How do you get stakeholders to act on customer insight?

Why do stakeholders ignore good customer insights?

Stakeholders ignore good insights because the brain consciously processes only a tiny fraction of the information it receives, and it filters by what's familiar and what's relevant to the goal in hand. In this webinar, Wordnerds' Zoe Wilson explains that when you present an isolated statistic — "here's what customers think about pricing" — that doesn't fit a stakeholder's existing mental model, their brain simply filters it out. They nod politely, take notes, and return to business as usual. It rarely means they don't care; the insight just had nowhere to land. Zoe reframes the insights professional as a translator whose job is to turn a mass of unstructured data into something that makes immediate sense to the audience. The fix is usually not better insight but better framing: present the same finding inside a structure the stakeholder already uses, and the brain no longer has to work to hold on to it.

What does it mean to map customer feedback to a customer journey?

Mapping feedback to a customer journey means organising verbatim under the stages a business already recognises, rather than presenting it as standalone themes. At Grainger, Jenny remapped a small five-touchpoint programme into nine journey stages drawn directly from what customers said unprompted — booking, viewings, onboarding, day-to-day living, repairs, renewals and more — each stage owned by an accountable team. Crucially, she didn't launch five new surveys to get there; the nine stages came from existing verbatim. In the live demo, Wordnerds' Stella Dooris shows the mechanics: you train themes on the platform by giving an example of what you want (say, comments about front-desk staff) and an example of what you don't, and the platform learns the pattern and categorises reviews by journey stage. Because the stage is inferred from the customer's own words, you can map the journey without metadata and without touch-pointing customers at every step.

How do you use the prediction method in a stakeholder workshop?

The prediction method asks stakeholders to guess what customers will say at each journey stage before you reveal the real data — and it works because it creates curiosity instead of conflict. At a Grainger strategy day, Jenny gave her leadership team the nine journey stages and a pre-read, then asked them to map where they thought customer sentiment sat at each stage and what they'd do about it. Predictably, the team rated themselves brilliant everywhere. After a break, she revealed the actual Wordnerds sentiment scores. Where instincts were validated, leaders finally understood why they felt the way they did; where they were wrong, the gap itself drove the discussion — "why is it different from what I expected, and what could we do differently?" Wordnerds' Zoe Wilson notes the move embraces stakeholder expertise rather than competing with it: their experience stays valuable, but it's now tested against the customer's direct verbatim.

Does the framework have to be the customer journey?

No — the customer journey is powerful, but the framework can be anything that already holds currency in your organisation. Wordnerds' Zoe Wilson explains that the magic is never in the specific framework; it's in using a structure your stakeholders already think in, so insight has somewhere to slot. Wordnerds has mapped customer feedback against a large retailer's customer-promise pillars, against established CX drivers, and against operational KPIs. Social housing associations organise text feedback against their Tenant Satisfaction Measure criteria — a regulatory requirement that's instantly familiar across the organisation. A charity used a motivations framework to understand what resonates with supporters, and many teams apply Herzberg's motivation-hygiene theory to employee-experience surveys. The test is simple: what frameworks do your senior team reference in meetings, and what structures do your operational leads already organise their work around? Start there, and your insight stops being extra information to process and becomes the missing piece of a puzzle they're already working on.

How do you stop high-volume feedback from biasing the results?

You stop volume bias by leading with sentiment rather than raw counts. In the Q&A, Grainger's Jenny explains that a sentiment score weights feedback by how strongly customers feel, not just how often a touchpoint is mentioned — so a high-traffic stage doesn't automatically dominate just because it generates the most comments. The same approach cuts through noise in the opposite direction: a low-volume issue that customers raise with real intensity still surfaces, instead of being drowned out. It also disarms the anecdote trap — the "but I know, because one customer emailed me once" objection raised in the opening poll — by putting every comment on a comparable, feeling-weighted scale. Jenny's advice is to focus on the things that genuinely nudge the needle and to pair every insight with an agreed action: leverage the power of sentiment over a raw CSAT, NPS or volume metric, and the rest takes care of itself.

How long does it take to build a living journey map in Power BI?

At Grainger it took just under a month to reach a usable first iteration. In the Q&A, Jenny shares the timeline: her new Customer Experience Insight Manager started on 29 July and engaged Wordnerds customer success manager Nat on the work; the first playback — the nine themes set into a journey framework — landed on 22 August; after a few iterations it was exactly right by mid-September. Behind the nine headline stages sat 19 and then 38 more granular themes available to drill into, but nine big stages were what the leadership team needed to follow the story. Jenny credits the speed to getting the framework and contextual themes right up front and hitting the health score so the data populated cleanly. The output is a living Power BI journey map that refreshes the moment a new review or survey result arrives — not a static map gathering dust — so teams can re-pivot programmes and projects as sentiment moves.

Full Webinar Transcript

Zoe Wilson: From insight to influence. I'm Zoe, from the Wordnerds customer success team. I'm really excited that everyone could be here joining us this afternoon. We'll move into the plan for today and the content very shortly, but just while we're giving everyone a few minutes to join, it'd be lovely — we've got a chat function on the right-hand side — if we could get to know everyone who's here in the meantime. So please do pop in the chat who you are, your job title, which organisation you're with, where you're joining us from, and even maybe what the weather's like, to start a bit of conversation. We've got a nice sunny day in Newcastle today.

We're also joined by our other presenters today — you can see Jenny and Stella. We'll get to know them very shortly when we get into the content and the plan for today. Thank you all for joining; it's great to see people from across the country here with us.

The headline for today is that we'll be looking at "from insight to influence": using customer feedback to map and validate your customer journey and influence stakeholders. We're going to start by setting the scene and introducing the challenges that you might face as insights professionals. Then we're going to move into the bit that personally I'm most excited about — hearing Jenny's complete real-world transformation story from some work she's done at Grainger. We're then going to extract the key lessons from that into a framework you can apply, and understand why that customer journey is such a powerful lens for looking at feedback and insights. Then we've got Stella, who's going to deliver a live platform demo and give you a step-by-step guide for how you can implement this process, mapping your customer feedback onto your customer journey. And we'll finish with a live Q&A with our experts. Please do use the chat for questions as we go — we'll save them all to the end so we can have a nice discussion. We've also got a resource to give at the end, a toolkit which summarises everything we've looked at today.

So just to get to know our experts a bit better. Firstly, I'm excited to introduce Jenny from Grainger, who is the Director of Customer Experience at Grainger plc. Jenny's bringing her real-world CX leadership experience working with major brands including P&O Ferries and M&S, and she's been leading some seriously impressive transformation at Grainger. Secondly, I'd love to introduce Stella, who's an insights analyst in our brilliant insights and innovation team here at Wordnerds. Stella's going to show you the practical methodology and give you a live platform demo using some real data from TripAdvisor reviews. As I've said, we'll answer questions at the end — Stella, Jenny and myself will all be available in that Q&A session.

So just to get us started, we'd like to start with some framing around why we're all here today. A lot of people in the audience will be able to relate to the problem that great insights alone are not enough. To make that real-world difference, you need to get buy-in from your stakeholders to act on the insights. But the challenge we're seeing is that it can be natural for our brains to be a bit resistant to new information, so we need to look at how we can frame insight in a way that is more easily understood and accepted.

You can all see on the right-hand side there's a little poll. Before we come to understanding and solving this problem, we'd love a bit of insight from everyone here in terms of how insights usually land at your organisation. The question is: when you present customer insights, what do stakeholders usually do? A few options — take notes, say thanks, carry on as before; ask "how do we action this?"; challenge the data or the methodology; share their own anecdotes that might contradict it; get excited and make changes; or is it something else?

Interesting — the top answer coming out is asking "but how do we action this?" The second most popular option is taking notes, saying thanks and carrying on as before. A couple of people are answering around challenging the methodology or sharing anecdotes, and unfortunately no one's saying "get excited and make changes." I'm really positive that by the end of this session we'll be able to look at how we can move from that mindset of asking "how do we actually action this?" to the process of making actions come true. So thanks everyone for taking part — without further ado, I'm going to hand over to our first expert, Jenny, to share her story of going from instinct to insight.

Jenny: Thank you very much, Zoe, and thank you everyone for having me. It's fascinating to see the results of that poll validating the journey I had when I arrived at Grainger. So, new to real estate — this is a story of me not just being new in role, but new to industry, and therefore facing a unique challenge as Director of Customer Experience entering a business that was already incredibly successful. My leadership team has decades of experience. The business has thrived on that experience and their gut feel, and yet their CSAT had become stagnant and there was no answer within their instincts.

Of course, my job coming in wasn't to prove them wrong; it was to make them even better. It was to take them from saying "I think" to "I know" — particularly hard when you're coming from outside the industry, and you're not that voice of experience, and you're having to represent the voice of the customer. When I joined, it was very much reactive, on gut feel and experience — very much a loudest-voice-in-the-room approach to customer issues, rather than using the data and the validation. An example: Grainger plc is a private rental company — homes. You've got one voice over here saying we want to retain customers, keep them longer. Then you've got the acquisition and rental team saying the rents are higher for new lets, so let's get them out and get higher rents. Those two conflicting improvement initiatives were being resolved by the loudest voice in the room.

So my job was really to change this, and to bring in the power of verbatim. I'm not going to lie — I've made my career on starting with the power of verbatim. We've heard that net promoter score in the industry might be dying a death — we could debate that on a whole other webinar. But by starting with verbatim, not the way the playbook tells you to, you're at the right end of the maturity scale, where you can take satisfaction scores back to the voice of the customer.

It's really important that we focus on the partnership here, transforming verbatim into actionable insight. If you're a Wordnerds customer, you already know the power of verbatim. But it is now the first foundational step I take — not the surveys, not the quantitative data, but the qualitative. I know from previous experience just how powerful proper verbatim analysis can be, and I needed to explain to the business why we had to move past basic satisfaction scores to real customer voice. So, like many of you, that's why I chose Wordnerds, and the partnership transformed things pretty much overnight. I ran a proof of concept — it took days, not weeks — for me to have a rich, detailed understanding of what customers were really saying: the context around their experiences, the root-cause analysis, and proper sentiment understanding. Not just how often someone said something, but how often they said it with proper feeling.

So this got me to where many of you already are, having really good insight. But that was my voice alone. So what I needed to think about was: how do I get it to be really understood? How do I get the leadership team and our business to buy into this? We did have a small voice-of-the-customer programme when I joined. It measured five stages of the customer journey — and no surprise, given my point about the loudest voice in the room, those were the five stages people thought were the most important and that benefited their own objectives. But the verbatim wasn't properly analysed, and customers didn't just give feedback about those five touchpoints. They also gave it via social media and annual NPS reviews, and even within those five touchpoints they'd tell us about other stages of the journey — pain points and success points — naturally telling us what happened to them at their stage of the rental journey.

So, using this rich source and the customer's own words, we were able to remap the customer journey alongside the customer's organically told experience. We mapped that onto nine new stages, so that the insight could be contextualised into a format that was digestible and understood. And critically, those nine stages were organically spoken about. It's really important to say I did not start five new surveys on top of the five — we got to these nine from the verbatim. It got the business to think about customer experience in that linear rental journey. It was familiar, because it's the way the business was set up: a rental team, a lettings team doing viewings, an in-house team looking after paperwork and progressing tenancies, on-site teams looking after day-to-day living, repairs and maintenance with facilities-management teams, a skilled renewal team negotiating whether you'll pay more to stay next year, and onboarding teams that would also off-board. Each of the nine journey stages mapped to the teams that were accountable.

But again, at that point it's still just insight. So I had to think: how are they going to take more than my word for this? I'm new to the industry — what's the best way to present this to my stakeholders? What I told the business is "what's got you here won't get you there." If you've worked at M&S, or read any posts from the CEO Stuart Machin, you'll know that's a quote from him. I didn't think I'd ever quote him in a webinar, but I'll credit him with it. The workshop was labelled the "instinct to insight" workshop, and that's where I started.

I mapped the customer journey with them, and what was really important is I got them to go along the journey visually with me. We ran a really exciting workshop — it was part of a larger strategy day, so they'd been sat down all day looking at five-year plans and finances. I gave them the nine journey stages and asked them to map their instincts: along the linear rental journey, where did they think customer sentiment sat at each of the nine stages, using the Wordnerds sentiment score I'd given them in a pre-read? Not only that — I asked them what they thought we should do about it at each stage. So instead of the poll result where no one says "great, let's do something," I was getting them to ask the action question themselves. That naturally created curiosity. Spoiler alert: the team thought we were brilliant at all nine stages. But asking what we should do about it made it really fun and engaging, and it meant we harnessed all that anecdotal feedback that we could revalidate via a contextual theme in Wordnerds if we wanted to.

After a pause — I let them have a coffee and a cake — we brought them back into the room, and I shared the revelation of where the insight had actually come from: our Wordnerds data, and I showed the real scores. There were moments where people agreed and disagreed, but mostly we had curiosity. Where people had been validated, they now had the reason they felt that way. Where they hadn't been validated, it allowed us to discuss: well, why is it different from what I expected, and what could we do differently? We could also talk in terms of volume.

After that, we've got to talk about the transition — because you're still in a room presenting, and there could still have been polite nodding and no action. So "insight to instinct" became a bit of a catchphrase, but we're now having to move this on to be "from insight to influence" — that action. To take them on that journey, we were bringing stakeholders along a path to move them from instinct to insight, and from insight to action, or influence, or impact — you can choose any of those three words. I needed them to emotionally buy in. I'm stressing emotionally, because sentiment means our stakeholders understand the real-world customer they're living in. It's the customer-journey lens, and it works really well because it's natural language and it's in the journey framework that my business understood.

So thanks to that switch — "how can we use this to influence, how would you fix this?" — and I've still got that list of how they'd fix it, which we're going to revisit. This year our metrics have utterly transformed to being curious about customer experience. It's foundational to the business now. And I want to tell you it's not the NPS that's foundational — it's the sentiment score. People now actively ask me, "is my instinct right or wrong about this?" They see this source as a trusted advisor and collaborator. When I come back with insights, I'm a purist: I will not prove a hypothesis just to prove a point. I'll give the objective answer, with the colour and context of the customer voice.

Now, the important thing in your poll was about how we take action. So after this exercise, with all those agreed actions — because we could show the seven actions on the customer experience programme validated from the insights versus the insights the senior leadership gave — my team set-up is vital. Yes, I have an insights manager, absolutely. But 60% of our time is spent on programme delivery, almost like a project manager: setting up workshops to do root-cause analysis even deeper, re-agreeing the actions as a result of those customer needs, and actually delivering those programmes and projects. Customer experience is seen as transformational because the journey map isn't just a static moment in time.

Although I took them through that exercise very manually — don't be afraid, if you're going to run this, that it needs to be fancy in any way; it was old-fashioned flip chart and pens — when we re-presented the insights, the business adopted Power BI. It's a living, breathing journey map where the second a new review or survey result comes in, the journey map updates. So it's living, breathing, trackable sentiment analysis across our journey, which means we can re-pivot if we need to on the programme and the projects to make sure we're still achieving the right outcome. It sounds too good to believe, but every decision really does now start with that customer voice, because we can validate it. We've truly become customer-centric — not just saying it, and not because we've mandated it, but because we've made customer reality impossible to ignore.

If you thrive on Power BI, as many businesses do — other systems are available — you of course need to know what system is most adopted by your business. I could have put this into a CXM solution, or produced a static map, and in fact we had those predated. I've heard at conferences, "oh, I've got a journey map, I'll dust it off and do something with it." Putting it in Power BI and making it living and breathing with the new sentiment was the real game changer to me, because the people who'd contributed in that workshop and believed in the change could actually see, when we delivered the programmes and projects, the expected outcomes.

So I'm really proud of what we've achieved — it's been hugely rewarding. What I said at the very beginning is my job wasn't to come in and tell the business they were good or bad; it was to make them better on their gut instincts. Recently, in an all-hands call, our CEO was asked quite openly what customer expectations have changed over the years. She started to say "well, I think," and then stopped and paused — probably because she could see me and my head of data on the screen — and said, "actually, no, I know. I know we've got nine service commitments, and I know what has changed, and I know the opinions on repairs and maintenance have changed, and I know the importance of some of the hygiene factors." She knows because we've done this journey, and it's in a framework that's easy for everyone to understand, business-adopted, and reflects the set-up of the business.

You heard me say, is NPS dying a death? I'm going to circle back and probably eat my words a little. But I promise you, if you focus that 60% or more on the right actions — and if you look at that graph in the bottom left, that blue line going up since the investment in customer experience at Grainger is actually our Net Promoter Score. So I'll leave you with this: if you map it to the framework that's important to you and your stakeholders, that score will take care of itself. Thank you very much.

Zoe Wilson: Amazing, thanks so much for that, Jenny. There are lots of great things to pick up on. My favourite bit, which just summarises everything, is that your CEO is now able to say "I know," not just "I think," based on having this data and this evidence — and that brilliant part around the living, breathing Power BI which puts this information in a place that's familiar and accessible. Stella's going to give us an example of what that can look like later. I can see loads of positive stuff in the chat for you, Jenny. If anyone has any questions for Jenny, please pop those in now and we'll pick them up in the Q&A at the end.

Moving on to the next section: what we wanted to look at now is the psychology behind why this familiar-framework approach, versus isolated insights, works so well. We heard about Jenny's success, but we were really curious about why this approach works. We had a think about examples from other customers doing similar things, and did some digging into how people actually process information. It started to become clear how and why this approach was working.

Firstly, what we found is that because our brains are constantly processing so much information, we can only consciously deal with a very small proportion of it. That means our brains have to filter massively. Think of a single hour in a meeting, or this hour in the webinar today — there's a lot of information coming at you, lots of different stimulus, so it's no wonder you're not going to absorb and remember absolutely everything. The way the filter works is that our brains filter based on what's familiar and what's relevant to what we're trying to achieve — that's how things get prioritised.

I think that explains, based on the poll at the start, something we've all experienced, where you present brilliant customer insights to stakeholders. You've done all the hard work, you go and say "here's what our customers think about pricing" — but if that conflicts with what they already think they know, or they don't have the full context of where the insight came from, they might just nod politely, take some notes, and then go straight back to business as usual. When that happens, it's easy to get dejected and think your stakeholders just don't care. But it actually seems like, when we present these isolated insights, they're just getting filtered out. If they're not fitting into that existing mental framework, the brain isn't going to hold on to them.

So another way we like to think about this at Wordnerds is that, as an insights professional, you're also a translator. It's your job to present insights in a way that makes sense to the audience. You've got this massive, unstructured data, and you've got to turn it into something meaningful. So, in other words, what if the issue isn't that you need better insight — you just need to present it in a way that's familiar to your stakeholders?

This is why customer-journey mapping is effective as your translator. It's familiar, there's somewhere for the information to slot, and it just makes sense. When stakeholders see information organised in a structure they already know and use, their brains aren't having to work as hard — a bit like driving a familiar route, where you get there before even thinking about it. The framework provides the scaffolding that makes insights stick. Instead of random facts floating about, everything's got a place to slot into.

It's important to remember this approach isn't just about using customer journeys, and that's the exciting bit. The framework can be whatever makes most sense within your organisation. At Wordnerds we've seen this work with lots of different frameworks. We've got customers who've asked us to map feedback against their company values or their external customer promise. Others use established CX drivers, or even operational KPIs, as the organising principle. The magic is never in the specific framework — although the customer journey is really powerful, which is why we've focused on it today — but in using something that already means something to your stakeholders and is familiar within your organisation.

So the question becomes: what frameworks are already familiar? What lens does your senior team normally use when making decisions? What structure would make immediate sense to your operational leads? That becomes your starting point. The framework provides the context that makes the insights you deliver actionable. As a result, we reduce cognitive load, give context to create meaning, and tap into existing mental models, so the information becomes easier to process and embedded in people's brains.

The next step we loved from Jenny's approach was her prediction method. It's particularly clever. When Jenny asks stakeholders to predict what customers will say at each journey stage, she's not telling them their instincts are wrong. She's saying, "let's look at your experience and see how it compares to what customers are actually saying — whether it aligns and you're validated, or whether it's different and you can understand why." With this approach, Jenny creates natural curiosity. If customers predict one thing and stakeholders say another, the stakeholders want to understand why. It's human nature — we're all curious to understand why we might be right, or equally why we might be wrong.

The brilliant bit is that Jenny is embracing stakeholders' expertise rather than trying to compete with it. She's not asking them to forget their experience and solely listen to data. She's saying your experience is valuable, but let's see how it matches up with that direct customer verbatim. We've experimented with this approach ourselves, and it's fascinating how it changes the dynamic in the room. It's that group-involvement approach: instead of presenting directly to stakeholders, you're exploring with them, and they become partners in the discovery rather than just receiving information. You can adapt this to whatever framework makes sense in your organisation — the key is getting that involvement and comparing assumptions with customer reality.

So, to conclude: what we've learned from Jenny's approach, and from working with lots of clients across different industries, is that success isn't just about having better insights. It's about presenting them in a way that will actually stick. When you've got frameworks that are already part of how your organisation thinks, the insights stop being extra information to process amongst millions of other things, and start being the missing pieces of a puzzle people are already working on.

Just a few examples of ways we've seen this work beyond the customer journey. We've worked with a large retailer who mapped all their feedback using different customer-promise pillars. We work with a lot of social housing associations who use their tenant satisfaction measure criteria — a regulatory requirement — as a framework for organising their text feedback, something really familiar across their organisation. We work with a brilliant charity who use a really interesting motivations framework, so they can understand what resonates most with their supporters and apply that across different messaging. And a final example, which should be applicable to everyone: if you conduct employee experience surveys or staff engagement, we work with a lot of teams to use the Herzberg motivation-hygiene framework, which takes principles from a recognised psychological theory to understand what motivates your employees. Those examples illustrate that the specific framework doesn't matter nearly as much as using one that has meaning in your organisation.

So our challenge to you at the end of this, as a first step for implementing this strategy and embracing that role as a translator, is to consider some questions. What frameworks already hold currency in your organisation? What structures do your team naturally think in? How do your operational teams organise their work? Once you know the answers, you can step into that translator role, and transform your customer insights from just interesting information into essential intelligence that fits perfectly into how you already work. The beauty is you'll also know quickly if it's working: are your stakeholders asking more questions? Are they remembering the insights? Are they bringing them up in future meetings? And, importantly, are they actually taking action? That's when you know you've really cracked it.

So now that we've learned a bit about the background, I want to hand over to Stella, who's going to show us how this works practically, in a live demo moving through our platform and also looking at some Power BI work. Over to you, Stella.

Stella Dooris: Thanks, Zoe — hard act to follow, as always. I'm Stella, an insights analyst at Wordnerds, and I'm going to show you our step-by-step guide, taking you from mapping your customer journey all the way to visualising it for stakeholders in a digestible, readable way. We're going to use a live demo project we've built. We've analysed lots of publicly available data from TripAdvisor and Google Reviews, to show a version everyone can relate to — we've chosen hotel guest experience. As Jenny said, while it can be useful to touchpoint people across different stages, you don't actually have to; it doesn't have to be a blocker, as we can use the verbatim and what they're telling us to see where they're at in the journey.

So step one is mapping your customer journey. It doesn't need to be linear or capture the whole journey — Zoe mentioned a lot of useful ones. You may think of it more as the awareness and decision-making stages, or it could be the actual experience when they're a customer. We understand you probably have your customer journey nailed and that this looks like a very BTEC version compared to yours, sorry — but this is the one we've chosen for the demo: an actionable hotel guest experience that we're hoping everyone can understand.

It's useful to think about what people talk about within the journey and within each stage — what that will look like in the verbatim. If you're manually coding, this is what you'd see when you're reading. Take, for example, the room itself. It can be obvious, like "the room was amazing" or "the room was small." It can also get more niche: "I didn't sleep very well, the aircon was too loud, the remote didn't work." These are all examples that, after you think for a while, pop up as what people talk about at each stage.

Next, we capture these journey stages using customer verbatim. You've already thought about what people might be saying, and this is where you look for examples in this journey stage so you can train the themes and put them onto the platform. The platform learns these patterns and can categorise the reviews by journey stage as you train themes. This is how we're able to categorise the journey without metadata and without touchpointing customers across the journey.

Let me take you through an example of training a theme, if I get the platform up. I'm going to take, for example, front-desk staff, which is something we thought you'd experience at that arrival and check-in stage. To start, you give an example of what you do want to find — something you've already been thinking of. So I'm going to type in an example (I'm scared of typing in front of you all, but I did it for improv). And then an example of something you don't want, which might be "the breakfast was amazing." I made a few typos, but that's okay. Then I click train, and the platform's going to use the context of what you've given it and show lots of different examples that it wants you to check. So I'll go through — the front desk, as you can see, is pulling up things here: receptionist, "front desks were fine," and so on. You don't need to think of lots of different ways to talk about the staff at the front desk — this is what the platform does. It pulls it out within the data to find those examples without you having to find them. As we train a theme, it becomes more accurate until it understands exactly what you want, and then it can encapsulate that stage of the customer journey.

Step three is organising it into a framework, which you can see we've done here, numbered one to seven. This is the framework we showed on the last slide. It goes from booking to pre-arrival through to post-stay and retention, and within each of these are stages that show what happens. So within booking you've got all the booking themes; within arrival you've got the first impression, the staff, the room, and so on. The beauty is it's really customisable to what you want your journey to be.

Next we'll go onto Power BI, and this is where the magic happens. This is our customer journey page, which we're pretty proud of. It shows the data your stakeholders and platform users can see — their insight, in a readable, digestible and pretty way. This visual shows the complete customer journey, with sentiment on the Y axis, volume as the size of the circle, and the customer journey along the X axis. You can identify and explore interactively, drill down into verbatim, and identify what themes overlap to drive experience quality at each stage. In this example we're comparing years: black is 2024 and red is 2025, and I've taken the Rosewood in London. You don't have to compare yourself — you can compare competitors, or your own brands, or social media versus TripAdvisor. It's all customisable.

Here we can see that for the Rosewood, they've managed to improve satisfaction across all stages of their customer journey. They've increased the most in the bar, dining and room experience, and improved least in their lowest-sentiment category, which is post-stay and retention. I'm able to click into here, see what's driving positivity and volume in each stage, go down into the verbatim if I want, and go onto the platform to see what's crossing over, what themes and topics are coming up. It's all very customisable. So Jenny was already ahead of the curve — she realised it's a good way to visualise it in BI. This is what we've come up with to visualise the customer journey in a nice and easy way.

So this is how we've gone from mapping the customer journey to visualising it for stakeholders, bringing it to life using a familiar customer journey to make it more accessible. You don't need lots of different surveys for people to tell you what stage you're at — this comes out using the verbatim. Hopefully this has inspired everyone here to get out and try it for yourself. I think it's quite interesting stuff. So back to you, Zoe.

Zoe Wilson: Amazing, thanks Stella. It's never easy to do a live demo and you smashed that. As Stella said, we're super proud of that customer journey view, and I think some people on this call might have seen it and hopefully started using it within their organisations, as we've been working on presenting these insights in Power BI. Hopefully that's sparked some inspiration.

What we'd like to do with the remaining time is open out to a Q&A session. We've got a few in the chat already, but as we go, if anyone would like to add more questions, please do — for myself, for Stella, or for Jenny. Starting off, we'll go with Emma's question to yourself, Jenny, related to presenting the customer journey within Power BI. Emma said: "I love the living customer journey. How long did it take you to build that view within Power BI?"

Jenny: I actually had to go and look. My new Customer Experience Insight Manager started on 29 July — that's when we first engaged with Nat on this piece of work; he's our customer success manager at Wordnerds. And I had my first playback, using the nine themes set into the framework you just saw demonstrated, on 22 August. That was the first playback; there were some iterations, and we had it about mid-September exactly the way we wanted it, with the right level of drill-down. That included, behind those nine stages, 19 and then 38 more granular themes, should we want them — but to articulate to the stakeholders, those nine big stages. So just under a month for that first iteration, thanks to the correct framework set-up and those contextual themes, making sure we hit the health score so that we populated the data correctly.

Zoe Wilson: Thanks Jenny. I think that's an important step — getting those foundations in place and then having the vision to set it up in BI. Another question for you next, Jenny. Niamh has asked: how did you invite your stakeholders to the workshop meeting, and how did you pitch that workshop to them?

Jenny: I was really lucky that it was an annual meeting I didn't know happened when I first joined Grainger. We have what's called the Hampshire Group — about the top 40 leaders — and we meet once a year to look at our strategy. Our trading year is October to October, so it's always around the first week of September. I was able to put this alongside the five-year plan, so that was really powerful.

But what I made sure I did is I didn't call it a customer experience or a customer journey. I just used that impactful title, "instinct to insight." I've actually removed the term "experience" from our strategy — we just call it the customer strategy, with the service commitments, something that's for everyone and not a customer experience team. One of the really important things I did, particularly for the experts in the room and the people I'd identified as reflectors or a little more introverted, was a pre-read. So when I pitched the workshop, it wasn't blind — I wasn't taking them on an instinct-to-insight workshop blind. They had seven key moments, key drivers. Wordnerds also helped me in the background, producing that Power BI to look at what the customer experience drivers framework was within those nine stages, and I presented the detail behind those seven points. People who hadn't thought about a customer journey — those senior managers in finance who might not think they touch the journey — were coming with that knowledge.

I also really advocate pre-dropping methodology. Prior to that, I'd used our all-hands call to introduce myself and my team, and we talked about the methodology — the Wordnerds insight-to-impact model, which is a lovely infinity cycle. In the pre-read was also that methodology. So the methodology wasn't a mystery, and on that poll it took away the opportunity for conflict around mistrusting the methodology — questions could be asked up front. So in summary: don't make it a mystery; send a pre-read; call it something that isn't leading or like your department only owns it; open it up to "our customer strategy"; and pitch the workshop as something they're going to bring their expertise to.

Zoe Wilson: Amazing, thanks Jenny. That's something I can really resonate with — when you understand a bit about what you're walking into and you can have that reflection time beforehand, it makes it far easier to contribute when you're in a live environment. I should mention at this point, a good chance to plug our handout, which will be available. We've created a toolkit guide with essentially how you can put into place everything we've talked about today, including that pre-read information if you wanted to run one of these workshops yourself. That's available to download here, and we'll email it out to everyone tomorrow as well.

Maddie next has asked: interesting to look at the psychology behind this — is there anything you can recommend in terms of further reading?

Zoe Wilson: There's so much available on this, just in terms of the power of context when you're processing and sharing information. We've included some bits in the handout around the research, so we'll get that across to you, and we can also share some other personalised recommendations if you want to dive into this even more. Really great to hear that sparked some interest.

Just looking through the chat — Tim said, "Thanks Stella, you just gave me a light-bulb moment." That sounds very exciting, Tim. He says: "At the moment we are using the customer journey framework over one particular service delivery, but we can scale this to view the total customer experience across the whole tenancy whilst a property is occupied and whilst a property is void. We could use it to look at staff's journey to make the property lettable again, so this might reveal issues internally also." Absolutely love that. Congrats, Stella. Jenny, did you want to add something?

Jenny: No, just that there's a light bulb — there we go.

Zoe Wilson: Super excited to see that come to life, Tim, and hopefully that's sparked similar ideas with our other guests. Another question for Jenny, from Caroline: how do you ensure that high-volume customer insight, touchpoints and surveys don't bias your results?

Jenny: I know Wordnerds have asked me to speak, but truly that's the beauty of Wordnerds, and the beauty of a sentiment score over a word count. Because you're not just looking at the volume of customers at that touchpoint — you're looking at it with the most negative or positive sentiment, almost a weighted scale. By using sentiment, I could remove that volume bias. Equally, I can remove it the other way: that low-volume but really negatively-said feedback, those anecdotes we asked about in the poll — "oh yes, but I know, because that one customer emailed me once." It helps cut through that noise in the opposite way as well.

So by focusing on the sentiment, on the things that really nudge the needle the most, and taking action to repeat back — it's about the action as much as the insight, and the rest will take care of itself. Don't fall into that bias trap. That's why you leverage the power of sentiment over a CSAT or an NPS or a volume metric.

Zoe Wilson: I love that. What you've just said, Jenny, might also apply to Cheyenne's next question. Cheyenne has asked: often in our organisation, stakeholders are able to predict verbatim and sentiment levels regarding our complaints and repairs service — in particular, we've had the same issues occurring for a while. When stakeholders are already aware of what the verbatim is saying, how do you motivate them to take action based on the feedback rather than their own experience?

Jenny: Well, that's why I had to take the team set-up I did. I needed a programme delivery manager and a project manager that keeps the stakeholders, or the working group, true to the customer needs statement. The other framework I use to keep the motivation on the action base rather than their own experience is, if any of you have set up technical systems, you might have used user stories and success criteria. We use the Wordnerds verbatim — the customer words — to write that success criteria: "as a customer, I…" And the customer experience programme manager's role, over my insight manager, is to keep that working group true to that success criteria.

Yes, their own experience is absolutely valid, and that can pivot the root cause sometimes, because it might be that extra anecdote that unlocks the light bulb Tim's just had. We have the same challenges, Tim, of that void turnover, and what do we know of the staff experience as well. So absolutely leverage a customer success criteria — that would be my highest advice for keeping stakeholders motivated to take action on the feedback. You need that buy-in, and that needs scene-setting, and that's what my project manager does. She sits down with a RACI: who is responsible for delivering this, but who is ultimately accountable for that success-criteria outcome. You need a very strong person in that role, would be my advice — if it's not already you.

Zoe Wilson: Amazing, thanks Jenny. From my point of view, this relates back to what you were saying earlier about the Power BI being that living, breathing document people can refer back to. Quite often, even if you've got the same issues occurring over time, it's seeing how that has changed — maybe the sentiment around a particular issue — and being able to look at that based on the journey stage, using a Power BI that everyone has access to and is familiar with, can be really powerful.

I think that might be all of our questions so far. While I'm wrapping up, if anyone else wants to pop questions in, please do. In the meantime, what you'll get after today — you can see in the handout section — is the toolkit I've referenced, available to download. It takes you through how you can actually implement this process, starting tomorrow, within your organisation: from the pre-read to the workshop to what's next. We'll be emailing that out to everyone tomorrow, and this afternoon you'll also get a recording of today's webinar, so please feel free to share that with anyone you feel it might resonate with.

So just to say thank you so much to everyone for joining us today — thank you for all the questions and engagement, and hopefully we've had a few more light-bulb moments like Tim's. At Wordnerds, your customer success managers are here to help if you're an existing customer and want to talk more about how to put any of this into practice, or reach out to an account manager for any other questions. Thank you so much, Jenny — so interesting; we've heard this story a few times now, but it never gets boring. And thank you, Stella, for taking us through that live process. So, thanks everyone, have a great rest of the afternoon, and we'll speak to you soon.