We’ll now move on to the notes your instruments play—touchpoints.
Coda
• A channel is a medium of interaction with customers or users.
• Channels are deceptively complex, as they enable how you interact with people, yet also create barriers within organizations to design across channels.
• Channels have three facets that define them: interaction, information, and context.
• To change the channel-centric mindset that dominates most organizations, start by defining your channels as enablers of moments, not isolated destinations.
• Approach your channels as a conductor would an orchestra. Choose, tune, and direct them with intent.
CHAPTER 2
Pinning Down Touchpoints
Cataloging and Communicating Your Touchpoints
CHAPTER 2 WORKSHOP: Touchpoint Inventory
Example Pitch to Participants (and Their Managers)
The term touchpoint, along with channel, has slowly made its way into the lexicon of organizations primarily via the marketing function. Marketing traditionally creates a demand for products and services through campaigns targeted at customer segments. Campaigns often include several tactics—from commercials, to direct mail, to banner ads, and so on—which, in concert, increase brand awareness and offerings. Each customer interaction with a marketing communication is called a touch; the communication itself is a touchpoint.
Marketing organizations have become increasingly scientific in the creation, deployment, and measurement of touchpoints. Approaches such as customer relationship management (CRM) have enabled marketers to define strategies for how often they touch customers through which channels and to what end. New tools now exist for customer experience managers to monitor and measure the performance of touchpoints. Thus, the term touchpoint has become more prevalent in branding and customer experience to quantify and delineate the different ways that customers interact with a brand.
Other disciplines—such as service design—also focus on defining and connecting touchpoints. Interactions such as the attention and detail of a restaurant staff, the way your ride service driver opens the door or drops you off at the airport, or the literal quality of the touch by a massage therapist create the service moments in real time. Many touchpoints are intangible; for example, conversations can leave a lasting impression but are not objects manufactured beforehand. Services also create tangible evidence to reinforce brand or invisible actions. For example, a hotel may put a card and mint on your pillow to bring focus to and amplify the service of a nicely made bed.
What’s Service Design?
Service design is a human-centered design approach to defining a service’s value proposition and designing interaction and operating models. This work results in more intentional and well-orchestrated service components (touchpoints, information, people, and so on) that deliver better outcomes for all service participants (customers, employees, and other stakeholders). Several methods and tools recommended in this book have their origins in the service design community or related disciplines.
The digitization of products and services (as well as growing interest in customer-centered approaches) has led to the language of marketing, customer experience, and service design mixing with digital and physical product design. The term touchpoint has become more prevalent, but also less precise. Much of this ambiguity exists because practitioners within various disciplines use the same terms with slightly (or dramatically) different meanings. When one of your colleagues says touchpoint, she may be referring to a digital product (e.g., mobile app), feature (password retrieval), channel (email), or even a role (call center agent).
Orchestrating experiences requires coordination across different disciplines. Touchpoints represent fundamental building blocks of support for customer journeys that cut across time, space, and channels. Therefore, a common definition and approach to touchpoints can lead to improved coordination and ultimately better customer experiences.
NOTE WHAT IS A CUSTOMER JOURNEY?
A journey is a conceptual framework used to understand and design for a customer’s experience over time. Depending on the context, a journey can reveal what customers are doing, thinking, and feeling to achieve an explicit goal (owning a home) or implicit need (shelter) or interacting with a product or service (getting a home loan). These insights help identify opportunities for improving products and services or creating new value propositions and offerings. Chapters 4, “Orienting Around Journeys,” and 5, “Mapping Experiences,” cover these concepts in depth.
A Unifying Approach
Here’s where things get tricky. To orchestrate experiences, you should think about touchpoints in two different but related ways.
First, customers encounter an organization, service, or product in a specific context. This encounter may be planned or unplanned; it may be designed or not designed. But they happen. You can observe the encounter, describe what is happening, and determine its effect. These encounters are touchpoints, and as branding folks will tell you, they will impact the customer’s perception of a brand, product, or service positively or negatively.
Second, organizations can design proactively for specific customer moments. They can determine the value that they want to provide, choose channels to interact with customers, and use design craft to meet customer needs optimally. These series of choices result in a family of touchpoints that are produced in advance or cocreated with customers in the moment. For example, a greeter at a retailer’s