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Check Sheet to Evaluate Touchpoint Efficacy

Building an excellent rapport and loyalty with customers isn’t another management fade. It is about building trust and that cannot be done overnight. We all know this and there is nothing new about this.

Here’s what we need to know about building Customer Loyalty. It is not merely about your genuine desire or interest in the customer. That innate desire has to translate into reality that is only possible by ‘Engineering the Customer Experience’.

‘Engineering The Customer Experience’ is about building processes, systems and practices that will ensure that customer interactions are meaningful and delightful not because of that one employee or that one day or that one product or that one touch point, etc. It should be independent of all these factors.

Thus Engineering The Customer Experience means, there is consistent & seamless service delivery, by design. For that to happen, we need to see every customer interaction as an opportunity to build or break the customer trust.

There are many aspects that go into Engineering the Customer Experience for delivering superior customer experience (CX). In this article, let’s talk about Touchpoint Efficacy and what parameters are important.

Customer Touchpoints are literally those activities when the organization gets in touch (ie.,contact is established) with its customers or vice versa. When you walk into a store to understand the product features and brands available, that is one touch point. Following week, you make up your mind and come back to the same store to make the purchase, that’s another touch point. In this case, both these touch points use the same channel – the store.

Usually we spend our resources to design our channels very well, but we hardly focus on designing the touch points. We assume it would be taken care!

Here are 6 to evaluate the Efficacy of Customer Touch points:

1. Least Customer Effort/ Max Productivity : Is the touch point reducing the effort needed by customers to interact with the organization? Is it making the customer more productive? Think about complicated sign-up process to make an online purchase or parking difficulty in visiting a store.
2. Transparent : The information provided in the touchpoint, communication that happens, etc., should all be transparent to the customers. Illogical policy deflections, needless iron walls, make it sound rigid and opaque system that works in the interest of the company and against that of the customers. 
3. Risk Free – Whether its sensitive customer information handling, processing or storage customers won’t want to take on unnecessary risks. This equally applies to health and safety aspects too. Most touch points are meticulously designed to make them risk-free for organization, but not always for customers.
4. Fun & Image Friendly – Would the customer willingly associate with something that is not representative of his/her social image. Millennial weigh fun equally as image. For example, while waiting for the phone to be serviced, is there an element of fun there!
5. Personalized – There is lot of difference between a 20 something filling up an online form vs a 60 something doing the same. Personas differ and so do customer expectations on how they are serviced.
6. Purposeful – Lastly and most importantly, any touch point should deliver what it is supposed to do. This is last in the list because, most often, organizations focus on this and miss the above 5 points. That’s why this is last in the list, though ideally it should be on the top.

You can use the Touchpoint Efficacy Checksheet to rate and compare various touchpoints across the journey or benchmark competitor touchpoint against yours.