Touch Point Analysis (TPA)
Touch Point Analysis (TPA)
Does each customer interaction live up to the brand experience that the
company is trying to create? Are you providing a more consistent and
relevant customer experience than your competitors are? Which
interactions are the most powerful for creating customer loyalty?
All these repeated interactions are actually touch points. For our
discussion, we will define a touch point as any customer interaction or
encounter that can influence the customer’s perception of your product,
service, or brand. A touch point can be intentional (an email you send
out) or unintentional (an online review of your product or company).
Thus touch points begin long before the customer actually makes a
purchase and long after they have made their first transaction. The goal
of every company interested in leveraging customer experience as a
competitive advantage is to create a positive and consistent experience
at each touch point.
Your touch points need to include every encounter in
the attraction process, such as your website, blog,
email, newsletter, press coverage, articles, industry
events, webinars, brochure, product literature,
advertisements, etc to samples, white papers, product
demos, initial calls, sales presentations and meetings, to
your contract, product deployment or delivery process
to your customer service, invoice, trouble ticket, to a
loyalty card or referral program in your retention
process. As you can see for most companies this is
going to fairly long list
Inventory Your Touch Points
Before you can begin measuring the effectiveness of each
touch point we have found, take an inventory of all the
touch points encountered by your customers. When you
inventory your touch points you will want to know at least
the following:
1. Where the touch point is typically encountered in the
customer life cycle.
2. The operational purpose of the touch point. On the
operational side a touch point may be designed to identify a
prospect, resolve a problem, accelerate conversion or
support executing a transaction.
3. The role of the touch point should in the customer
experience such as influencing perception, building
preference, or creating loyalty.
4. Who owns the touch point?
Example: Appointment scheduling may be owned by
presales, invoicing by accounting, and the website by
marketing.
5. The touch point’s value. While all touch points matter,
they are not equal. A bad experience on one touch point
may be enough to make a customer leave you but a bad
experience on another while irritating and potentially
damaging if fixed in time can be overlooked.
Assess Each Touch Point’s Effectiveness
Now that you have a complete inventory of all of your touch
points, and you understand the impact of each touch point in the
experience as well as operational purpose and customer
experience role for each touch point, you can assess the
effectiveness of each touch point in terms of achieving its
intended purpose against both operational and customer
experience objectives.