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Touch Point Analysis (TPA)

Touch Point Analysis (TPA) involves systematically evaluating all customer interactions or touch points to understand their impact on brand value and customer experience. It is important because customers' overall experience is shaped by many individual interactions over time. TPA can uncover opportunities to improve how well a company meets customer needs and wants at each touch point. Conducting TPA involves mapping touch points, analyzing their value drivers, and developing and implementing plans to enhance the customer experience. Measuring the impact of improvements on key metrics like loyalty and retention helps optimize the customer experience over the long run.
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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
151 views16 pages

Touch Point Analysis (TPA)

Touch Point Analysis (TPA) involves systematically evaluating all customer interactions or touch points to understand their impact on brand value and customer experience. It is important because customers' overall experience is shaped by many individual interactions over time. TPA can uncover opportunities to improve how well a company meets customer needs and wants at each touch point. Conducting TPA involves mapping touch points, analyzing their value drivers, and developing and implementing plans to enhance the customer experience. Measuring the impact of improvements on key metrics like loyalty and retention helps optimize the customer experience over the long run.
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We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Touch Point Analysis (TPA)

It is the sum of all customers’ interactions with a company, over time,


that ultimately creates or destroys that company’s brand value. Yet few
companies take time to look at their own business practices
comprehensively through the lens of their customers to understand how
they measure up to their customers’ needs and expectations.

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?

Fielding customer-satisfaction surveys is not enough. To better serve


their customer base and more effectively acquire new customers,
organizations need to delve into the details of individual interactions to
understand the relationship between each customer touch point and
the value it delivers to customers.
After all, value may be built through a series of positive
experiences, but it is maintained through consistently
meeting the needs and expectations of your customers
throughout the customer lifecycle—from pre-purchase
consideration to post-purchase evaluation. Companies that
have recognized and leveraged this insight have reaped the
benefits through improved key performance metrics.
Touch-point analysis uncovers powerful customer insights
as well as opportunities to improve how well you meet
customer-segment needs and wants.
Systematically evaluating performance across all customer
touch points can lead to better organizational alignment;
increased brand perception; and concrete improvements in
acquisition, retention, and up-sell and cross-sell efforts.
Conducting a Touch-Point Assessment
Managing your customer experience is an ongoing and
evolutionary process that takes time and cross-functional
commitment if it is to deliver significant results. Because
customers’ needs and expectations change over time, the way
you meet them must evolve in accordance with those shifts.

Customer touch-point management provides a company with a


critical baseline from which it can start to evaluate itself
through the eyes of its customers and make small
improvements to enhance the customer experience.

The approach is simple and relies on using proven


process-analysis techniques to see your business through the lens
of your customers. Although the process is straightforward,
executing it well is far more complex. It requires listening to
your customers despite receiving feedback that might challenge
internal beliefs, and then aligning the organization around
changes that will improve the customer experience.
Following points outlines an approach for assessing and managing
customer experience across all your touch points:

1. Baseline your performance:


Customer touch-point projects should begin with a review of
the customer insights you already have and a map of customer
interactions to understand where data collection is still needed.
Gather supplemental data through various research methods, such
as direct interviews, short post-event surveys, etc.
The key is to ensure that the baseline assessment not only
collects the relevant information on customers’ needs and
expectations at every stage in the customer lifecycle but also
seeks to objectively measure how well each interaction adds to or
subtracts from brand value. Are you delivering a consistent and
relevant experience? How does a particular interaction compare
with your competitors?
2. Analyze value drivers:
The next step is to analyze which interactions matter
most to customers and what dimensions of those
interactions drive value from a customer perspective.
Touch points with high volumes of customer interaction
and those that can elicit potentially strong emotions in
customers (e.g., websites, customer service, service
departments) tend to have the most significant impact on
your brand.
Understanding the value drivers, especially by customer
segment, will help you target where to begin improving
value for your customers. In doing such an analysis, ask
yourself: What do my customers value in an experience?
Which experiences are enhancing my relationship with my
customers? How do these experiences differ by customer
segment?
3. Develop and implement an improvement plan:
Kicking off initiatives to improve customer experience usually
requires the effort and support of several cross-functional teams.
The level of buy-in across the organization to deliver a consistent
brand experience will make or break your efforts.
For this reason, giving priority to a few quick wins—those
that are easy to implement but will have a big impact—will help
show your customers (and your internal critics) the benefits of
managing the customer experience.
While mapping out the correct sequence of initiatives, ask
yourself the following: What are the needs of my most-profitable
segments? What impact can I deliver in the short term? In the
long term? How am I going to align the organization to improve
the customer experience? Who do I need buy-in from?
4. Measure the impact:
The goal of touch-point analysis is to drive customer value.
Measuring the improvement in customer experience and
understanding movements in key performance indicators
(e.g., lifetime value of the customer, retention rates,
customers’ willingness to recommend your brand) will help
you understand how improving touch points affects loyalty,
brand equity, and overall profitability of specific customer
segments.

The shifts in some of these metrics will likely occur over


the long term rather than immediately; therefore, they must
be monitored over time
The Customer Lens

Every organization, whether it starts with small steps or


radically shifts its culture to become more
customer-centric, should consider customer touch-point
analysis and management as a tool to drive increased
business value.
It All Begins with Touch Points
A customer experience does not begin and end at a transaction, visit to a
website, or conversation with customer service. The customer
experience process encompasses the moment the customer becomes
aware of your company and is comprised of multiple independent
interactions, transactions, and contacts along the way.

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.

We find it is worthwhile to actually plot this analysis on a 2X2


grid, with one axis labelled operational effectiveness and the
other labelled customer experience effectiveness. Our analysis
methodology enables us to map each touch point onto the grid
and place it into one of four quadrants: high/high effectiveness,
low/low effectiveness, high operational/low customer role
effectiveness, and low operational/high customer role
effectiveness. The mapping will allow us visualize whether and
where there are weak links in the overall experience.
Take Action
Thanks

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