How to Measure Touchpoint Effectiveness: Six Steps to Better Customer Experiences
Perhaps
you've had this experience or something similar:
You
take your car in for service to a place you've used frequently over the years.
You drive in and complete the intake process. You provide some information
about the car's performance and any problems. The service manager provides an
estimate and tells you when to return. You're delighted when the service
manager calls to tell you can pick up your call earlier than expected and the
bill will be less than estimated. But then, a few days later, your engine light
goes on. You call the service manager. He can't explain why it went on but
suggests you bring it back. You're frustrated because you've just been without
your car and paid for service. After an exploratory look, the service manager
tells you that this will be a significant additional cost. But, you say, they
had the car for several days for a complete checkup, shouldn't this issue have
been discovered then? The service manager says, well, sometimes things happen.
You leave your car to be fixed and you pay again when you pick it up.
Later,
a colleague asks for a recommendation for where to take her car. Can the
service manager rely on you to make a referral?
As in
the above scenario, every touchpoint your customer has with your company
matters; some, however, matter more than others.
Customer experience and engagement have evolved from table
stakes to points of differentiation, as indicated by the flurry of customer
experience/relationship scores now being published. Each interaction creates an
opportunity for a moment of truth. More and more evidence
strongly suggests that there is a link between customer experience/engagement
and the financial success of a company.
Your
company can improve customer experience and engagement by understanding the
value of each touchpoint.
A high-quality customer experience is made up
of high-quality interactions
A
customer experience is not limited to a specific transaction, website visit, or
conversation with a service representative. It's a process that begins the
moment the customer becomes aware of your company, and it encompasses all the
interactions, transactions, and contacts along the way.
Ron Shevlin, author of Everything
They've Told You About Marketing Is Wrong and an analyst at
Aite Group LLC, suggests the following definition for customer engagement:
"Repeated interactions that strengthen the emotional, psychological or
physical investment a customer has in a brand." All those repeated interactions
are touchpoints.
For our
discussion, we define a touchpoint as any customer interaction or encounter
that can influence the customer's perception of your product, service, or
brand. A touchpoint can be intentional (an email you send out) or unintentional
(an online review of your product or company). Customers experience touchpoints
long before they make a purchase and long after they have had their first
transaction.
The goal of every company interested in using customer
experience as a competitive advantage is to create a positive and consistent
experience at all
of the touchpoints.
Customer experience becomes a complex process to measure when
you consider the vast number of touchpoints customers encounter today. However,
not all "touches" are equal: Some interactions matter more than
others. Therefore, you must understand how each touchpoint contributes to the overall
customer experience.
By
measuring each touchpoint independently, you can determine its contribution to
the overall effectiveness as well as more effectively measure the total
customer experience.
Although overarching metrics such as customer lifetime value and category ownership are quickly becoming
standard today, attempting to measure the customer experience with a single
metric can be an overly simplistic and risky approach.
Effectively
managing the customer experience requires effective measurement and management
of a portfolio of metrics, including touchpoint effectiveness, to gain insights
into what is—or is not—working.
Measure touchpoint effectiveness with these
six steps
For the
six-step process outlined below to be successful, you need to see your business
through the eyes of your customer. To complete these six steps, you will need a
database of your touchpoints. An easy way to start is to create an Excel file
that contains these six columns:
1.
Touchpoint
2.
Operational purpose
3.
Role in customer experience
4.
Lifecycle stage
5.
Touchpoint owner
6.
Importance/impact
Step 1: Inventory Your Touchpoints
To
measure the effectiveness of your touchpoints, you first need to inventory all
the touchpoints your customers encounter throughout their entire life cycle.
Make a list of all those touchpoints.
Note:
If you haven't named the stages of the customer life cycle, you should do so.
For example, you might have stages similar to this:
1.
Investigation/contact
2.
Interaction/connection
3.
Education/conversation
4.
Evaluation/consideration
5.
Selection/customer
6.
Advocate/community
Your
touchpoints need to include every encounter in the attraction process (such as
your website, published content, press coverage, social media, and
advertisements), through the sales process (such as whitepapers, customer
testimonials, samples, product literature, and sales presentations to your
prospects), through the delivery and service processes (such as invoices and
trouble tickets), and finally through your retention process (such as your
account management, referral program, and customer advisory boards).
If
you're like most companies, you'll come up with a fairly long list of encounters.
Step 2: Every touch has a purpose
Transfer
all your touchpoints to individual Post-it notes.
For
each touchpoint, indicate its operational purpose and its role in the customer
experience. On the operational side, a touchpoint may be designed to identify a
prospect, resolve a problem, accelerate conversion, or support executing a
transaction; on the customer experience side, a role of a touchpoint might be
to influence perception, build preference, or create loyalty.
This work is often done best in a facilitated
working session that includes people from functions that "touch"
the customer, as well as some customers.
Together,
organize all the Post-it notes on a wall in the order they are most likely
experienced. The goal is to group together all the touchpoints associated with
a specific phase in the customer lifecycle.
Then
transfer that information to the first four columns in your touchpoint
spreadsheet.
Step 3: Identify ownership
Who
owns the touchpoint? Use the working session as an opportunity to clarify
touchpoint ownership.
For
example, appointment scheduling may be owned by Pre-Sales, invoicing by
Accounting, troubleshooting by Support, demos by Product, and webinars by Marketing.
Indicate
the primary owner (column 5) for each touchpoint in your spreadsheet.
Step 4: Rate the touchpoint's impact
Since
not all touches are equal, it's important to understand the individual impact
of each interaction.
Even
some touches that appear similar do not carry the same weight. For example, a
mix-up in a coffee delivery might be irritating but not damaging if rectified
quickly. A mix-up in the delivery of medication, however, may be enough to lose
the customer.
Score
the impact of each touchpoint on the experience using a 1-10 scale, with 1
being "doesn't have a high impact on the experience" and 10 being
"has a very high impact on the experience." Avoid guessing. Consider
including members of your customer advisory board in the process. If necessary,
conduct some customer research.
Add the
information that results from this step to column six.
Step 5: Assess the effectiveness of critical
touchpoints
Ah, the
value of the sort feature in Excel! Sort your touchpoints by the impact column.
Initially focus on touchpoints with a score of 8 or higher.
Add two
more columns to your spreadsheet (your spreadsheet now has 8 columns) with
these labels:
1.
Operational effectiveness
2.
Customer experience effectiveness
Then
using the same scale of 1-10, with 1 as "extremely ineffective" and
10 as "extremely effective," evaluate each touchpoint that earned an
8 or more on its ability to positively impact operational effectives and
customer experience. (If you're up to it, do this for all the touchpoints.)
Step 6: Analyze what is and isn't working
You're
almost finished. Create a 2x2 grid, with one axis labeled "operational
effectiveness" and the other labeled "customer experience," and
map each touchpoint with an 8 or higher onto the grid.
Each
touchpoint will fall into one of four quadrants on the grid—high operational
effectiveness/high customer experience, low operational/low customer
experience, high operational/low customer experience, low operational/high
customer experience.
The
mapping will allow you visualize whether and where there are weak links in the
overall experience. Indicate the quadrant for each touchpoint back on your map.
So what now?
For
each touchpoint you now have three pieces of data:
1.
An impact/importance score
2.
An effectiveness score
3.
A point on the grid
For
those touchpoints that were in the low/low quadrant of the grid that have a
rating of 8 or higher for importance develop, prepare and implement a
corrective action plan.
Let's
think back to our opening scenario. By using the approach outlined in this
article, the service manager will have a solid idea about whether his customer
will make the referral.
Though every interaction matters, to improve customer experience
you need a place to start. This approach helps you identify the touchpoints
that will have the greatest impact on improving and delivering great customer
experience, as well as on your customer retention rate and your customer
referral rate.
Customer
experience/engagement is a core competency that every company needs to
cultivate. Ready to evaluate your touchpoints?
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