that I see organizations doing that I think are really helpful. One is certainly the focus of today has been the customer experience. But the other part, which I hear organizations doing with a customer journey map, is trying to look at their content and to make sure that they have the right content available for different stages of the customer journey map. So I guess that's the bit that might answer that question and that is that the 70% of customers that are being referred to can be influenced by providing them with the right content and making sure that you're present on all the channels that customers are likely to be. Okay. Is there a optimum number of personas that you should build into a customer journey mapping exercise? It's one persona per customer journey map, so every customer journey map is unique to the persona. I have been asked this question before about how many personas and I would say you may well have six or more groups of customers. But if you want to try to start customer journey mapping and to try and do it well, I think go with a lower number to begin with. So you might start with two or three personas and build customer journey maps around those two or three. I almost go below that and say pick one persona that you really think that you can make a difference to in terms of their customer journey and start there. Okay. What if the customer journey map once mapped feels all positive? Should we add in negatives to balance it out? The truth is I don't know. The truth is it depends on how you've come to the conclusion that it is all positive. I always think that interrogation of the data is really, really important. And if you don't uncover anything negative with lots of customer research to confirm that then there's nothing I would add. I wouldn't add negative where there isn't any negative issues. But what I would do which is slightly different is I would look at the positive and say well how can we do even better? So this is about optimisation then. So if you find that you're meeting the customer needs at different stages then start to think of it in terms of how can we exceed the customer needs at these different stages? How can we really delight our customers at these different stages? So don't add negatives but just look to keep improving. Keep improving. Thanks Marion. There's one or two questions around tools for completing this task. Are there any tools that you recommend or any software that you might recommend or would you just do your own thing with a spreadsheet and some design tools? Right, so yes there are some tools and a lot of those tools that are available are PED for tools. In my experience if you sign up for a free trial often you can create beautiful customer journey maps but it can be hard to export them unless you have a PED version of the platform. I tend not to use those tools. A spreadsheet as you said is perfectly acceptable at a table. If you do nothing else even if you do a table I use Canva a lot as you can probably tell from today and I would use Canva to create nice visuals because the visualisation is important as well having this sense that you can see at a glance what a customer is doing what a customer is feeling and where we should be focusing our attention. I think that's really important. So you don't have to be very creative you don't have to produce a very beautiful creative journey map. A table will suffice. There's a related question here actually Marion. Is there a persona template that you might recommend? Again usually the organisations I don't know whether you want me to name any on this but usually those organisations will also provide a customer journey template. I guess it really depends on why you're putting together a persona as to what you put into the persona itself. We're always very keen to make sure we've got put it like this. I'm getting less convinced that demographic information which I see a lot in personas is as useful as it might have been in the past. I think we've got to start looking in personas in terms of their digital focused behaviours and the things that we're looking at for the customer journey map. What are their needs? What are their goals? What are the things that they're looking for in a good experience? I think those have to be included in a persona but that's not the question the question is about template. So there's no straight answer to that there's lots of templates that you can use and you can find online just if you google them I don't personally have a preference. One of our attendees today has said that HubSpot has a nice persona created tool. And HubSpot also has a customer journey template as well I'm pretty sure. There's other tools like smart play, custolence, UX, Bresio there's lots out there. So is there a would you recommend sort of the frequency in terms of revisiting reviewing customer journey mapping what was that question how long is the basis stream? I don't know do you think it all depends on the organisation and the kind of time you have available I think I used the phrase recalibration I see no harm in trying to do this even on a quarterly basis just to refocus your mind on this customer and that kind of helps you as well to become more customer centric if you're reminding yourself on a regular basis these are the needs of the customer this is the customers perspective on the experience they're receiving so again the customer journey map should help you outline your priorities the kind of opportunities you have to do better so revisiting it on a fairly regular basis I think is a good idea in your own availability and the resources you have okay and final question for today if you are an organisation or a new product or service so you don't actually have customers yet where does the whole customer journey mapping exercise 15 is it possible to do that even though you don't have a customer base that's a very good question and it actually is something that you know I didn't really have time to get into today but the question of what journey are you mapping has to be at some point whenever you're creating a customer journey map it has to be addressed so if you are a new business and a startup absolutely a customer journey map can be created with what you think would be the ideal customer journey so you don't have the data you don't have the experience but you can at least try and say this is the experience we want customers to have these are the initiatives we're going to have in place to make sure that customers can do things easily quickly and to ensure customer success so those three components of a customer experience from Temkin are really useful in that situation to think about success, effort and speed and to plan your journey plan the customer journey against those three I think we're going to have to call a halt to the Q&A session for now. It's been one of our most popular sessions actually Marion we could have gone on for quite some time extra I think talking about this but anyway once again thank you very much Marion for that session it was brilliant so that's all the time we have for today for our Q&A session I'd like to say thank you to Marion for today's presentation so CIM Ireland for organising the event and a thank you for attending we hope you found it interesting and worthwhile Our next webinar is sustainability is it time for marketing to grow a conscience is on Thursday the 19th November at 1pm this time hosted by CIM Midlands you'll find it listed on the events page of the CIM website where you'll also be able to find out more information and to register for the session so once again you'll shortly be receiving a survey on today's event and we'd really appreciate it if you could provide your feedback so on behalf of the CIM thank you for joining us and we hope you enjoy the rest of your day