Touchpoints: An the Importance of Knowing the Their Importance
Hey There!
I’m glad y’all have found the stuff on NPS scores so helpful the last couple of weeks. I’ve also received a few notes and messages about the stuff around discounts.
I’ll get to pricing products and services in the next few weeks because I think that pricing products and services once the pandemic is past us is going to be challenging, but also offer a tremendous opportunity.
But this morning I want to talk about something that all of us should be thinking about right now, touchpoints.
I don’t have to tell any of you that I do a fairly decent job of consistency with touchpoints since I’m here every Sunday, except for two, but it was a pandemic and I was burnt out. (So forgive me.)
Touchpoints are important in all environments, but they are even more important now because our lives have been turned upside down, and despite the news covering things that look sort of normal…just the vast majority of folks, normal isn’t really on the menu or even close.
This means that touchpoints have had to change.
They will continue to evolve and change going forward, but that was likely the situation no matter what.
First, just so folks are clear: a touchpoint is all the contact points along the way where a customer interacts with you or your business.
Here’s the challenge: you have to understand and identify all of them.
Another challenge is that folks often underestimate the length of the buying journey.
This leads you to often only focus on things after a certain point when you’ve guessed that people are starting their journey, underestimating important touches earlier in the process.
In thinking this through, I tried to think about the different touchpoints that stood out to me over the years as things that made me likely to buy or continue to buy certain things. I’ll share three of them quickly:
I was at Wolf Trap in the before times and a volunteer was chatting with me because I was nice to her one night and she mentioned how most folks were rude to the volunteers. That stuck with me.
I was at a resort in South Carolina one year and my first interaction with the staff was being lectured about all the things and how they couldn’t find food to serve my son after we had been traveling since 6 in the morning. That stuck with me and set up the experience on the wrong foot.
On my 40th birthday, the hotel I was staying at had a special cake waiting for me and an upgraded room, plus their concierge found Pliny the Elder for me. That was multiple touchpoints rolled up into one.
BTW, it was an amazing cake!
The big key here is that the small stuff is usually what ends up being the big stuff.
It is strange but true. I bet you if I ask you to think of 2 or 3 examples, you’d find that the important things were almost always small gestures or small things.
Now what I want you to do for me this week is to spend some time doing two things:
First, I want you to spend some time mapping out your touchpoints. Knowing that most folks usually underestimate the amount of time and touchpoints they have with a prospect or customer, push yourself to go deeper.
As an example, a tremendous touchpoint that felt huge after the fact was when you land in the Sydney airport and you get through customs in about 10 minutes or less, compared to the entrance you feel when you fly in the United States…especially Dulles.
As you map out the touchpoints, think about the peaks and valleys of touchpoints. What do you want to be the premium ones? How do you want them to build? Etc.?
Second, once you’ve mapped out your touchpoints, think about how you can measure your touchpoints for their positive and negative impact on the customer journey.
What are the ups? What are the downs?
Then, we can work on improving them or finding ways to help balance them out so that there isn’t such a huge gap between the way certain touchpoints feel to people.
As a final lesson to frame this concept, think about when Apple Stores first starting popping up everywhere and the way that every touchpoint was important and the entire feeling was one of excellence.
Apple was taking a Gestalt view of their customer experience in the store. If you can, I’d challenge you to do the same thing.
If you get stuck, let me know and I’ll see if I can nudge you along.
Dave