Smaply is a software that helps users to visualize and manage their customers’ experiences by enabling them to use tools such as journey maps that facilitate the process of seeing things from the customer’s point of view. This allows a better understanding of the customer’s needs, feelings, and potential pain points.
Here comes a Q&A session with Katharina Rainer, Head of Marketing at Smaply. Katharina has an academic background in strategic management and psychology, and contributed to several papers and books on customer experience and service design. She is an alumni of the This is Service Design Doing Executive School, and an acknowledged subject matter expert in the field of design thinking and customer experience.
First and foremost, please share a brief introduction to journey mapping and how it can help businesses. And maybe you can add what Smaply is and how it can help users to improve their customer’s experience
Smaply is a digital tool for people working on customer experience innovation. It includes a journey mapping software that helps companies better understand the experience their customers have. Smaply comes with a persona mapping tool, which makes it easier to empathize with the customer and to understand the potentially numerous customer segments, their expectations and how they differ from each other.
Smaply also enables users to create stakeholder maps to visualize the ecosystem in which a product or service operates from a specific perspective. The stakeholder mapping software, the persona generator and the journey mapping tool make a powerful combination to visualize, understand and improve customer experience.
The methodology behind Smaply is based in service design. Service design aims at making every service or product as customer/human centered as possible and therefore optimize the experience a person has with an organization.
Journey mapping enables you to comprehend exactly that: the experience a customer/employee/citizen etc. has with an organization. The visualization of each individual step helps you to understand what they are going through, where pain points and moments of truth are and how the experience could be improved. It might be that a factor, that is not even in the responsibility of a company, breaks the whole process. It’s crucial to reveal those and then see how it’s best to take care of them.
What is the vision behind Smaply?
We believe that service design can positively impact people’s experiences, their everyday lives, and our society as a whole. We believe that service design is more than an innovation approach; it can be a management approach rooted in human-centered design, co-creation, and sustainability.
We believe that software can be an enabler to motivate people and organizations into this way of working, to question traditional organizational structures and processes, to change hierarchies and cultures.
We discovered that people struggle with similar issues, independent from their backgrounds, geographical location etc. For example, what to do after a CX workshop, and how to ideally process the learnings? In international teams it’s often difficult to make the findings accessible for all dispersed team members.
Our vision is based on these concerns, so we help organizations successfully manage customer experience by developing and providing design thinking software. There are customizable templates available within the software, or it’s possible to simply start from scratch.
Additionally there are a lot of free tutorials and educational materials provided on our blog, also containing persona templates, journey map templates and stakeholder map templates that can be downloaded for free to be used in workshops as a starting point.
Isn’t it cumbersome to digitize workshop maps? Is there an easy way to do so?
It is! And everyone who had to do it, knows! We tried to find a solution for that and created Smaply Capture. It is made to make it easier for teams to digitize their workshop results: users can take a picture of their pen-and-paper map and Smaply Capture uses OCR (optical character recognition) to convert it to an editable map in a few seconds. It’s super easy, just take a picture of your map, upload it to Smaply and then you’ll have it there in your projects.
Furthermore, Smaply integrates with the most common whiteboarding tools and allows you to import your maps with a few clicks. It’s perfect for remote teams who conduct online workshops in Miro etc. You can import journey maps with a few clicks from Miro, Mural, Lucidspark, and Excel.
What are the most popular features of Smaply within each tool?
In the journey map tool the basics are the text lane, the storyboard and emotional journey. They are in most cases crucial to create a journey map that provides real insights. To go into more detail the dramatic arc, the activity lane and the channel lane are a great starting point. The activity lane shows the events that happen backstage and are not visible to the customer, but still influence the experience. To make a journey map a living boundary object and a management tool users can add projects via the integration with Jira, or include live data via Google Sheets.
The persona editor is flexible, there it really depends on the use case. But we recommend to use a photo, a quote, some basic information in text, and often it can be helpful to include a slider to visualize affinity to a certain thing, such as technology for example.
In the stakeholder map editor users can organize the stakeholders into three categories: Is the stakeholder essential, important, interesting? Which ones are local, national, international? Understanding how the key stakeholders are connected to each other, analyzing how they influence the product or service, and using the insights to improve your service or product are the next key steps.
Do you offer any kind of design thinking coaching or training for customers who are not yet proficient in journey mapping?
Yes, we offer training hours. They are included in plans for larger organizations. There we also go into the options of using journey mapping as a management tool, if wished by the customer. These coaching hours are planned in close collaboration with the customer, so they can get the most out of their sessions.
For users who do not have the financial resources to do one of these training sessions, we also offer a free online course. Additionally people find a lot of learning resources on our blog.
How do you deal with matters of data security and privacy concerns?
Our customer’s privacy is our number one priority. We never process data for any other purpose than for providing Smaply. We never sell any data, regardless of whether or not it’s personal information. Customers can easily and at any time access their data when they use our software.
Within that context, we make sure we are using certified secure cloud servers. Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services provide our hosting.
Both of them offer multi tenant servers while we also have dedicated instances on each of them. The latter runs in a VPC on hardware that is dedicated to a single customer. This provides a layer of physical security as well as software-based security.
Furthermore, we comply with GDPR.
Are there other measures you use to ensure data privacy and security?
Absolutely. We use a single sign-on over OpenIDConnect, OAuth and SAML. We are also using AES-256 encryption at rest and continuous TLS 1.2 for data encryption in motion. We also carry out regular penetration, disaster recovery and business continuity tests. And we use only ISO 27001 and SOC-2 certified data centers.
Your website also states that custom service level agreements (SLAs) are offered. What does that mean?
These are SLAs that guarantee a certain uptime of our software, a swift response in case of an inquiry or if the software is not fully functional as well as quick and secure mitigations of issues.
What are the costs for your product?
Smaply offer a per user pricing with various options to allow for teams of any size to use our software. It ranges from a free plan with limited features to custom enterprise plans with white-labeling options.
You can check out our prices at our pricing page or contact us directly for an offer via sales@smaply.com. As you can see from the page, our cost structure is very reasonable even if you need a custom option. We have a large number of satisfied customers who are also listed on this page.
Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about the services you offer?
One really great thing that many customers and non-customers appreciate is our blog about customer experience that provides much educational and informational value in an easy-to-read format. Readers find our unique articles to be very insightful and helpful when starting out with their journey mapping endeavors.
For example, a recent blog post dealt with using journey mapping in healthcare. Obviously being able to positively impact this area has real benefits to both care providers and patients as well as the broader community. It’s this type of impact that makes my job so rewarding.
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